by David Standish

By 1962, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., had been writing novels for ten years; three had been published—Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night—and nobody had ever heard of him. He didn’t count. Player Piano had been haphazardly reviewed when it was published in 1952, because it was a first novel; and had been as haphazardly dismissed when the reviewers found out that it looked a lot like science fiction—which is to say, trash. In 1959, “The Sirens of Titan” came out as a paperback original, with a screaming space-opera cover—and didn’t get a single review. Ditto Mother Night, in 1962, which carried a cover blurb implying that it was part of the Kiss My Whip school of writing.
In the 11 years since, he’s written four more novels—Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, just published. His books are now reviewed in the lead slot of the Sunday Times book section; Slaughterhouse-Five rode the best-seller lists for more than three months and was nominated for a National Book Award; Breakfast of Champions was grabbed by three book clubs long before it came out; those early novels that the critics wouldn’t touch with a stick are now being taught in colleges all over the place; a book of original essays about him called “The Vonnegut Statement” just appeared; the number of Ph.D. dissertations considering his work is up to six so far, and you can practically hear the typewriters clacking in graduate schools everywhere: “The Ambivalent Relationship of Zen and Bokononism in ‘Cat’s Cradle’: An Approach.” And so on.

by Aaron Barlow

Late in his career, in the essay “Man, Android and Machine,’’ Philip K. Dick said the android is “a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves.”¹ This is merely a description: unsure of the exact nature of the android, Dick could attain no definition. Even a clear dividing line between android and human proved impossible. Though the dangers of deception are clearly depicted in his fiction, Dick’s androids are its instruments no more often than are men. Each can be a constant enemy, or an inconstant friend. Both human and android may be means to someone else’s end. Like a man, an android sometimes proves to be something more than this. Each can be a victim, harmed by the deceit as surely as the deceived. To be truly victimized, a being must have a life beyond its utilization. Dick’s androids often have this life, just as his humans do.