When I first read this, exactly ten years ago, I wrote:

I must say that it wasn’t a brilliant choice of holiday novel; the disjointed narrative failed to engage me, and I felt that the stories never quite concentrated sufficiently on either near-future world-building or interesting characterisation. It was interesting that Disch correctly saw the politics of reproduction as being so prominent in the twenty-first century, although the detail has turned out rather differently.

My concentration was at a low ebb in August 2014 because of my role at that year’s Worldcon, and I think that I was unfair. It’s not actually a novel; it’s a group of six short pieces, with a shared setting and some shared characters, all set in and around 334 East 11th Street in New York, so I was demanding more coherence than necessary. Within each story, the characterization makes sense. And I’ll get to the world building.

I have come back to it as one of the relatively small number of books set in 2025, looking at next year as science fiction saw it. Actually only one and a half of the six shorter pieces that make up the book is explicitly set in 2025, and the longest piece (which shares the title “334”) has 43 sections, all dated to the years 2021, 2024 and 2026, so none of them in 2025. I missed that when I did my 2021 and 2024 write ups.

It’s interesting that the politics of reproductive health is one of the themes of the book. The 2020s of Disch’s world are over-populated and subject to government regulation, particularly in deciding who gets to have children. The first story is about a young man whose social rating is too low to allow him to become a parent, and his efforts to overcome that. Another is about a couple who do qualify for children, and decide that the male partner will be the one who actually becomes pregnant.

Otherwise, it’s a typical late 60’s / early 70’s story, set in a rather grim dehumanising dystopian society, where advances in technology haven’t brought much improvement for most people and the smart people exploit the cracks in the system. Somewhat depressing. You can get it here.