Camp Concentration

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Camp Concentration is a 1968 science fiction novel by Thomas M. Disch.

[edit] Synopsis

Perhaps Disch's best-known novel, this book is set during a war, projected from the Vietnam War, in which the United States is apparently criminally involved (it is noted at one point that the US is waging germ warfare in "the so-called neutral countries"). The President of the United States during this fictional war is Robert McNamara.

Poet, lapsed Catholic and conscientious objector Louis Sacchetti (= Sacco + Vanzetti?) is sent to a secret military installation called Camp Archimedes, where military prisoners are injected with a form of syphilis intended to make them geniuses (hence the punning reference to "concentration" in the novel's title). By breaking down rigid categories in the mind (according to a definition of genius put forward by Arthur Koestler), the disease makes the thought process both faster and more flexible; it also causes physical breakdown and, within nine months, death. After a test run on the prisoners, a megalomaniac nuclear physicist has himself injected with the disease, joins Camp Archimedes with his team of student helpers, and sets about trying to end the human race.

The book is told in the form of Sacchetti's diary, and includes literary references to the story of Faust (at one point the prisoners stage Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Sacchetti's friendship with ringleader Mordecai Washington parallels Faust's with Mephistopheles) and to alchemy, which the prisoners are using as an elaborate cover for their escape plans. Sacchetti, who is obese, has a number of ironic visions involving other obese historical and intellectual figures, such as Thomas Aquinas. The novel's ending may owe something to the episode "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" from the television series The Prisoner, for which Disch wrote a spinoff novel.