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