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I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he we
by dkarl 2y ago
I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.
I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.
If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.
- oorza 2y agoThe same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII. People contain multitudes.
- jhbadger 2y agoAnd don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.
- WillAdams 2y agoNo, the Federal Service was not completely military --- that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to determine which would have orbits which would intersect with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.
- borski 2y agoWhile I agree with your premise, it’s worth noting that much of the military is also “bureaucrats doing necessary government work.”
- WillAdams 2y agoWhich is why there is a rather marked divide between the "pencil-pushers" and "the tip of the spear". That said, there are lots of instances of the clerk-typist being told to grab his rifle and fill out a billet for a patrol and similar things --- RH actually speaks to this and other similar, but broader concerns in _Starship Troopers_
- borski 2y agoTrue. Honestly, I thought it was a great film, and I’ve watched it a bunch of times. I thought it explored that topic quite well.
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoStarship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense to give control over society to those who felt a responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and run with. That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said militarism was good, haw haw".
- Y_Y 2y ago> Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead? > What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- Thrymr 2y agoHumanity is doing pretty well at glacier reduction. It is true that total glacier eradication is a bigger challenge.