Thomas Disch made a significant contributions to the science-fiction genre. He published his first sci-fi in Amazing Stories and its companion magazine Fantastic in the early 1960s. He was a mainstay of the New Wave movement that soon after formed about the British magazine New Worlds.

Thomas Michael Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1940. He was brought up there and then in Fairmont, Minnesota, where he acquired his love of science fiction and poetry. After an unhappy stint with the US Army, he studied architecture and English literature at New York University, graduating in 1962.

He published more than 20 short stories in his first five years as a professional writer. One, White Fang Goes Dingo (If, April 1965), was expanded into the novel Mankind Under the Leash (1966). Ace Books bound it back-to-back with Planet of Exile, by another promising newcomer, Ursula Le Guin. At Disch’s request the British paperback edition was entitled The Puppies of Terra (1978). His short-story collections include One Hundred and Two H-Bombs (1966), Getting into Death (1973) and The Man Who Had No Idea (1982).

Disch’s first published novel, The Genocides (1965), concerns an alien invasion in which Earth is turned into a glorified vegetable garden, with human beings undergoing extermination by pesticide. There are no survivors. “It seemed to me perfectly natural to say, ‘let’s be honest, the real interest in this kind of story is to see some developing cataclysm wipe mankind out’.”

Echo Round His Bones (1967) is a jeu d’esprit about a misfiring matter transmitter. The Prisoner (1969) was Disch’s idiosyncratic take on the soon-to-be-cult TV series of the same title. He wrote the tie-in novelisation for Alfred the Great (1969), under the “Victor Hastings” pseudonym. “Thom Demijohn” (Disch and John Sladek) wrote the horrific Black Alice in 1968.

Camp Concentration (1968) is the first of three sci-fi novels by which Disch will be best remembered. It tells of a politically minded poet involved in a US army experiment to boost intelligence, at the cost of killing him in a few months; he has to find a way to save himself and his fellow inmates from a hellish fate.

The other two exceptional novels are 334 (1972), a set of six linked stories about a grim near-future New York, and On Wings of Song (1979), a hymn to the human spirit which won the 1980 John W. Campbell Award.

The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991) is one of Disch’s more avowedly mainstream novels — a persecuted boy with supernormal powers grows up to let loose a worldwide plague. Stephen King called it “one of the best novels of horror-fantasy I’ve ever read”.

The Brave Little Toaster (1986) was filmed by Disney in 1987. Five humanised household appliances set off on a perilous quest to find their young master. It was the first animated film to be exhibited at the Sundance Film Festival. Although the film received only a limited theatrical release, it has since become a perennial rental favourite. The film of Disch’s 1988 sequel, The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, went straight to video in 1998. The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue followed a similar trajectory in 1999.

In 1999 Disch won both the Hugo Award for Non-fiction Book with The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World and the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse.

Disch was deeply affected by the death in 2005 of his partner, the poet Charles Naylor, with whom he edited several anthologies. Naylor’s illness had left them without savings, leading to the loss of their house in Barryville, New York State. Since Naylor was the named tenant of their rent-controlled flat in New York City, Disch, who had been partially disabled for some years, was threatened with eviction.

Thomas M. Disch, science-fiction writer and poet, was born on February 2, 1940. He took his own life on July 4, 2008, aged 68