📖 Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut's work starts, I'd suggest, from the axiom that the twentieth century he'd lived through was a time of such extremity that it can only be responded to with similar extremity. So the tools of his fiction are absurdity, exaggeration, caricature and, very often, apocalypse. Sometimes, he winds up using the tropes of science fiction to tell his stories, and sometimes not; but either way, they can best be understood as the response of a sane man to a world he felt was increasingly insane. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) seems to have wanted to write from early on in his life; he helped edit the student newspaper at Cornell University, and after World War II had spells as a journalist. But his most famous formative experience was when, as a captured US soldier in 1945, he witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden - an event that became the basis for his book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).