Slapstick

I assume/hope that the teenagers who know how to read today still go through their Kurt Vonnegut phase. Their must be nine or ten kids who read? Maybe?

Anyway, I loved Slapstick the best, though it was universally panned at the time (1976). Old Kurt himself talks, in a self-interview in Palm Sunday*, that he was devastated by the crappy reviews this one received.

To me, it is a consummate sci-fi story, in that it has about nine thousand ideas in it that each would make for a good story, yet KV shoehorns them all in into about two hundred pages: gravity used to be changeable like the weather, thus explaining how ancient peoples made such wild monuments? Check. The Chinese shrinking themselves to conserve resources and then, when they get down to microscopic level, being inhaled like dust all over the earth, causing the plague known as Green Death? Sure. Why not? Artificial families, so no one is ever alone? Just like FaceSpace! IT'S ALL COME TRUE! Sort of.

The whole thing, as fantastic as it is, is presented with a straight face, and, further, it is all an elegy to his sister. Sad and lovely.

* Palm Sunday is where he says his family back in Indianapolis was the "Von" in Vonduprin fire-door bars. Go to an old theatre and look.