Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut (born 1922), American novelist and satirist. He was born in Indianapolis, later the setting for many of his novels. Vonnegut trained as a chemist and worked as a journalist before joining the U.S. Army and serving in World War II. After the war he worked in public relations for General Electric.
His experiences as an advance scout in Germany, and in particular his witnessing of the bombing of Dresden whilst a prisoner of war, would inform much of his work. This event would also form the core of his most famous work, Slaughterhouse Five.
This background influenced his first novel, the dystopian science fiction novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write SF short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959. Through the 1960s the form of his work changed, from the orthodox science fiction of Cat's Cradle to the acclaimed, autobiographical Slaughterhouse Five, given a more experimental non-linear structure by using time travel as a plot device.
These strutural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which included the many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs and an appearance by the author himself as a Deus ex Machina. Many hostile reviewers found the book formless, but it became one of his best sellers, and was later filmed.
Although many of his later novels embraced science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, not least due to their antiauthoritarianism, which matched the prevailing mood of the United States in the 1960s. For example, his seminal short story Harrison Bergeron graphically demonstrates how even the noble sentiment of egalitarianism, when combined with too much authority, becomes horrific repression. A case could be made for Vonnegut's form of political satire through extrapolation and exaggeration requiring a science fiction theme, simply as a milieu for proposing alternative systems, while remaining essentially political satire nonetheless. In this sense Vonnegut's work is no more or less science fiction than is Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
In much of his work Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through his proxy, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, characterised by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism tempered by humanism. In 1974 Venus on the Half-shell a book by the Phillip Jose Farmer in the style of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout was published. This action caused a falling out of the two friends and considerable confusion amongst readers.
There was an incorrect urban legend widely circulated on the Internet that Kurt Vonnegut gave a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 in which he advised students to wear sunscreen. In fact, the commencement speaker at MIT in 1997 was Kofi Annan and the putative Vonnegut speech was an article published in the Chicago Tribune on June 1, 1997 by columnist Mary Scimich.
Quotation
- "There is nothing intelligent you can say about a massacre." - Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five
Books:
Player Piano -- The Sirens of Titan -- Cats Cradle -- Slaughterhouse Five or The Childrens Crusade -- Mother Night -- Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons -- Jailbird -- Deadeye Dick -- Galapagos -- Timequake -- Breakfast of Champions -- God Bless You, Mr Rosewater -- Slapstick -- Hocus Pocus -- Palm Sunday -- Bluebeard
Short Story Collections: