A Kurt Vonnegut good-bye—and a pointer to free downloads of some Vonnegut classics
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a sci-fi writer and satirist who wrote about heroics, vanities and greater sins, inspiring comparisons with Mark Twain, died yesterday at 84 with a full head of hair. You can read a Google News roundup and his New York Times obit along with a link-rich Wikipedia item.
Via Wowio, you can download free ad-supported copies of Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano and Slaughterhouse-Five. My favorite by far is the latter.
Remembered from a tech-and-Net perspective, Vonnegut was notable in at least several ways.
First, in Player Piano and elsewhere, the ex-technical writer bemoaned the double-edged nature of technology—the jobs and freedom it could cost us. He was a happy Net-resister to the end. “All I use a computer for is as a word-processor,” he said. His nonadvice became an urban legend when he did not give the famous “Wear sunscreen” speech.
Second, the inhabitants of net.communities, the TeleBlog included, might appreciate certain elements of Bokononism, Vonnegut’s fictitious religion in Cat’s Cradle. How about a karass, in which people, without understanding the full story, combine forces toward a divine purpose? Might that not describe some of the serendipity that happens online? Not to mention a granfalloon, a phony karass. Are not certain granfalloons—real-world countries, with meddlesome politicians—often a threat to the Net in the form of censorship?
Third, Vonnegut was among the first major novelists to make a virtual world appearance in Second Life. See a Vonnegut video made there by Infinite Mind radio show, with John Hockenberry interviewing him. For hair fetishists, yes, that’s the source of my full-head-of-hair observation—at least I’ll assume that he didn’t go bald behind our backs after the program.
A war-hater
Beyond the above, keep in mind how Vonnegut might want to be remembered most of all—as a war-hater: a ‘tude evident in such works as Slaughterhouse-Five. I could not help but think of Vonnegut when, in the same newscast, I heard that the Bush Administration was extending tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. So it goes.
Detail: Sorry: I don’t know when the photo, from Wikipedia, was taken. Anyone know? And was Jill Krementz, his wife, the photographer?
April 12th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I remember being startled when, having read Cat’s Cradle, I next encountered the term “granfalloon” in a psychology textbook. (Though I don’t think the field of psychology used it in precisely the same way he did.)
April 12th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
[...] I discovered WOWIO today via Teleread and it’s a great source of DRM-Free known titles of free eBooks. What caught my attention initially was that they were offering 5 Kurt Vonnegut titles (Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, Player Piano, and Slaughter-House Five). All are ad supported, which as best as I can tell means that the first few pages are sponsored like magazine ads, but then the book is clean which is quite fine (ahem) in my book. [...]
April 28th, 2007 at 12:39 am
What is the difference between Slaughter-House Five and Slaughterhouse-Five, if any?
April 28th, 2007 at 3:26 am
Good question. On the cover it’s:
SLAUGHTER-
HOUSE-FIVE
But the first hyphen is probably because of the space situation. The more correct version might be:
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
That’s the usage at the top of the pages mentioning the title—and on the back cover, and I’ve changed the post to agree with that.
Oh, these cosmic questions!
Thanks,
David