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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

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334 points musha68k | 18 comments | 20 Oct 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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karaterobot ◴[20 Oct 24 17:17 UTC] No.41896910[source]▶
> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who wrote Cat’s Cradle?

As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. That's especially true if those people are introspective, creative types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like it is to the author of the article.

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dkarl ◴[20 Oct 24 18:19 UTC] No.41897366[source]▶
I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.

I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.

If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.

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1. oorza ◴[20 Oct 24 23:44 UTC] No.41899473[source]▶
The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII.

People contain multitudes.

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2. jhbadger ◴[21 Oct 24 00:32 UTC] No.41899678[source]▶
And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.
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3. ThrowawayR2 ◴[21 Oct 24 00:50 UTC] No.41899751[source]▶
First of all, it's Sixth Column. Secondly, the "white people" were the remnants of the US military after the United States had been invaded and conquered by a pan-Asian bloc that emerged that had previously conquered and absorbed the Soviet Union. The religion was just a ruse to cover their rebellion. They beat the invaders using a sci-fi mcguffin that, among other implausible things, could selectively be tuned to kill based on genetics.

It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone would derive "genocide" out of it. IIRC, it was a plot point that the invaders also treated Asian-Americans brutally.

4. WillAdams ◴[21 Oct 24 01:09 UTC] No.41899845[source]▶
No, the Federal Service was not completely military --- that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to determine which would have orbits which would intersect with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.
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5. ThrowawayR2 ◴[21 Oct 24 01:19 UTC] No.41899883[source]▶
Starship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense to give control over society to those who felt a responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and run with.

That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said militarism was good, haw haw".

6. MassPikeMike ◴[21 Oct 24 02:55 UTC] No.41900284[source]▶
Certainly people contain multitudes, but in Heinlein's case some of the diversity of viewpoint was intentional. The happy universalism of "Stranger in a Strange Land", the libertarianism of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', and the patriotic collectivism of "Starship Troopers" were, I think, the result of Heinlein choosing three very different political philosophies and exploring where they led. (This is not my original theory, but I can't seem to find a reference for it.)

To me it's one more sign of how masterful a storyteller Heinlein was that his embrace of the contradictions was conscious and not just a result of some sort of inner conflict.

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7. borski ◴[21 Oct 24 09:06 UTC] No.41902099{3}[source]▶
While I agree with your premise, it’s worth noting that much of the military is also “bureaucrats doing necessary government work.”
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8. lynx23 ◴[21 Oct 24 09:49 UTC] No.41902389[source]▶
Wha? The best sci-fi novel ever written? An Ode to free love?

Stranger In A Strange Land is so creepy, I started to wonder about the sanity of Heinlein. A sex cult around a pseudo-alien? C'mon. It feels like it was written by a 14 year old.

I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.

But tastes obviously differ.

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9. WillAdams ◴[21 Oct 24 11:03 UTC] No.41902843{4}[source]▶
Which is why there is a rather marked divide between the "pencil-pushers" and "the tip of the spear".

That said, there are lots of instances of the clerk-typist being told to grab his rifle and fill out a billet for a patrol and similar things --- RH actually speaks to this and other similar, but broader concerns in _Starship Troopers_

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10. throw4847285 ◴[21 Oct 24 13:49 UTC] No.41904134[source]▶
I think Heinlein's politics are quite consistent. "Right wing libertarian who believes that some social mores should be pushed and challenges and others need to remain unquestioned." A tale as old as time.
11. WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 13:56 UTC] No.41904200[source]▶
Also, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ends in a Socialist Revolution. (This is underscored in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" where the moon weary noir world-hopping protagonist comes from a worse version of the moon than "Harsh Mistress", one where the revolution was stamped out and is even more the dystopian "libertarian fantasy" people think "Harsh Mistress" is. The protagonist then later gets a chance to hop to "Mike's" version of the Moon and it is a far more pleasant, much more socialist place.) On the embrace of contradictions, it does seem to escape many how in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" the AI Libertarians hope to build on the Moon Libertarians dream to exist says "Libertarians can have a taste of Socialism, for a treat" as the main plot for the second half of the book.
12. JadeNB ◴[21 Oct 24 14:10 UTC] No.41904360[source]▶
> I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.

In a world with both Greg Egan and Ted Chiang writing sci-fi, one has to exclude their novels from any best-of comparisons just to give other authors a fighting chance.

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13. WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 14:36 UTC] No.41904635[source]▶
While not a complete satire in tone, Starship Troopers was very much a "bildungsroman" showing a child growing up in that society and getting lectured about it and growing up (and growing more cynical as childhood naivety wanes). The book is extremely didactic and written "this is the way society should/must be", but that doesn't mean they were the actual didactic thoughts of the author (especially as the protagonist does start to question them late in the book, despite being a proponent of it all in youth). As much as anything the book seems to me a "gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment) meant to ask hard questions of an extreme take on a possibly good idea. The possibly good idea wasn't intended to build a militarized society, but the fact that it led to an awfully militarized one, seems to me to be an intentional contradiction in the narrative that Heinlein asks of the reader, in the way of a satire/farce (even if not actually satire/farce) to question the extremes of the thought experiment, to question the didactic lectures for their problems and failed assumptions.
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14. zeroonetwothree ◴[21 Oct 24 14:58 UTC] No.41904912{3}[source]▶
Ted Chiang hasn’t published any novels.
15. LargeWu ◴[21 Oct 24 15:58 UTC] No.41905499{3}[source]▶
Modern social media has beaten the idea of any nuance out of its consumers. I think it's very challenging for younger people today to understand satire and subtext, even the very concept of a thought experiment. When one's primary mode interaction with the world is short thoughts that are designed for maximum engagement and outrage, there's no room for subtlety. There has been a ratcheting effect of social discourse, and one who dares defy the orthodox positions, even to positions that were not controversial 10 years ago, draws the wrath of legions of anonymous mobs. Ultimately, people are rewarded for increasingly polarized discourse and disincentivized from moderation and especially from challenging thoughts. It's no wonder people are incapable of anything but taking something like Starship Troopers at face value.
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16. lynx23 ◴[21 Oct 24 16:06 UTC] No.41905584{3}[source]▶
Oh damn, DEI has finally made its way into books! The Horror. I totally dsagree. We dont have to shoot down exceptionally good peple just so that the mediocre are noticed. I dont want to notice the mediocre, I dont have time for their stuff.
17. WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 18:20 UTC] No.41906844{4}[source]▶
I've been saying a bunch of similar things for a while now. I sometimes refer to it as being past a Poe's Law Singularity and good satire is hard/impossible/dead. Poe's Law examples (someone taking satire as serious surface level only takes) are too easy to find today, including in the very names of modern startups and corporations. RIP satire, you were a good friend once, and so it goes. It's possibly a good thing Vonnegut did not survive to see this world on the other side of the singularity. (Or it is possible it only happened because too many writers like Vonnegut passed away out of this timeline.)
18. borski ◴[21 Oct 24 19:57 UTC] No.41907890{5}[source]▶
True. Honestly, I thought it was a great film, and I’ve watched it a bunch of times. I thought it explored that topic quite well.