I am very sad.

Kilgore Trout - 1922 - 2007
I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

As you can no doubt guess from the lead quote of the header of this blog, the passing of Kurt Vonnegut makes me very sad. It all started in 8th grade. I read a short story called "Harrison Bergeron," and when Diana Moon Glampers (the Handicapper General) came in and shot the two main characters at the end to derail whatever positive, happy ending was formulating, I knew I had found "my guy" to read. My Vonnegut library is essentially complete; the paperbacks fill an entire shelf on my home office bookcase.

Vonnegut was like the Radiohead of novelists: technology and science are necessary evils that can cripple and water down the human race as much as they can enable it. He worked in a genre largely of his own making (satire sci-fi), and perfected it--often using his alter ego Kilgore Trout as a main focus and voice. His arsenal of characters are thoroughly woven throughout all of his books (Trout himself appears in some form or another in more novels than he does not).

Vonnegut loved playing with technology, science, and religion, which I always found to be eerily cool reading his works as a high school/college student in the 90s, 20 and 30 years after they were written. Player Piano touches on society's impending over-reliance on technology and the rifts it can create; Cat's Cradle rolls science, technology, and religion into one small package. (I always suspected that Vonnegut secretly loved things like the Mark Foley scandal, since Cat's Cradle has a central thread focusing on a unique religion that has been deemed illegal and that everyone outwardly despises, but yet that everyone also practices in secret.) In The Sirens of Titan, one of the main characters creates the "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent". Vonnegut always wrote about these very salient things, but he always did it in such a way that made the reader think while simultaneously asking, "What is this guy smoking?!?"

"He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull." --Gore Vidal

From his cnn.com obit: "Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet."

Another of Vonnegut's biggest subjects was the idea of human free will. He touches on it in The Sirens of Titan in relation to religion, and how religion can affect people in terms of their willingness to accept things, to manipulate others, and to be manipulated. In his watershed Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time" and relives many of his previous moments of life. At the same time, he becomes fully aware of his own death but just the same is powerless to change it.

Timequake involves a period of time where the universe elects to stop expanding, contract a bit, and then re-expand. This re-expansion causes humans to re-live a period of their lives, but they do so as if on video tape: they cannot control things that have already been done. They lose free-will. Of course, this is problematic when the universe again reaches its original point of expansion and continues anew. People are suddenly given free will again, only they have no idea what to do with it. The results (as they often are in Vonnegut's work) are catastrophic.

The messages are similar and simple: think for yourself, but be careful what you wish for. Pay attention, but don't always trust what you see on blind faith. Humanity is a delicate gift whose balance can be easily upset if it is not treated as such.

For me, it always came down to: an author who makes these kinds of arguments, but does so in a nutty way and is never afraid to make fun of himself... that's the guy for me. Who can forget his cameo in "Back to School" when he shows up to write Rodney Dangerfield's paper on Kurt Vonnegut, and the professor says, "Whoever wrote this obviously knows nothing about Kurt Vonnegut"?

Maybe that was his goal all along.

Godspeed, Kurt. We'll miss you.