Behold the Man
Nebula winner and the New Wave's most notorious provocation: time-travel paradox as theology, handled with a seriousness that outlasted the scandal.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Slaughterhouse-Five about?
Billy Pilgrim — optometrist, prisoner of war, survivor of the Dresden firestorm, abductee of the Tralfamadorians, who see all moments at once and keep him in a zoo with a film star — has come unstuck in time, and the novel comes unstuck with him, shuffling his life into a mosaic where the firebombing sits beside the wedding night and the assassination. Vonnegut spent twenty years failing to write his Dresden book before realising the failure was the form: there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The birds say all there is: Poo-tee-weet. So it goes — one hundred and six times.
Why it matters
One of the defining American novels of the twentieth century, a permanent fixture of curricula and banned-book lists alike, and the genre's strongest claim on the literary canon.
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