This sardonic anti-war tale begins with Billy Pilgrim’s return to Dresden, Germany after WWII where he was a POW during the infamous firebombing. Throughout the story, it becomes evident that Billy suffers from PTSD and depression as he travels back and forth in time, experiencing fragments of his life involving terrible hardship and death. So it goes. To cope, he creates a fictional planet called Tralfamadore where claims to have been taken to become an exhibit in a zoo for the entertainment of the Tralfamadorians. And of course, Billy enjoys the science fiction novels of one obscure and loathed writer named Kilgore Trout.
Slaughterhouse Five is an engaging read from start to finish. Vonnegut’s fractured prose reflects the state of Billy Pilgrim’s mind, but while the story is tragic, Vonnegut imbues it with his trademark dry humor at just the right moments.
The wealthiest Hollywood playboy in America, Malachi Constant, is invited to the home of Beatrice Rumfoord to witness the manifestation of her husband, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak. Nine years before, Rumfoord had piloted his spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum near Mars. Kazak was his only companion aboard ship. Since then, man and dog exist as energy but materialize on a regular schedule in his mansion on Earth. Word of Winston’s materializations have spread over time and now draw a crowd outside the mansion’s walls. His wife, however, permits no audience to Winston’s appearances—until he specifically requests the presence of Malachi Constant.
A writer named Jonah (or possibly John) looks back on his adventures, and his conversion to a religion known as Bokononism, while conducting research for a book about the late Frank Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. The first leg of our hero’s journey takes him to Hoenikker’s hometown of Ilium, NY where he meets two of Hoenikker’s three adult children. There, Jonah learns that each of the children possesses a piece of Ice-Nine, a dangerous substance their father developed for the military.
Gathering some of the best SF writers of the time including Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, and more, TV:2000 offers prescient tales of television’s effects on society, how it can be used to shape opinion as much as entertain, misinform, disinform, and overwhelm.
Elsie the curious cow wanders to the window of the farmhouse where her human owners are watching a graphic TV show about the slaughter of animals at industrial meat farms. Shaken by this revelation of her own imminent fate, Elsie is determined to escape, but to where? She later learns of a country called India, where cows are worshipped, and devises a plan to get there.