Our house has just acquired Netflix, and tonight we watched 'Slaughterhouse Five', which I first watched in a cinema in London back in 1972. I think I went with Jennie Brousson, a young lady of Huegenot descent ... but memory plays tricks. (That's so funny, if you're ahead of me.)
The book which preceded the film was written by the late Kurt Vonnegut. I knew him as a science fiction writer, but at this distance I can't recall which books I had read; maybe his early short stories, which were hard science fiction or sometimes just fiction .... but then he went far, far out. He can be compared to Philip K. Dick (yes, yes ... the author of 'Blade Runner' blah blah blah), but unlike the great Dick, he wasn't actually insane.
Which is quite surprising, really. OK, so he drank a great deal and smoked after it became unfashionable.
If you read his books and the broad brush strokes of his life (look them up, I'm not spending the whole evening posting links), they overlap. He creates characters that reoccur, and details of life that do the same. Vonnegut had a sister who died young, and a mother who committed suicide; his book people have suicidal mommas, and one story features siblings who are scandalously linked.
But don't run away with the idea that he's using his work as self-analysis. He just uses material. You don't have to know anything about him to enjoy reading his books. He worked in a power plant - he writes stories about it. He lived near a volunteer fire station and helped out - he uses it, several times. His brother was a weather scientist - he uses it ('Cat's Cradle', and that's the only other title I'm mentioning). He gets interested in art - he illustrates his books with powerful line drawings.
[A total aside: Kurt's older brother Bernard invented the process of seeding clouds with silver iodide to promote rain. I am obsessed with Kate Bush, and the song 'Cloudbusting' is about another maverick who believed he could create rain.]
In 'Slaughterhouse Five', the main character Billy Pilgrim "comes unstuck in time", drifting between decades and a future in which he is abducted by aliens (before it was fashionable) to the planet Tralfamadore. Small wonder, since he suffers trauma in a plane crash, which occurs some years after he served in WW2 and survived the firebombing of Dresden, in which over 100,000 civilians died. But Billy Pilgrim is a curiously bland character, never really reacting to anything or taking a positive direction. He is like the hero of 'The Tin Drum', or maybe just another version of The Fool.
I think Vonnegut just felt too deeply about Dresden, and other acts of barbarity which crop up in his books, to express his emotions, even through his characters. He simply describes. No, that's not quite true ... he describes with innuendo. He's saying; "You see? You see what we do to each other? Any idea why? Me neither".
It is no surprise that the words many picked up on in the seventies from his books was the bathetic phrase "So it goes". (Me, I preferred "Poo-tee-weet?" Look it up, fer crissake.)
There are many flashes of true brilliance. The American Nazi Howard W. Campbell, Jr. in 'S5' and 'Mother Night', who has designed his own uniform that makes him look like 'Captain America' (or maybe 'The Shoveller' from 'Mystery Men'). Ice-Nine (look it up). Bokononism (ditto - what is the wampeter of YOUR karass?).
But for me, the greatest is Kilgore Trout. Kilgore is the world's worst sci-fi writer. He has never been published, although he has written hundreds of stories, and in one book attends a Sci-Fi convention ('with hilarious consequences'). Oh, that's not quite true. Some of his MSS have been stolen by publishers and used to bulk out pornographic photomagazines, with their titles changed to crudities. I think this is Vonnegut doing a little satire on the decades when Sci-Fi mags proliferated. [And still existed, alas. Where are they now? I have a kindly rejection letter signed by the great Ben Bova. That's as near as I got.]
Kilgore Trout gives Vonnegut licence to invent stories that he never actually has to write himself - a writer's dream. I'll never forget the one about the alien that tries to warn of a cosmic disaster, but is blasted because he looks like a sink plunger, and because his species' form of communication is tapdancing while farting.
And Kurt/Kilgore became the universe's only recursive author. Kurt Vonnegut once made Kilgore Trout write a novel called 'Venus on the half-shell'. I was amazed some years later to see that actual title listed in the end-papers of another SF novel, and spent years trying to find out what the hell was going on. Come the Internet, all was revealed; Philip Jose Farmer (another SF writer of note) posed as Vonnegut and wrote a fairly amusing parody novel, a copy of which I now have ... but it seems Kurt was not amused. Follow up the story yourself.
I love science fiction. No, not precise enough ... I love good writing, with imagination. If it's science fiction, too - I'm in hog heaven.
