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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

(www.polygon.com)
334 points musha68k | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 1.023s | source
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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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QuesnayJr ◴[20 Oct 24 17:44 UTC] No.41897102[source]▶
It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.

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1. Chathamization ◴[21 Oct 24 04:09 UTC] No.41900621[source]▶
Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.
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2. QuesnayJr ◴[21 Oct 24 05:57 UTC] No.41901063[source]▶
All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me, everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.
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3. Chathamization ◴[21 Oct 24 07:47 UTC] No.41901691[source]▶
Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text implying that's not the case:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

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4. QuesnayJr ◴[21 Oct 24 08:13 UTC] No.41901835{3}[source]▶
Because either the person quoted or the article itself wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a contradiction, but if the point is that everything is meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction than eating breakfast is a contradiction.