I'm finished with this book but I can't finish it. I read to the end of the short story that gives this collection its title. It featured women who had been numbed from the waist down who were rescued by a freethinking man from a totalitarian dystopia. They are all grateful (in retrospect) to be raped by him. I can't waste any more of my life on loudly declaimed misogyny, either in a sci-fi future or a beatnik past.

This book was very entertaining to say the least. The stories are the perfect length, and I really enjoyed how different they are from each other. Favorites (in no particular order): EPICAC, the Euphio Question, Long Walk to Forever, the Kid Nobody Could Handle, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Who Am I This Time, All the King's Men, and Next Door. I definately gravitated to the more sci-fi ones like The Euphio Question and EPICAC, but the was KV can make an ordinary place/family so strange is amazing.

Clever satire, mostly. I have struggled a couple of times with V's longer works, but finally decided to see what shorts he's written besides the frequently anthologized Harrison Bergeron. Turns out, a bunch. Accessible and still plenty provocative. In fact, that Sense of Wonder and What If that I enjoy so much in the best SF is present even in V's non-SF stories.

I think maybe my favorite story here is Unready to Wear. "Trouble with the world is not too many people--it's too man bodies." Makes sense to me, as not only do bodies have to be fed, protected from germs, etc., but the glands and all do all too much governing of the mind. Of course, thinking about that on one's own is one thing, but exploring V's take on it brings it to another level.

Highly recommended to readers who like to be given something to think about.

Kurt Vonnegut was a beacon from above, illuminating my youth. Literature could be serious and fun, all at the same time.

Mockery was culture, satire was seriously funny, and books could be simple, silly, and profound.

Welcome to the monkey house, where there are no rules except the ones you tell yourself.

Where I Live - 3 stars
Harrison Bergeron - 3 stars
Who Am I This Time? - 2 stars
Welcome to the Monkey House - 1 star
Long Walk to Forever - 5 stars
The Foster Portfolio - 3 stars
Miss Temptation - 5 stars
All the King's Horses - 4 stars
Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog - 3 stars
New Dictionary - 4 stars
Next Door - 5 stars
More Stately Mansions - 4 stars
The Hyannis Port Story - 5 stars
D.P. - 5 stars
Report on the Barnhouse Effect - 5 stars
The Euphio Question - 5 stars
Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son - 4 stars
Deer in the Works - 4 stars
The Lie - 5 stars
Unready to Wear - 5 stars
The Kid Nobody Could Handle - 5 stars
The Manned Missiles - 5 stars
EPICAC - 5 stars
Adam - 4 stars
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - 4 stars

25 Stories. Average rating: 3.32

Interesting stories. Mostly General fiction, while some are SF. Good language and writing style. Most of the stories were however either just good [3-stars (13 stories)] or okay [2-stars (4 stories)]. Seven stories though, very much stood out for me.

n  5-starsn
n  Who Am I This Timen: When a characterless actor plays a character with extreme intensity in the theater, he finds a woman falling in love with these characters. Thinking what its advantages are, by the end of the story, made me find the story to be amazing.

n  All The King's Horsesn: After Colonel Kelly, along with his wife, two ten-year old twin sons and twelve others, crash-land their aircraft in a territory held by a Communist guerilla chief, their lives fall into Colonel's hands when he has to play chess against the chief to escape death. Now as POWs, the sixteen are now set as the chessmen in a big room of 64 squares, and upon anyone's capture, she/he is put to instant painless death! This was interesting and cruel. Enjoyed keeping 'myself' in the scenario.

n  Tom Edison's Shaggy Dogn: A short story that brings out a confidential fact about dogs. I loved this a lot, given my personal views about dogs and cats. I personally view cats as highly evolved and having an ability to survive anyhow as and whenever necessary. However my view of domesticated dogs is possessing complete loyalty, but its side-effect being usually submissive to its Master and as a result lacking evolutionary growth and eventually being called by me as 'stupid' if seen in a wider picture. Because of this view, this story beats me, and I loved it. It subverted my whole idea of a domesticated dog. :)

n  Unready to Wearn: Describes a time in the future when humans are able to manually discard and store their physical bodies, while allowing their psyche to be free from various duties and troubles, calling them 'amphibians'. This was such an awesome and interesting contemplative story.

n  4-starsn
n  Welcome to the Monkey Housen: A nice futuristic story where Earth's population has now reached 17 billion, and the World Government has forced two laws upon its people with regard to overpopulation: Encouraging Ethical Suicide OR Compulsory Ethical Birth Control using a pill.

n  Report on the Barnhouse Effectn: A fictional report about the discovery of the so-called Barnhouse Effect, which is something equivalent to Telekinesis, but much stronger and evolving.

n  The Euphio Questionn: Radiations from outer space are tapped and used in equipment, which when used cause people to be euphoric whenever enabled. Ecstatic situations indeed! :D

I love Kurt Vonnegut, and have since I was about 15, so I'm biased. Each year I try to find a new book or set of stories by Mr. Vonnegut that I have yet to enjoy, and this year it was Welcome to the Monkey House. Actually, as I read, I realized I had read a few of these as a teenager, but it was good to read them again. So sad that he died from a fall at 84. My guess is he would have been deadpan wisecracking well into his 90's if he had lived. What a man, and what a voice for the portion of the WWII generation that saw and understood the horror of that war. My dad was a WWII vet, and I grew up worshipping him, and I wanted to go to West Point like he did (he got there the hard way, after a stint as an infantryman). One day, I guess I waxed a little too enthusiastic about how great it would be to be in the military like he had been. He smiled at me, and then he got very still. And he said, "You know, John, war is the absolute worst thing that can happen". Not something that a worshipful 16-year-old intuitively understands, and it was good that he said it to me. Vonnegut knew what my dad knew about war, and Kurt said so in unvarnished terms, as such things really should be said.

—"I still catch myself feeling blue about things that don't matter anymore."—

Awfully darn good. Sometimes a homerun, sometimes a tripple, often a hard-hit single, but never a disappointment.

—"He shook his head. "Life's a funny thing, Helmholtz."
"Not very funny, sometimes," said Helmholtz."—

My favourite story was the brilliant All the King's Men. Sixteen American plane crash survivors captured by a communist group are forced to play a game of human chess in which only those left standing will live. The American colonel has to decide on the moves and his family are among the prisoners at risk of death.

I got as far as the title story, in which a sci-fi rebel hero takes down a fascist government by kidnapping women, making them detox from a drug their body is dependent on, and then sexually assaulting them.

A Compendium of Curmudgeonly Humour

Kurt Vonnegut is a curmudgeon. Curmudgeons are often misunderstood and taken for irascible pedants. On the contrary, they are anything but pedantic. Curmudgeons are introverts who are simply tired of adapting themselves to the demands of an extrovert world. They want to be left alone. Which is why they occasionally write or say nasty things to annoy people. The hope is that other people will then have something to talk about with each other and give the curmudgeon some peace.

A curmudgeon like Vonnegut is the opposite of a totalitarian. A curmudgeon knows the world around him and its imperfections through direct experience. But he is wary of turning his opinions, of which he has many, into policies. This is just as well because his opinions are anything but consistent. He has learned over the years that consistency is indeed the sign of a trivial mind which would like to impose order on a universe that is inherently chaotic.

Curmudgeons are male by definition because they fear the power of women and have no defences against it. Female power arises from the inherent male incompetence in things like communication and relationship-building. Sisterhood is a mystery which manifests to him as a hive-mind and he dares not mess with it. The curmudgeon knows he is deficient and relies on women to suffer frustration and annoyance in his presence. He is aware of this sufferance and, as a mark of respect, neither contradicts nor criticises his female companions. They in turn accept the deal as the best they are likely to get and desist from all attempts to improve him.

A curmudgeon is not without charm in certain situations, primarily those in which he is forced to respond to the opinions - usually political, but sometimes anthropological - of others, particularly blowhards and dilettantes. In such circumstances his remarks are likely intended not to convince but to undermine. He perceives this as healthy cynicism. The charm emanates from the fact that he doesn’t mind what anyone else thinks of him. The combination of the unexpected and the absence of obvious banality helps.

Vonnegut reaffirms my love for his work with this delightful collection of short stories. His stories are always so original and ahead of their time. And his characters are so real.