Unstuck
I’m unstuck in time.
It’s 1978, and I’ve discovered Kurt Vonnegut for the first time. His writing is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It has the trappings of scifi, but is layered with bizarre situations, stranger characters and primitive line drawings. I burn through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Breakfast of Champions,” “Cats Cradle” and the rest. I even read “Venus on the Half Shell,” a pulpish Vonnegut tribute written by the one and only “Kilgore Trout.”
It’s the 80s. Vonnegut’s still writing, but his books lack the bite of his earlier work. And I’ve moved on as well, to the grittier work of Ballard, Dick and Gibson—though I still soldier through Vonnegut’s later works (at least through “Galapagos”).
Now it’s the 90s. And Billy Pilgrim’s children are unstuck all over the airwaves. In “Quantum Leap,” Scott Bakula bounces from era to era with Tralfamadorean aplomb. Jean-Luc Picard of “Star Trek” gets unstuck and discovers that all good things come to an end … or a beginning … or something like that. On “Babylon 5,” Zathras becomes so unstuck that he drags Captain Sinclair about a million years into the past. Vonnegut’s legacy is assured.
It’s 2005. Vonnegut publishes “A Man Without a Country,” his best work in two decades. Not because of the quality (or quantity) of the writing, but because, at 82, he’s still passionate in his beliefs, his anger, his frustration, his despair (and hope) for the human race.
It’s 1978. I’m discovering Kurt Vonnegut for the first time. I crack the cover of “Breakfast of Champions” and begin reading.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. One of htem was a science-fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. He was a nobody at the time, and he supposed his life was over. He was mistaken. As a consequence of the meeting, he became one of the most beloved and respected human beings in history.
I’m unstuck in time.
