The Genocides is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Thomas M. Disch, published by Berkley Books as his debut. Years after unknown extraterrestrials sow Earth with gargantuan, fast-growing plants that overwhelm native life, the novel follows a small community along Lake Superior. The group struggles to adapt to a collapsing ecosystem and to impersonal machines that erase the last traces of humanity. Combining survival narrative with a stark, naturalistic tone, the novel presents the alien crop as a system that renders people incidental. The Genocides was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel for the 1965 awards year.
Later discussion has emphasized ecological catastrophe and plant horror as central concerns, as well as the novel’s alignment with New Wave-era skepticism toward technocratic rescue. Contemporary reviews were divided, with praise for its severity and atmosphere alongside objections to its anti-heroic focus. Subsequent overviews have tended to treat it as a significant early work in Disch’s career and a touchstone in accounts of ecological science fiction. The book was reissued in hardcover in 1978 and continues to be cited in surveys and critical studies of apocalyptic and eco-SF.
Background and publication
The Genocides, a 143-page paperback, was published by Berkley Books in 1965 as Disch’s debut novel.[1][2] A hardcover edition followed in 1978 from Gregg Press, issued in its Science Fiction Series with an introduction by editor David G. Hartwell.[3] The novel was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel for the 1965 awards year.[4]
In 2001 Disch said he had been reading Anna Karenina while drafting the book, and that Tolstoy’s prose influenced his style.[5] He said, "When I was writing The Genocides, I went down to Mexico and brought along a small supply of books, Anna Karenina among them."[5] In a 1983 interview he described irony as his "guiding mode" as a writer, a stance that shaped even his first novels.[6] In later reference works, John Clute called the book Disch’s "most formidable early work" and associated it with the New Wave movement.[2]
Plot summary
Years after unseen aliens seed Earth with vast, fast-growing Plants that overwhelm native ecosystems, a small community on the shore of Lake Superior struggles to survive. The settlement’s patriarch, Anderson, keeps strict control, tapping Plant sap to irrigate a cornfield and barring outsiders. When a caravan of refugees approaches, most are killed and their bodies rendered for food. Two are spared for their skills: Jeremiah Orville, a mining engineer, and Alice Nemerov, a nurse. Jeremiah conceals a private motive for revenge because his wife was among the slain refugees, and he embeds himself in the community while waiting for an opportunity.
As shortages worsen, the last milk cow dies during a botched calving mishandled by Anderson’s eldest son, Neil, heightening tensions within the family. Across the depopulated countryside, spherical machines move methodically, incinerating traces of human habitation. When they reach the enclave, fire drives the survivors underground into nearby caverns and then deeper into the Plants’ root system, a lattice of hollow, walkable tunnels. There they find reservoirs of sweet pulp stored along the roots, which sustains them for weeks and softens their sense of urgency. As scarcity returns, Anderson increasingly relies on Jeremiah’s technical skills, aggravating resentments among his sons.
Anderson is bitten by a rat; the wound turns septic and his authority erodes. Before dying, he asks Neil to accept Jeremiah as leader and permits Jeremiah to marry Anderson’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Blossom. Neil rejects this, murders his father, and later kills Alice when she begins to suspect him. He imposes harsher rationing as the group fractures. The survivors split up. Jeremiah searches the tunnels for Blossom, intending to complete his revenge by killing her, but he cannot and stays with her instead. Joined by Buddy, Anderson’s younger son, they try to navigate back through branching passages.
A surge of sap floods the rootways as part of the Plants’ harvest cycle, emptying the pulp reserves and scattering the human remnant. Neil attempts to sabotage Jeremiah’s route and turns violent; he is fought off and left behind. When Jeremiah, Blossom, and Buddy reach the surface, the machines have harvested the underground crop and a new wave of seedlings has already been sown. With their stores ruined, the survivors abandon the tunnels. Jeremiah relinquishes his plan for revenge and leaves with Blossom, while Buddy stays with the others. As winter returns, the settlement dissolves. The Plants continue to spread and the machines carry on their impersonal rounds as the last survivors face attrition and hunger.
Themes and analysis
Critics commonly read The Genocides as an ecological allegory in which an alien agriculture treats Earth as a site of extraction and management, rendering humanity incidental. Rob Latham argues that the vast monoculture and the systematic elimination of human traces figure a "biotic invasion" whose logic mirrors ecological imperialism and resource regimes; the narration’s cool, observational stance heightens the novel’s anti-anthropocentric effect.[7] A later version of his essay reiterates this position within eco-SF debates and New Wave criticism.[8]
Commentary also places the book within the 1960s New Wave for its bleak naturalism, formal restraint, and focus on ordinary survivors rather than technocratic problem-solving. Latham locates the novel among New Wave texts that reject triumphalist, human-centered solutions in favor of ecological and social determinism, while Thomas L. Wymer emphasizes Disch’s disciplined naturalism and irony as hallmarks of his early work.[7][9]David Pringle’s retrospective capsule underscores the novel’s uncompromising outlook and literary ambition, situating it among notable New Wave titles.[10]
Religious and mythic overlays are present but used without consolatory effect. John Sladek highlights Old Testament echoes and the ending’s inverted Adam-and-Eve image, in which a mismatched pair survives not to inaugurate a new humanity but to witness its extinction; Wymer relates these gestures to Disch’s larger program of irony and formal constraint.[11][9]
Some critics emphasize plant horror. Jill E. Anderson describes the overwhelming vegetal presence as a form of "plant horror" that unsettles human control and challenges Cold War containment myths and progress-driven narratives. By contrast, reference works emphasize the aliens’ indifference to human concerns and the novel’s detached tone.[12][2]
Taken together, scholarship frames the novel as a system-scale catastrophe narrative in which ecological allegory and "plant horror" operate within New Wave naturalism, while reference works stress the aliens’ indifference to human meanings—an anti-anthropocentric stance that withholds consolatory transcendence.[7][12][9][2]
Reception
Contemporary
Critical response in the SF magazines of the late 1960s was mixed. In her "Books" column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (June 1966), Judith Merril treated The Genocides as a notable debut aligned with emerging New Wave tendencies, praising its disciplined prose and its refusal of easy, technology-driven rescues.[13] In the U.K., Brian W. Aldiss devoted part of his "Book Fare" column in SF Impulse (January 1967) to a strongly positive appraisal, highlighting the credibility of the alien agriculture as an impersonal menace and the novel’s uncompromising bleakness.[14]
Skeptical notices appeared alongside this praise. In "Galaxy Bookshelf" (December 1966), Algis Budrys criticized the book as representative of an anti-heroic, New Wave mode, arguing that its emphasis on powerless survivors and its derivative alignment with that movement undercut dramatic engagement.[15] In Analog (August 1966), P. Schuyler Miller’s "The Reference Library" offered a brief, cooler notice from a more traditional venue, noting the novel’s grim survivalism and downbeat end rather than its literary ambition.[16]
Retrospective
Later overviews have tended to install The Genocides as a key early work in Disch’s career and as a touchstone of 1960s New Wave themes. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute identifies the novel as among Disch’s strongest early efforts, emphasizing its cold naturalism and the aliens’ indifference to human concerns—traits the entry links to the movement’s rejection of comfort and uplift.[2] Rob Latham’s analysis places the book within a line of "biotic invasion" narratives, reading the global crop and the systematic erasure of human traces as an allegory of ecological imperialism and system-scale management; he connects the narration’s cool, observational tone to the novel’s anti-anthropocentric effect.[7] A later reprint of Latham’s essay reiterates this positioning within eco-SF and New Wave debates.[8]
Scholarship on Disch’s early fiction further uses The Genocides to illustrate his program of disciplined naturalism and irony. Thomas L. Wymer describes the first novels as exercises in formal control that withhold consolatory transcendence, a stance that helps explain the book’s relentless endgame.[9] The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Disch similarly treats The Genocides as an important—if austere—debut that anticipates concerns explored more fully in Camp Concentration and 334, reinforcing its status in accounts of New Wave fiction and ecological catastrophe narratives.[17]
Legacy and influence
Later reference works and criticism have treated The Genocides as a touchstone of Disch’s early career and of late-1960s science fiction. John Clute’s entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction continues to rank the novel among Disch’s strongest early efforts, emphasizing its cold naturalism and the aliens’ indifference to human concerns as emblematic of the period’s rejection of consolatory narratives.[2] Rob Latham again places the novel within a lineage of "biotic invasion" stories that allegorize ecological imperialism and system-scale management, noting that its dispassionate narration supports an anti-anthropocentric stance later linked with eco-SF.[7] A later version of his essay repeats this point and cites the book as an anchor text in discussions of ecology and science fiction.[8]
Scholarly overviews of Disch’s career also treat the novel as programmatic for his early style. Thomas L. Wymer connects it to Disch’s disciplined naturalism and irony, emphasizing its refusal of transcendence.[9] David Pringle’s canon-forming survey includes The Genocides among the "100 Best", reinforcing its status in retrospective assessments of the New Wave.[10] The Dictionary of Literary Biography similarly frames the debut as important groundwork for themes and methods expanded in Disch’s later novels, helping to secure the book’s continuing visibility in histories of apocalyptic and ecological science fiction.[17]
Criticism also situates the novel within eco-gothic and "plant horror" traditions, and it is frequently cited in discussions of the eco-weird; analyses by Rob Latham and Jill E. Anderson foreground its vegetal agency and ecological imperialism, and editorial surveys of weird landscapes include The Genocides among representative works.[7][12][18]
References
↑ Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vol.1. Chicago: Advent. p.144. OCLC655427527.
1 2 3 Latham, Rob (2014). "Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction". In Canavan, Gerry; Robinson, Kim Stanley (eds.). Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. pp.77–108. ISBN9780819574275.
1 2 3 4 5 Wymer, Thomas L. (1984). "Naturalism, Aestheticism and Beyond: Tradition and Control in the Novels of Thomas M. Disch". Voices for the Future, Volume Three: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press. pp.186–219.
1 2 Pringle, David (1985). Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. London: Xanadu. ISBN0-947761-11-X.
↑ Sladek, John (1980). "Four Reasons for Reading Thomas M. Disch". The Stellar Gauge. Norstrilia Press.
1 2 3 Anderson, Jill E. (2016). "The Revenge of the Lawn: The Awful Agency of Uncontained Plant Life in Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think and Thomas Disch's The Genocides". In Keetley, Dawn; Tenga, Angela (eds.). Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan. pp.129–143. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57063-5_8. ISBN978-1-137-57062-8.
↑ Merril, Judith (June 1966). "Books". The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Vol.30, no.6. pp.32–38.
↑ Aldiss, Brian W. (January 1967). "Book Fare". SF Impulse. pp.51–54.
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