The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gaia Strikes Back

The Genocides, written in 1965, is part of a very specialized dystopian sub-genre which might be called ‘Apocalyptic Greenery.’ This collection of anti-biophilia stretches at least from Greener Than You Think (1947), to The Day 0f the Triffids (1951), to Death of Grass (1982). All consider various sorts of revenge by the plant kingdom on its primary oppressors, human beings. The moral is clear: the world which houses us is not friendly toward us.

Of these fantasies The Genocides is certainly the most homicidal as well as the most biblically apocalyptic, referencing specific Old Testament passages throughout. Appropriately enough one of the key characters is a fundamentalist preacher turned survivalist. The send-up of Christianity is obvious in the comments made by one of his sons: “One way or another, atheists had to be stomped out. Because atheism was like poison in the town reservoir; it was like…. But Neil couldn’t remember how the rest of it went. It had been a long time since his father had given a good sermon against atheism and the Supreme Court.”

The Genocides differs from its peers in that it is not human beings who are the cause of earthly destruction but a mysterious alien race which uses the Earth as a plantation within which human beings, and apparently all other living things except a highly invasive species of plant, are merely vermin. The Genocides is also the only one to avoid any cliched allegory to the Cold War, a favourite trope among contemporary sci-fi writers. The ‘enemy’ is not our human confreres but something entirely ‘other.’

Disch suggests, therefore, that there are bigger problems than either international nuclear conflict or environmental destruction on the horizon: “There is evil everywhere, but we can only see what is in front of our noses, only remember what has passed through our bellies,” says the preacher’s other son. The clear suggestion is that we are part of a hierarchical gnostic universe which might contain any number of increasingly powerful species. To those some level beyond human, we are indeed mere vermin, as they perhaps are to those even more powerful.

Of course these unexplained aliens and their technologies of agriculture and pest-control are metaphorical but not in a hackneyed way. Disch points specifically to his issue: “There had been the intoxication, while it lasted, of power. Not the cool, gloved power of wealth that had ruled before, but a newer (or an older) kind of power that came from having the strength to perpetuate extreme inequity.” This is, I think, the core of the book: Power, what it is, how it is used, and where it leads, which is to eternal inequity. There is an important theological criticism here of Disch’s childhood Catholic education which insisted that all power comes from God and is distributed for the ultimate good of creation.

Disch makes no distinction between good power and bad power or between the power of Nature and the power of God. Power is of one kind only. It is a force which coerces. “Before the advent of the Plants, Tassel [a once prosperous farming community] had been the objectification of everything he despised: smallness, meanness, willful ignorance and a moral code as contemporary as Leviticus,” thinks the educated brother.

After the Plants and their alien Farmers arrive, the real status of human beings and their self-justifying ideas of power derived from some divinity are made clear: “They were the puppets of necessity now.” He who has the ‘best’ moral ideas, or the best weapons to enforce adherence to them, is ultimately irrelevant whether he knows it or not. Power is mere conceit and is only negatively associated with the divine.

The pursuit of power, in other words, is a central human failing. Ultimately it is vain, and will be proven so. None of us likes to recognise this. The idea of the divine source of power, it seems, is a typical human ploy to exert power over power by confining it in a benign (or at least sentient) box called God. “It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species, his world was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.”

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