One of the hallmarks of post apocalypse stories is that things go from bad to worse on a very regular basis. But most of them start off in the fairly familiar, fairly common world and something goes terribly wrong-zombies, atomic war, pandemic plague, EMP, or just some mysterious something that puts an end to life as we know it. But rarely have I seen a mysterious something else quite as odd as the one used in Total Oblivion-More or Less. The Earth finds itself over run by hordes of barbarian Scythians and people from something like the Roman Empire. But…
Tag: kurt vonnegut
Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
Too many modern books are either parts of a series, or 700 pages long, or both. Too many classic novels suffer from the same problem, War and Peace and pretty much anything by Dickens is a long term project. Somewhere along the line a number of writers decided to bang out books that could be read in one or two sittings. Kurt Vonnegut was one of those writers. Slapstick is another good old fashioned End of The World book-Kurt Vonnegut loves that whole post-Apocalyptic thing. People die by the millions, nations crumble into ruins, and the Chinese learn to control…
Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
I first read Man Without a Country not long after it came out in 2005 and I still totally agree with everything Kurt has to say. Kurt was a humanist who had the radical idea that war was bad, over population was bad, The Bushes-Chaneys-Rumsfelds of the world were bad, and that the idea that The Free Market will self correct and fix everything is total bullshit. My kind of a guy. Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven now, along with Issac Asimov. Just kidding. They were both famous atheists who prefered the rational to the fantastical, except for their writing.…
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is a rather depressing bit of business. It is the story of a writer and the trouble he causes all his creations, apparently to entertain himself. Though it is never really clear if the Creator is entertained or not. He seems as sad and pathetic as the characters whose strings he pulls. There is madness and mayhem and a lot of talk about bad chemicals and so on. The book is written in an odd style, even for the great and odd Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions is about a number…