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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

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334 points musha68k | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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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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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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MassPikeMike ◴[21 Oct 24 02:55 UTC] No.41900284{3}[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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1. WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 13:56 UTC] No.41904200{4}[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.