Soon two outsiders, the nurse Alice Nemerov and Jeremiah Orville, join the ranks after the townsfolk capture a roving band of marauders.

Neil relies on his brutish strength and status as first-born to enforce the brutal whims of their father. Buddy despises Neil and all he represents. 357” (17)–and their attempts to survive on the new frontier.Īnderson’s adult sons Neil and Buddy work hard days cutting the Plant and feeding its juices to their small plot of corn. The narrative follows the inhabitants of a small town named Tassel–under the dictatorial sway of the preacher/mayor Anderson and his “Colt Python. Within seven years the alien trees or Plants, six-hundred feet tall with leaves the size of billboards, threaten to annihilate the last bastions of humanity. Apocalypse cannot lead to rebirth.Ī billion spores, “invisible to all but the most powerful microscopes,” sown by an invisible sower over the entire Earth create a veritable carpet of greenery across even the most inhospitable geographies (15). Disch conjures a frontier landscapes inhabited by the sinful.

In the face of apocalyptic annihilation at the hands of a vast alien Plant spread across the Earth, biblical stories of redemption and (re)birth are subversively recast as either delusions or decrepit meaningless patterns. Disch’s The Genocides (1965) is an incendiary assault on our senses and expectations of trope and genre. Richard Powers’ cover for the 1965 1st edition.

The genocides thomas disch