The Genocides is Thomas Disch's first novel, and it shows: the book is utterly depressing, yet equally boring. The premise of the book is that aliens have invaded Earth--but not directly. Instead, the aliens have dropped the seeds for millions of Plants, tall, fast-growing things that suck up all the nutrients from the soil. When the story begins, we discover that the Plants have taken over almost all arable land (and most non-arable land as well), causing most terrestrial animals and plants to go extinct. A small band of humans, led by a grizzled old man named Anderson, struggle to eke out a living against these implacable enemies, but theirs is a losing struggle.

The Genocides is an unrelentingly bleak book. I don't think a single happy thing happens in the entire novel--except for a sudden change of heart in one of the characters near the end. (It seems to me that this change of heart was only introduced to deal with the plot effects of the clumsy way in which that character was introduced--but that's just my opinion.) And many of the things that do happen are downright disgusting--the sausage incident is a memorable scene, as is Greta's eventual fate, and the rats (urgh).

Of course, there's nothing wrong with being depressing, especially when that is Disch's entire point. Most alien-invasion novels, whatever their ending, portray humans as a plucky species capable of fending off technologically superior species because--well, because we're humans, goddammit. And even when we lose we do so with grace and nobility, revealing the best of our humanity in our last minutes together. Disch trashes all of these science-fiction tropes in The Genocides. Humans are not the plucky prime denizens of Earth who manfully oppose the invasion; instead, we are so insignificant in the aliens' plans that they hardly distinguish us from the other animals they have to eliminate. As the novel constantly emphasizes, we are the worms in the apple, the fleas on the dog--pests, to be sure, but ones that are easily dealt with. As if to underscore this point, Disch repeatedly (and excessively) stresses the parallels between his merry troupe of survivors and Noah's biblical post-flood family. The difference, of course, as Disch does not tire of reiterating, is that in this book, there is no God. And humanity loses.

There are some who will no doubt hate The Genocides solely for its relentless bleakness. I like to think I'm not one of those--but I still ended up disliking the novel. The problem is this: When a novel deals with its characters' struggles against a clearly implacable foe, the plot inevitably suffers--after all, it's not as though I expect this small group of a dozen humans to actually defeat a planet-full of Plants and re-populate the Earth (H.G. Wells to the contrary notwithstanding). So when an author writes a disaster novel of this type, he'd better make sure that his characters are phenomenal, because the only way to get readers involved in the story is to make them really identify with the plight of the characters. None of that happened here. The characters are both unsympathetic and two-dimensional; for each character I could count off on one hand what I know or believe about him/her and about his/her beliefs, dreams, or hopes. Character interaction is also monotonous: the same problems keep cropping up again and again, without any development. And the ideas behind this novel, while interesting, are insufficient to carry the weight of an inferior story.

Since this is a first novel, The Genocides may not be representative of Disch's best work. But I for one will not be rushing to read his next novel, until I'm sure it's significantly better than this one.

NOTE: For a while I wondered whether the Plants weren't just the ultimate communist metaphor. Disch actually explicitly calls the Plants communist, but I don't know if that actually proves anything.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu