Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, his writing is both highly intelligent and totally silly. Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of short stories. Kurt Vonnegut’s sci-fi stories are often shocking in their premise and more shocking in their solutions. They are written in the such plain and straight forward style that the sci fi elements often sneak up on you.
Welcome to the Monkey House is the story of a world which is overpopulated, so the World Government comes up with an Ethical Solution to the problem. Birth Control is bad, so they just devise a way to take all the pleasure out of sex. The solution in the story involves numbing the lower extremities with drugs, thus making any sensation, pleasurable or otherwise, impossible. Our hero is Billy the Poet, who sends dirty poems to virgins. He later deflowers these virgins after he kidnaps them. All for their own good, of course.
I have read most of these stories before, but it is still fun to listen to them again. The audio book versions are always fun-the actors giving the stories a new twist and a bit of emotion. ‘Harrison Bergeron’ is the story of future were everyone is equal-by making the smart dumber and the strong weaker. Maria Tucci does a great job of vocal acting as the poor tortured couple watching a sad TV Show they will soon enough forget.
Kurt Vonnegut was a brilliant writer and artist. My favorite Kurt Vonnegut novel was Slaughterhouse Five, but everything he wrote is amazing. The short stories in Welcome to the Monkey House are amusing and thought provoking. I highly recommend this book.
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