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Kurt Vonnegut RIP
Apr. 12th, 2007 08:50 amKurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, has died at the age of 84. So it goes.
When Douglas Adams died, I noted that he was a writer whose very writing sparked ideas and thoughts in my brain, and that now he was dead, there were thoughts I'd never think, insights I'd never have. Well, Kurt Vonnegut was a writer who inspired Douglas Adams. The world is horribly poorer without him.
I've actually only read four Kurt Vonnegut books, something I hereby resolve to change as soon as possible. When I was 18, I read Player Piano, principally because I knew Vonnegut had inspired Adams. I wasn't ready for it. I thought it was very good in its way, but needed more robots to be 'proper' SF. I was a badly-read idiot. I didn't appreciate how rare it was for an author to write SF that stood up well as a book in any other genre. I know better now, though I'm still learning.
A couple of years ago,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
booklectic indirectly encouraged me to read Sirens of Titan. I loved it. Anyone who saw me at booklectic's birthday party this year may remember that I was dressed in hoops of tinsel with various pictures of London throughout the ages. This was my vain attempt to re-create a chrono-synclastic infudibulum from the book.
Knowing that I'd liked Sirens of Titan,booklectic lent me Slaughterhouse Five. In this, Kurt Vonnegut describes his personal experience as being a prisoner of war in Dresden when we carpet-bombed it. Fascinatingly, he does it in an SF story involving time travel along one's own personal timeline. A lesser author could have ended up trivialising the experience, but in Vonnegut's hands it ends up being a seminal example of what SF should be doing all the damn time.
And then, last month, I bought A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America, because I needed a book to push my Amazon order into the free delivery zone. This is a series of essays on how fucked up America and much of the Western world is, basically, but it's also steeped in wit and humanity. He also urges writers never to use semi-colons, so I've consciously left them out of this post. Now that was tough.
When Douglas Adams died, I noted that he was a writer whose very writing sparked ideas and thoughts in my brain, and that now he was dead, there were thoughts I'd never think, insights I'd never have. Well, Kurt Vonnegut was a writer who inspired Douglas Adams. The world is horribly poorer without him.
I've actually only read four Kurt Vonnegut books, something I hereby resolve to change as soon as possible. When I was 18, I read Player Piano, principally because I knew Vonnegut had inspired Adams. I wasn't ready for it. I thought it was very good in its way, but needed more robots to be 'proper' SF. I was a badly-read idiot. I didn't appreciate how rare it was for an author to write SF that stood up well as a book in any other genre. I know better now, though I'm still learning.
A couple of years ago,
booklectic indirectly encouraged me to read Sirens of Titan. I loved it. Anyone who saw me at booklectic's birthday party this year may remember that I was dressed in hoops of tinsel with various pictures of London throughout the ages. This was my vain attempt to re-create a chrono-synclastic infudibulum from the book.Knowing that I'd liked Sirens of Titan,
booklectic lent me Slaughterhouse Five. In this, Kurt Vonnegut describes his personal experience as being a prisoner of war in Dresden when we carpet-bombed it. Fascinatingly, he does it in an SF story involving time travel along one's own personal timeline. A lesser author could have ended up trivialising the experience, but in Vonnegut's hands it ends up being a seminal example of what SF should be doing all the damn time.And then, last month, I bought A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America, because I needed a book to push my Amazon order into the free delivery zone. This is a series of essays on how fucked up America and much of the Western world is, basically, but it's also steeped in wit and humanity. He also urges writers never to use semi-colons, so I've consciously left them out of this post. Now that was tough.
