Kurt Vonnegut is dead, at the age of 84, of brain injuries following a fall at home. Here is The Guardian:

“In 1947 Vonnegut became a public relations writer for General Electric, based in Schenectady, New York State. In 1950 he sold his first story, Report on the Barnhouse Effect, to Collier’s Magazine. His stint in PR was to inspire a number of stories and influenced his first novel, Player Piano (1952), which satirises modern automation and corporate values. He quit in 1951 to become a full-time hack writer of science fiction, spending over a decade in pulp obscurity. In time-honoured American fashion, he had to supplement his income with a variety of jobs, including copywriting and car selling; at one time he ran a Saab dealership. One of his fictional alter egos, Philboyd Studge, is a Pontiac dealer who goes berserk after reading a story by Kilgore Trout, another Vonnegut alter ego.

The need to earn money became still more pressing in 1958, when Vonnegut and his wife took on the three orphaned children of his sister and brother-in-law, who died within 24 hours of each other (his the sister died of cancer and her husband, a failed toy inventor, was drowned when his train plunged off a bridge).

In 1959 The Sirens of Titan was published, and Mother Night followed in 1961. Vonnegut was never happy with the label of ’science-fiction writer’, which he described as being put into a drawer that “serious” critics use as a urinal. Very few of his novels, in fact, could be described as straight science fiction, although his fiction always had a speculative element. The best of his early books is perhaps Cat’s Cradle (1963) a satirical examination of human beliefs through the religion of “Bokonism”. The title image (a construction of string with “No damn cat, and no damn cradle”) is a small example of the make-believe that makes the world go round, bigger examples being religions and world views of any kind. Even the finest of them are only what Vonnegut (within his own categories of “Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons”, later to be the title of a book of essays) calls “Foma”: the harmless untruths that make life bearable. Cat’s Cradle was much admired by Graham Greene, among others. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965) was followed by a collection of shorter works, Welcome to the Monkey House (1968). A year later came Slaughterhouse Five…

I love his books, though old age was not kind to him as a writer. Kilgore Trout, being a literary creation, will live with the language. May the Tralfamadorians carry his visions across the galaxy.

Here (allegedly) are his eight rules for good writing:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 1:31 am and is filed under ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.