Author Archives: Isabelle Lockhart '24

Camp Concentration (1968): A Review

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Camp Concentration (1968) by American author Thomas Disch first caught my eye with its title, which caused my Jew-dar to go off. Could this be an offensive Sci-Fi take on a Holocaust narrative?, I wondered, with mild horror. The cover art and the non-Jewish sounding name of the author seemed to suggest, “Maybe.” I figured it was my duty as a Jew to find out. After skimming the first few pages, I came to the conclusion that the book was not in fact a science fiction interpretation of the Holocaust, but a story vaguely about the Vietnam War—-the title simply appeared to be a play on words. My interest nevertheless piqued, I bought the book.

Camp Concentration is written as a series of diary entries from the pen of a man named Louis Sacchetti, who has been imprisoned in a mysterious military camp for being a conscientious objector to an unnamed conflict (implied to be the Vietnam War). Sacchetti, a writer, was specially selected for his intelligence, which the camp directors seek to maximize as part of an experimental program. He is one of several subjects who is injected with a type of syphilis that is meant to enhance mental strength, but also causes deterioration of the physical form. The novel tracks Sacchetti’s strange experiences with fellow prisoners and his gradual devolution into insanity. Explored in Camp Concentration  are themes of future wars, contagion, and the mad scientist. I would classify the book as soft science fiction, as it is focused more on the psychology of its characters (“inner space”) than the technology behind the camp’s experiments. 

I didn’t love this book, but Samuel Delaney and Ursula K. LeGuin did, at least according to the quotes featured on the book’s jacket, so maybe I just don’t have taste. I found the book to be a bit tedious—the flowery language and abundant esoteric references are no doubt purposeful given that the narrator is supposed to be a tortured writer, but they make for difficult reading. Camp Concentration is also alarmingly racist at times—one of the main characters, who is black, is at multiple points given a minstrel-like description, for example. Overall, I would say that this book doesn’t merit the description of “Artful and brilliant,” which one of the cover quotes confers to it. I would not recommend it. 

I honestly had a better time reading about the author, Thomas Disch, then I did reading this book. One of my favorite things that I learned was that Disch had a weird feud with Philip K. Dick, who was Disch’s friend before he wrote a paranoid letter to the FBI that slandered Disch and implied that there were seditious coded messages in Camp Concentration. In his last novel, The Word of God, Disch got back at Dick with a story in which Dick is in Hell suffering from writer’s block and makes a Devil’s Bargain to go back in time so he can write again. Dick winds up killing Disch’s dad and changing history so that Hitler wins World War II. Many years following the publishing of The Word of God, Disch also wrote a blog post in which, referring to Dick, he says, “May he rot in hell, and may his royalties corrupt his heirs to the seventh generation” (“Thomas Disch”). Damn.

Bibliography:

Disch, Thomas. Camp Concentration. 1968. Avon Books, 1971.

“Thomas M. Disch.” Wikipedia, 30 Apr. 2022. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_M._Disch&oldid=1085371257.

Parthenogenesis: Is It Possible?

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Joanna Russ’s short story “When it Changed” got me thinking: with the right science, would human parthenogenesis be possible? The answer is, maybe. This concept was explored in a paper by biologists Gabriel Jose de Carlia and Tiago Campos Pereira entitled “On human parthenogenesis,” which first appeared in the journal Medical Hypotheses (a publication which, to me, appears to propose ways to make biological science fiction phenomena into hard science–kinda cool). Carlia and Pereira address three barriers that must be overcome in order for human parthenogenesis to be realized: genomic imprinting, diploidy and heterozygosity, and zygotic behavior.

Source: “On human parthenogenesis”

Genomic imprinting refers to the “tagging” of paternal or maternal DNA that prevents a certain allele (i.e. a trait) from being expressed, meaning the allele from only one parent is expressed in the embryo. This process is crucial to human development. Carlos and Pereira suggest that deletion of several genes functionally comparable to those that allowed the creation of viable bi-maternal offspring in a mouse model could allow a human egg  to compensate for the absence of a paternally imprinted set of chromosomes, meaning it would be able to express proper alleles only using maternal DNA. Achieving diploidy and heterozygosity may be possible with the use of a bacterium, Carlia and Pereira hypothesize. The bacterium Wolbachia sp. can live symbiotically within a cell and is capable of inducing parthenogenesis in mites–parthenogenesis is advantageous to the bacterium, as it allows it to be transmitted to the host’s offspring (sounds wild, I know). Finally, the properly diploid, heterozygous gamete must be able to function as a zygote. In mice, the precise mutation of a proto-oncogene (a gene allowing for regular cell growth that, upon mutation, may induce cancer) can cause parthenogenetic activation, so it is proposed that the mutation of a similar gene in humans may do the same. In combination, these techniques would theoretically allow for viable human parthenogenetic offspring.

Putting these techniques into practice today would, of course, be considered unethical. However, the advent of “designer babies” and other uses of genetic engineering to ensure health and longevity suggest that genetic alteration for the purposes of parthenogenesis may not be an impossibility in the next hundred years, especially due to the so-called “male fertility crisis.” Who knows, maybe Beyoncé’s “Run the World (Girls)” was prophetic 🙂