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Fear is, after all, a sane response to the nuclear arms race. |
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In "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," the U.S. military gains a remarkable new super-weapon: the dynamopsychic property of one man's mind. But professor Arthur Barnhouse is a weapon with a conscience. He disappears. But he continues to use his power--to the horror of military minds around the world.
In the "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" of the year 2158, the wonder drug anti-gerasone has stopped the aging process, and Earth is getting mighty crowded. The Schwartzes share a single apartment--all seven generations of them. With family conflict reaching a level undreamed of by short-lived earlier generations, the Schwartzes land in jail--and make a shocking discovery.
A writer of many guises
The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) is generally viewed as a literary author, a mainstream best-seller, a master satirist, a lion of liberalism and a darling of the baby boomers. SF readers see yet another aspect--SF writer. His first novel, Player Piano (1952), is an SF dystopia of computer takeover. His second, The Sirens of Titan (1959), reveals that aliens are manipulating human history--aliens who return in his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (1969). SF recurs throughout Vonnegut's novels, and one of his most famous characters is SF writer Kilgore Trout, who in 1974 produced a novel of his own, Venus on the Half-Shell (ghostwritten by Philip Jose Farmer).
Vonnegut's collection Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) includes both mainstream and SF among its 25 stories (or, more accurately, 24 stories and a review). The most famous of its contents is the SF classic "Harrison Bergeron," an "if-this-goes-on" satire. Other such satires include "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow," which consider overpopulation. "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" is less an "if-this-goes-on" tale than an impassioned plea for the arms race not to go on. The same can be said of "The Manned Missiles," in which the first men to go into space--a Russian and an American--kill each other.
Not all the SF stories have an "if-this-goes-on" theme. In "The Euphio Question," a signal from outer space creates a dangerously disabling sense of tranquility in its listeners. Humans achieve a wondrous existence when they learn to put bodies on and off, like clothing, in "Unready to Wear" (a precursor to virtual reality, except without computers or software). In "EPICAC," the titular seven-ton supercomputer develops self-awareness and emotions. In "Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog," the true intelligence of canines is revealed--or is it?
Welcome to the Monkey House is one of the books that helped make Vonnegut popular with radicals, hippies, liberals, sex libbers and others during the sociocultural revolution of the 1960s and '70s. However, the collection now seems pretty conservative. Fear is, after all, a sane response to the nuclear arms race. Peace and overpopulation are mainstream concerns. The concept of health-related suicide has gained some acceptance. The view of our bodies as our enemy is not entirely removed from the puritanism that Vonnegut elsewhere satirizes. And his female characters are uniformly "girls," who are seen exclusively in the context of their relationships to men (the nadir of this pre-feminist attitude is reached in "Welcome to the Monkey House," where the catalyst of female sexual awakening is rape, though in reality it causes sexual and other trauma). But, flawed and unradical though the collection may be, Welcome to the Monkey House is an essential book for SF fans.
Readers should know that eight of the 25 works in Welcome to the Monkey House are SF, with the rest being mainstream. However, a number of the mainstream tales, such as "Who Am I This Time?" and "All the King's Horses," have a decided SF feel. --Cynthia
