Every epoch tells its stories its own way and Kurt Vonnegut managed to catch the spirit of the last midcentury perfectly…

The Year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.

The absolute conformity is a paradise for politicians…
The tales may be mockingly dystopian, vaguely romantic or just everyday life scenes but everything is tinted with a slenderly blackish humour and somewhat bitter irony. And every story exudes an inimitable psychedelic aura…

“Now I understand you poor fish,” I said. “You couldn’t get along without fear. That’s the only skill you’ve got – how to scare yourselves and other people into doing things. That’s the only fun you’ve got, watching people jump for fear of what you’ll do to their bodies or take away from their bodies.”

Time passes: some things change and some things remain the same.

A varied and uneven collection of Vonnegut's short stories. Some read like Yankee Magazine or Saturday Evening Post stories: boy home from WW II gets girl stories, or Vonnegut's 'hometown' stories of Barnstable, Massachusetts on Cape Cod.

Others, the better ones, play to Vonnegut's strengths, like the title work. These are science fiction with Big Themes like thought control, enforced birth control, a cemented-over world, weapons of mass destruction, and variations on Big Brother.



A 3.5, rounded up.

{Edited 6/5/23]

I hadn't read Vonnegut since I was younger. I read 3 of his books between the ages of 15 and 20 or so and I remember liking them. Now, I'm not so sure. I may have just been too young and ignorant of a white man to notice his severely problematic and offensive writing. The title story of the book takes place in a future where everyone is on medication to stop them from enjoying sex - they're numb from the waist down. The plot Vonnegut provides against this interesting dystopian short story? A vigilante man goes around kidnapping women until their meds wear off and then raping them so that they begin to enjoy sex again. Yes, that is seriously his short story and he justifies it by having the protagonist/serial rapist say that he feels bad about it but it's the only way and they'll be thankful later. Riiiiight. His female characters are a fucking joke, his protagonists get away with being assholes because he writes them in such a fun loving way. Some of his stories still have merit and are good, but so many are problematic with gender, race, sexuality, children, everything and several are just REALLY offensive. It's possible some of his books are better and I'd be interested to see if re-reading them now would change my opinion but I just don't have the time to waste on this fool.