Camp Concentration

Camp Concentration is a science fiction novel by the American writer Thomas M. Disch. It was first serialized in four parts in the British magazine New Worlds between July and October 1967, while Michael Moorcock was its editor, and it appeared in book form in the United Kingdom in 1968, with a first American edition the following year. The novel is associated with the British New Wave, a movement that stressed formal experiment, inwardness and literary ambition.

The book takes the form of the journal of Louis Sacchetti, a poet, Catholic intellectual and conscientious objector imprisoned during a near-future American war. After serving time in an ordinary prison for draft resistance, he is transferred to a secret military installation, Camp Archimedes, where the army is conducting experiments in "intelligence maximization." There the inmates receive Pallidine, a treatment derived from the syphilis spirochete that sharply increases memory, verbal power, analytical ability and creative imagination, but that destroys the body and brings death within months. The camp thus functions as both laboratory and death row, since the prisoners become geniuses even as their bodies fail.

Much of daily life consists of intense intellectual activity: the inmates read, debate theology, philosophy, literature and science, translate texts, compose verse and stage Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. The most formidable among them is Mordecai Washington, a charismatic and elusive prisoner who becomes the focus of Sacchetti's admiration, suspicion and dependence. As the months pass, the journal grows more elaborate and fragmented while the narrator's health, and eventually his sight and coherence, collapse, though flashes of heightened insight remain. The ending reveals that the plague of intelligence is spreading beyond the camp, and that a machine first used as a theatrical prop made it possible to exchange identities and minds.

Critics have read the novel as a reworking of the Faust legend, often in dialogue with Thomas Mann's work, and have stressed its alchemical motifs and dense literary allusiveness. Others have emphasized its treatment of institutions, official deception and the relation between knowledge and the body, and have proposed it as an allegory of the social meaning of hallucinogenic drugs in the 1960s. Its early reception was restrained but favorable, and it has since come to be regarded as one of Disch's major works. It is included in David Pringle's list of the hundred best science fiction novels and received Australia's Ditmar Award.