1972 novel by Thomas M. Disch
334 is a 1972 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Thomas M. Disch. It is set in New York City in the year 2025, depicting a future marked by limited technological advancements, overpopulation, and stark class divisions. The title alludes to the address of the housing project where most of the characters reside, 334 East 11th Street, as well to the year 334 AD in the historical context of the decline of the Roman Empire; numerous comparisons are made between the decline of Rome and the future of the United States.
The dust cover design for the first edition was by Michael Hasted.
Plot summary
The future in 334 has brought few technological advances except for new medical techniques and recreational drugs. There have been no dramatic disasters, but overpopulation has made housing and other resources scarce; the response is a program of compulsory birth control and eugenics. A welfare state provides for basic needs through an all-encompassing agency called MODICUM, but there is an extreme class division between welfare recipients and professionals.
The novel consists of five independent novellas (previously published separately) with a common setting but different characters, and a longer sub-novel called "334" whose many short sections trace the members of a single family forward and backward in time. The sections are as follows:
- "The Death of Socrates": A high-school student finds that, due to poor scores on his Regents Examinations and his father's health history, he has been permanently forbidden to have children; he searches for ways to get extra credit.
- "Bodies": Porters at Bellevue Hospital moonlight as body-snatchers catering to a necrophiliac brothel. Their task is complicated by the desire of some patients to be cryonically preserved for a better future.
- "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire": A privileged government worker, trying to decide where to send her son to school, pursues a parallel existence in a hallucinogen-assisted role-playing game set in the year 334.
- "Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come": A young professional man and woman face marital conflicts and parenthood, with several twists unique to the 2020s.
- "Angouleme": A group of highly educated prepubescent children decides to commit a gratuitous murder in Battery Park.
- "334": Vignettes of the Hanson family from 2021 to 2025.
Critical reception
334 was selected by David Pringle as one of the 100 best science-fiction novels written since World War II.[citation needed]
Samuel R. Delany's The American Shore (1978) is a book-length critical essay on the novella "Angouleme"; Delany argues that despite the lack of any scientific themes in "Angouleme", its speculative setting makes it inherently science fiction.
The novel was nominated for a 1974 Nebula Award. Previously, the novella "334" won a Locus Poll Award in 1973.[citation needed]
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