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RIP Kurt Vonnegut

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KenToad:
Well, if you haven't read Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse Five, then you haven't read his best stuff.

DrumAnBass:
Definitely one of my all time favorite writers... Genius in my opinion. Certainly left a legacy of great work.

boykster:
Literature is very subjective, but in my and many others minds, Kurt Vonnegut was a living legend of contemporary literature.  Sure, his topics were not always mainstream, but isn't that part of life?  Pushing things into an uncomfortable or foreign territory and watching to see how we react?

One of my favorite authors of all time is Philip K. Dick.  His novels were often simply nothing more than near stream of consciousness from his drug and paranoia fueled fear and contempt for society, but many of his novels were groundbreaking and have influenced if not fueled much of what we consider canon of science fiction today.

Like him or not, Kurt Vonnegut was an influential author and will be missed.

 :(

boykster:
the comparison was to illustrate that topics outside of "normal" are relevant, no matter who the author is.  Heck, it's probably been 20 years since I've read anything by Vonnegut, but to dismiss his body of work because he wrote about drugs and mental illness...often pseudo-fictional accounts of personal experiences.

PKD also wrote about similar drug and mental illness topics, mostly fueled by his own life.  Valis is a near autobiographical novel that explores PKD's own encounters with what he terms a divine presence.  He followed that up with 3 other novels exploring his experiences in a fictional realm.

And you're right, I wouldn't put PKD and Vonnegut in the same league at all.  PKD, as revolutionary and insightful as his work was, can't even touch the number of literature students and authors that Vonnegut did.

I'm not trying to convince you to <like> Vonnegut's work, that's totally up to you.

 :cheers:

shmokes:
Breakfast of Champions movie was awful.  Absolutely terrible.  Mother Night and Slaughterhouse 5 on the other hand were both quite good.

And, I'd tend to agree.  The fact that his books might incorporate drugs and alcohol (though, generally, drugs and/or alcohol are not the central theme) is irrelevant.  A good writer can write about swamp sludge if he's got something good to say about it.  Hell, read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if you want something that you can aptly apply your "look at me, I'm so high/drunk right now" bit to (and that's a pretty great book, too, BTW).

I'm going through my head, and it's been a while, but I'm ticking off his books I've read, B of C, Cat's Cradle, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5, Mother Night, Hocus Pocus, Time Quake . . . definitely others that just don't immediately come to mind.  He's probably my favorite author so I've read most of his stuff.  I've never come away from any of his books feeling like drugs or alcohol were glorified.  If anything chacters like the alcoholic Dwayne Hoover show the destructive qualities of substance abuse.  Come to think of it, I'm not sure he was an alcoholic . . . maybe he was just insane.  Anyway . . . I think that you can't be right or wrong about whether you enjoy Vonnegut, but it sounds like you didn't pay very close attention when you read him.

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