Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author. Slaughterhouse Five, Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions, Cat’s Cradle, and Hocus Pocus are all great novels that expertly blend science fiction, drama, and humor. This book is a little bit of a departure from his typical book. It is the last book he wrote. He passed away in 2007 at age 84 and this book was released in 2005. This book does not really tell a story, but serves more of guide to what he was thinking when he wrote some of his famous novels as well as his current view of the world and humanity.
He mentions the politicians and political events of the time the book was written. George Bush was president and Dick Cheney was vice-president as the US attacked Iraq searching for “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” This definitely was a low point in US history. Vonnegut seems somewhat despondent at the state of events at the time. He appeared to believe that the attack was merely to gain access to Iraqi oil. This may or may not have been true. He spoke of the unsustainability of our reliance on oil, which is true. Much of what we do now, twenty years later, is even more unsustainable. Think about this, nearly six billion people own cell phones right now. How many people use the same cell phone for more than five years? Not many. We are discarding billions of cell phones every year. Where are they going? This is not sustainable and no one seems to care. We, as a society, devour vast amounts of resources for almost no reason. Nothing is meant to last. Almost nothing electronic is intended to be repaired. We just toss it. All the resources used to manufacture and transport the product are gone and all that is left is waste that does not degrade.
Vonnegut seems as he had nearly reached full curmudgeon stage as he wrote this book. He always like to poke fun at humanity’s flaws, but it seems like things had finally gone past the point of joking for him. It was more like venting. He was definitely right to be worried. This book was written 20 years ago and things have only gotten worse. The world is more disposable than ever before.
Vonnegut also seemed concerned, as he did in Player Piano, of the role computers were taking in the workforce. He was concerned of people being displaced by machines in the workforce. As AI begins to become more commonplace, this will likely become a very real issue for the generation that is currently reaching adulthood. Vonnegut predicted a universal basic income to pay a large part of humanity that served no useful purpose in Player Piano in 1952. He predicted a world largely manned by a machine workforce, with just a small number of engineers and technicians keeping it running. The rest of the world spends its days drunk in bars and wallowing in lethargy, desperately seeking meaning. Is this where we are headed?