Finished listening to Slaughterhouse Five. Kurt’s writing has all the appeal of an old man yelling at a cloud. It ends quite abruptly. Maybe author got tired of the constant repetition. I felt that he was trying to make a point about the stolen kettle, but forgot what it was.
This again has very little to do with science fiction. It’s a fictitious account of Battle of the Bulge aftermath and the Bombing of Dresden. Of course America is to blame for everything, and only if it would stop producing weapons all the wars in the world would go away.
This is a collection of essay’s from Kurt Vonnegut, that sound like an old man repeating stories he’s been telling for years.
Socialism – good. Fossil fuels – bad. Bush has a stupid family name, so he must be stupid.
Interesting that the “unelected president” narrative didn’t start with Trump. Vonnegut claims the same about Bush. Every president I don’t like is “unelected” and has “staged a coup”.
Funny how he complained about overpopulation, when he had 3 biological children. At least he adopted 4 more to balance that out.
Finished listening to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” about a week ago.
As I mentioned, it is a non-fiction posing as a fiction, most of the fictionary stuff happening in the heads of different characters, either because they mentally ill, or write for a living.
The idea of Dwayne Hoover thinking about everyone else as “unfeeling machine” and only him having a free will is the basic concept of sociopathy. This is the definition of it, as far as I know.
The eponymous “Breakfast of Champions” is just a joke a waitress used to make when serving alcohol in the morning. Substance abuse is yet another novel’s theme.
It was an interesting read, because it’s a “zeitgeist”, a timecapsule of what social issues the author worries about exactly 50 years ago. And by far and large, those aren’t much different from today.
How much you enjoy this book depends on your patience and education. Kind of like late Terry Pratchett books.
It’s not a science fiction. No more than King’s “Hearts in Atlantis” is. And it’s packed with themes, although it glances by most of them. There’s a lot about environmentalism, and “America bad, communism good”, and homosexuality, and one of the characters is a transvestite, and mental illness caused by chemical imbalance, and all of our thinking being chemical reaction.
One of the characters is a failed scifi author, which allows for both unhealthy dose of self-irony and “story withing a story”. Most stories of that author dedicated to how America ruins ecology.