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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

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334 points musha68k | 3 comments | 20 Oct 24 16:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.733s | 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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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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1. 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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2. LargeWu ◴[21 Oct 24 15:58 UTC] No.41905499[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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3. WorldMaker ◴[21 Oct 24 18:20 UTC] No.41906844[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.)