The Genocides

The Genocides is a 1965 science fiction novel by Thomas M. Disch, first published by Berkley Books as a paperback. It was the author's first novel and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel that year. It is set on an Earth overrun by enormous alien plants that have displaced native vegetation and dismantled human civilization, leaving humanity largely irrelevant in the face of an ecological transformation that takes no account of it.

The story follows a small farming community in the American Midwest dominated by Anderson, a brutal patriarch who rules his family and the other survivors through intimidation, violence and rigid discipline. When a group of wandering refugees approaches, Anderson treats them as intruders and orders an attack that kills most of them. Among the few spared are Jeremiah Orville, a mining engineer who stays with the group while secretly plotting revenge, and Alice Nemerov, a nurse who becomes part of the farm's daily life. Conditions worsen, strange machines linked to the alien vegetation advance and destroy settlements, and tensions within the family grow.

Eventually the community is forced underground, into tunnels and passages among the roots, where it finds an edible pulp that sustains it for a time. Down there Anderson's authority weakens after a serious illness, and Jeremiah's growing bond with Anderson's daughter Blossom draws him closer to the household. The conflict ends with Anderson's murder at the hands of his son Neil, which unleashes the collapse of any internal order. When the pulp disappears and flooding makes the refuge uninhabitable, the survivors return to the surface and find that the world has entered another stage of its vegetal cycle, with no means of resisting it.

The novel is often read as a story of ecological conquest and biotic invasion, in which humanity is reduced to the status of pests. Its radical indifference to human beings also makes it an early example of the "non-contact" strand of first-contact science fiction, and its bleak, satirical tone has been described as an apocalyptic black comedy. Critic Judith Merril praised it highly on publication, calling it an outstanding first novel, and it is now regarded as one of Disch's most important early works.