Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut has made a
point of avoiding being labeled as a genre writer.
His first science fiction story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (1950), appeared in a general magazine, although some of his later work appeared in
genre publications. Most of his science fiction
shorts appeared during the 1950s, including “Big
Trip Up Yonder” (1954) and “More Stately Mansions” (1951), but even then it was obvious that he
was not writing in the usual traditions of the field.
His first novel was Player Piano (1952, also published as Utopia 14), a satiric dystopian tale in
which automation has split the American population into two separate cultures—one consisting of
the privileged engineering class whose expertise is
required to ensure that the machinery of civilization moves smoothly, and the dispirited, unemployed masses who can barely survive on their
welfare allowances. One member of the former
class becomes a discontented revolutionary
through a series of happenstance events that foreshadow the comic constructions of Vonnegut’s
later novels.
The SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) was a more substantial and rewarding satire in which a single individual, through a chance encounter with an
anomalous space-time condition, is placed in a
unique position to alter the future of humanity. It
was the first of Vonnegut’s novels to suggest the
formation of a new religion as a plot device, one he
would resort to again and much more effectively in
CAT’S CRADLE (1963) and elsewhere. Although
Cat’s Cradle was warmly received by the science
fiction community, this wry end-of-the-world story
also signaled the beginning of the author’s steady
move away from the field. Although he continued
to employ its devices—aliens, technological wonders, superweapons, even time travel—it was invariably for satiric or allegorical effect and not an
effort at serious speculation.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), drawn in part from
Vonnegut’s own experiences as a prisoner of war in
Dresden when that city was firebombed, was much
more successful outside the field than within. The
protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, has become unstuck in
time. His consciousness flits back and forth from
our present to his past during World War II and to
a future in which he has been kidnapped by aliens
from the planet Tralfamadore. Although the novel
is frequently comic, it is a bitter, ironic humor that
masks the tragic events, which are described in a
very moving manner. Whether or not one thinks of
it as science fiction, it is still Vonnegut’s most accomplished work.
Many of the later novels contain elements of
the fantastic. In Slapstick (1976), a broad but
sometimes unfocused satire, Vonnegut includes
shrinking Chinese, gestalt personalities, a colony
on Mars, and the possible end of the world. An
American city is destroyed by a neutron bomb in
Deadeye Dick (1982), and time backs up a decade
giving everyone a major case of deja vu in Timequake (1997). The most sustained and interesting
of his later novels is GALÁPAGOS (1985), yet another end-of-the-world story, this time with an
outrageously funny, if typically bitter, ending.
Vonnegut is often portrayed as a writer who
abandoned his roots in science fiction in favor of
more lucrative markets and wider critical acclaim. The truth is that his roots were never
firmly fixed in the genre, that his career as a
writer sometimes intersected the field briefly but
never found a permanent home. His short stories, which have been collected as Canary in a
Cat House (1961), Welcome to the Monkey House
(1970), and Bagombo Snuff Box (1999), all mix
science fiction with general fiction. Vonnegut
used whatever devices and conventions were
necessary for the story at hand, and has always
preferred not to accept the limitations that
would be implied by settling into an established
pattern or genre.