In his seventh novel, Disch reaches a literary high point in the field of science fiction. At once hilarious and frightening, it follows Daniel Weinreb as he attempts to escape the repressive laws and atmosphere of the isolationist State of Iowa. A rich black comedy of bizarre sexual ambiguity and adventurism, a bitter satire that depicts a near-future America falling into worsening economic and social crisis.Won John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1980.Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1979.Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1980.

If Charles Dickens has written speculative fiction, he might have created a novel as intricate, passionate, and lacerating as Thomas M. Disch's visionary portrait of the underbelly of 21st-century New York City. The residents of the public housing project at 334 East 11th Street live in a world of rationed babies and sanctioned drug addiction. Real food is displayed in museums and hospital attendants moonlight as body-snatchers.Nimbly hopscotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an aging matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 334 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.* The Death of Socrates • (1972) • novelette (variant of Problems of Creativeness 1967)* Bodies • (1971) • novelette* Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire • (1972) • novelette* Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come • (1971) • novelette* Angouleme • (1971) • shortstory* 334 • (1972) • novella