Word: vonnegutisms
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...last time, will write for LIFE this year. He will have a chance to compete with one of his more prominent nonfans, Feminist Germaine Greer, who will carry the Harper's colors at the Democratic Convention. For the Republican, Harper's is switching to Novelist-Playwright Kurt Vonnegut. The monthly's rival Atlantic is avoiding the name game. Says Managing Editor Michael Janeway. "We don't think it's the year for that. Some good, hard digging will be needed to cover this convention...
...Kurt Vonnegut, even at his best, is a middleman, but Slaughterhouse-Five is his best by far. He gets rage and desperation into his science-fiction time-space games; for once he deals with an incident of historical importance which he lived through, the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1944 by Allied troops. Because the acrid smell of flesh burning in the biggest civilian massacre of World War II has not left his nostrils. Vonnegut, who was transferred to the non-industrial cultural center as a POW, admits in his introduction that he's compelled for once to do more...
...Vonnegut, liberal quantities of whimsy are poured through the plot like so many doses of barium. The viewer is supposed to have a sense of the spiritual crisis brought on by Billy's experience in the Dresden bombing. Having found solace with Montana, he announces, "If we're going to survive, it's necessary to concentrate on the good moments and forget the bad." Shortly afterward, his baby is born, the universe rejoices, the firmament lights up with fireworks. As a resolution of plot and a reconciliation of historical horror, this amounts to a cosmic lollipop...
YOUR BASIC Red-Blooded Post-War American Kid grew up reading science fiction. He sheltered C.S. Lewis's Perelandra beneath the edge of a junior high school desk; he tripped across decades of The Martian Chrnoicles on hot, tedious summer afternoons; he liked Kurt Vonnegut for years before Slaughterhouse Five became a best-seller. Then the world changed, and he probably has not read much science fiction since...
Moreover, in spite of any general trend toward a broadening audience for Kubrick or Vonnegut, Fantasy and Science Fiction is permeated by a sense of its special readership. The editorial tone seems directed toward a circle as avid as the readers of pulp mystery magazines and as semi-expert as the clientele of Popular Mechanics. A typical introduction to one of the stories might read: "Now here's a story by an old friend of F& SF readers, one of the best young writers in the field. We think it's a story you're really going to like...