Venus on the Half-Shell Read Online Free Page B

“future fairy tales.” And even this is objectionable, since many science fiction stories take place in the present or the past, far and near. Anyway, the better writers spend most of their time trying to escape any labels whatsoever.
    In fact, there is a lot of Kilgore Trout in science fiction writers, including Vonnegut. If I did not know that Trout was a living person, I’d think he was an archetype plucked by Vonnegut out of his unconscious or the collective unconscious of science fiction writers. He’s miserable, he wrestles with concepts and themes that only a genius could pin to the mat (and very few are geniuses), he feels that he is ignored and despised, he knows that the society in which he is forced to live could be a much better one, and, no matter how gregarious he seems to be, he is a loner, a monad. He may be rich and famous (and some science fiction authors are), but he is essentially that person described in the previous sentence. Millions may admire him, but he knows that the universe is totally unconscious of him and that he is a spark fading out in the blackness of eternity and infinity. But he has an untrammeled imagination, and while his spark is still glowing, he can defeat time and space. His stories are his weapons, and, poor as they may be, they are better than none. As Eliot Rosewater says, the mainstream writers, narrators of the mundane, are “sparrowfarts.” But the science fiction writer is a god. At least, that is what he secretly believes.
    Trout’s favorite formula is to describe a hideous society, much like our own, and then, toward the end of the book, outline ways in which the society may be improved. In his 2BR02B, he shows an America which is so highly cybernated that only people with three or more Ph.D.’s can get jobs. There are also Ethical Suicide Parlors where useless people volunteer for euthanasia. 2BR02B sounds like a combination of Vonnegut’s novel, Player Piano , and his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House.” I’m not accusing Vonnegut of plagiarism, but Vonnegut does think highly enough of Trout’s plots to borrow some now and then. Trout’s The Big Board is about a man and a woman abducted and put on display by the extraterrestrials of the planet Zircon-212. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five tells how the Tralfamadorians carried off Billy Pilgrim and the movie star, Montana Wildhack, and put them in a luxurious cage.
    It may be that Trout gave Vonnegut permission to adapt some of his plots. At one time Trout lived in Hyannis, Massachusetts, which is very near West Barnstable, where Vonnegut also lived.
    Vonnegut admires Trout’s ideas, though he condemns his prose. It is atrocious and Trout’s unpopularity is deserved. (By the way, I’d characterize Vonnegut’s own prose, and his philosophy, as by Sterne out of Smollett.) A specimen of Trout’s prose, taken from Venus on the Half-Shell , sounds like that of the typical hack semipornographer’s. Most of the science fiction writers, according to Eliot Rosewater, have a style no better than Trout’s. But this doesn’t matter. Science fiction writers are poets with a sort of radar which detects only the meaningful in this world. They don’t write of the trivial; their concerns are the really big issues: galaxies, eternity, and the fate of all of us. And Trout is looking for the answer to the question that so sorely troubles Eliot Rosewater (and many of us). That is, how do you love people who have no use? How do you love the unlovable?
    Vonnegut lists Trout’s known residences as Bermuda, Dayton, Ohio, Hyannis, Massachusetts, and Ilium and Cohoes of New York. To this I can add Peoria, Illinois. A letter from Kilgore Trout was printed in the vox pop section of the editorial page of the Peoria Journal Star in 1971. In this Trout denounced Peoria as essentially obscene. It suggested that the natives quit raising so much hell about dirty movies and books and look in their own hearts for the genuine