Kurt Vonnegut didn’t think much of science fiction

Posted by: Scott    Tags:  ,     Posted date:  March 14, 2012  |  7 Comments


I received a copy of Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1950-1962 in the mail the other day. The book featured a cover photo of a Vonnegut I did not recognize and an essay on science fiction written by a Vonnegut I did not recognize either.

The photo caused some cognitive dissonance because of what was lacking—the curly hair, that mustache … and where was the cigarette? And as for the essay, well, he may have liked SF writers and editors, thinking them a jovial bunch, “generous and amusing souls,” as he put it, but he sure didn’t like the words on the page.

I’m sure I read the piece titled “Science Fiction” back in 1974 when it was reprinted in his collection Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, but I’d completely forgotten about it. Maybe you have, too. Or perhaps you’ve never read it. But in writing of the science fiction field of 1965, Vonnegut was quite dismissive:

Whatever it knows about science was fully revealed in Popular Mechanics by 1933. Whatever it knows about politics and economics and history can be found in the Information Please Almanac for 1941. Whatever it knows about the relationships between men and women derives from the clean and the pornographic versions of “Maggie and Jiggs.”

Oh, but he doesn’t hate all science fiction, though, because:

Along with the worst writing in America, outside of the education journals, they publish some of the best, They are able to get a few really excellent stories, despite low budgets and an immature readership, because to a few good writers the artificial category, the file drawer labeled “science fiction,” will always be home. These writers are rapidly becoming old men, and deserve to be called grand.

However, in closing, he returns to his basic theme of SF’s low standards, and sums up by saying:

Meanwhile, if you write stories that are weak on dialogue and motivation and characterization and common sense, you could do worse than throw in a little chemistry or physics, or even witchcraft, and mail them off to the science-fiction magazines.

This essay was originally published in the New York Times Book Review for September 5, 1965, the same year his character of Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer, appeared in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. I’d like to think Vonnegut eventually altered his opinion of us based on the changes the field went through in the ’60s and ’70s, but I have no idea whether or not he did.

Any Vonnegut experts out there know if he ever wrote further non-fiction about science fiction that reflected post-1965 SF?





7 Comments for Kurt Vonnegut didn’t think much of science fiction


James

Just reminds me of the old adage that 90% of everything is crap.

Todd Mason

Well, yes…though that’s his most famous essay about sf…but see the collection of the pro’s fanzine PITFCS for Vonnegut’s contributions there (as Vonnegut hung out at Milford and other sf circles in the early ’60s), as well as reading this essay a little more carefully, wherein Vonnegut notes that he is considered by many an sf writer (correctly), but that many of those mistake the “drawer” of sf for a urinal (as Dave Locke has noted elsewhere). Vonnegut’s relation to sf was about as consistent and as fraught as Margaret Atwood’s…both have contributed to sf media (Vonnegut had stories in IF and F&SF as well as AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS), both continued to write sf after doing so, and both can make the damedest statements at times. But, then, so can all the rest of “us”…

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Carl Rosenberg

I think Vonnegut’s attitude toward science fiction was more ambivalent (a love-hate relationship) than this essay indicates. (By the way, I found it irritating that there was no indication in the book “Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons” when this essay was written or published.)

In “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” the protagonist Eliot Rosewater delivers a lengthy tribute to science fiction which the British SF writer Brian Aldiss perceptively described as being “too long and lingering to be wholly satire.”

In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Vonnegut has two of his characters, Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim, traumatized by their experiences in WWII, finding SF of use in making sense of things: “They were trying to reinvent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was big help.”

Also, had Vonnegut completely despised SF, he couldn’t have created such a memorable character as the SF writer Kilgore Trout (whom some say is modelled on Theodore Sturgeon).

I think Vonnegut was being partly self-protective in dissociating himself from SF, for the reason he described so vividly at the beginning of his essay (about critics urinating on anything labelled as SF), but his own attitudes were more complex.

Carl Rosenberg

P.S,. When I wrote “this essay” above, I was referring to Vonnegut’s original essay on science fiction in his book “Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons,” not Mr. Edelman’s posting above.

Carl Rosenberg

My apologies for another posting. The mention of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater reminded me of another scene from the novel, when the eccentric millionaire Elliot Rosewater is discussing his upcoming court appearance with his father, a conservative Senator. Elliot starts talking about Kilgore Trout, and his father cautions him, “If you get in court, it would be just as well if you didn’t mention your enthusiasm for Kilgore Trout. Your fondness for all that Buck Rogers stuff might make you look immature in the eyes of a lot of people.”

This shows how aware Vonnegut was of the extent to which writing (or even reading) science fiction was a social handicap in respectable circles at the time he was struggling to build his career.

    Scott

    No apologies necessary! Thanks for posting!