What? There's no Santa Claus?

...or rather, no Howard W. Campbell?

Coming off of Ragtime and Mumbo Jumbo, I'd gotten into the habit of assuming that characters who are fleetingly referred to are either entirely real (you just can't make this stuff up!) or based on someone real. So imagine my disappointment when I discover that there was not a prominent American expatriate from Schenectady working in the Nazi propaganda department.

Oh, well. I guess the important thing is that Howard W. Campbell was entirely believable in the sense that I was not shocked by his existence. After all, there were (and still are) plenty of Nazi sympathizers and Nazi party members in the United States, so the concept of one working for Goebbels is not out of the question.

Campbell was originally created for one of Vonnegut's earlier works, Mother Night (1961, eight years before SH5), but he fits in well with one of the messages of the later work: anybody can do terrible things.

...okay, that sounded a bit like a motivational poster.

In order to shy away from a traditional view of the war, Vonnegut muddles the lines of who exactly is fighting whom and avoids identifying one particular side as "Committer of Atrocities". The American soliders are miserable; the Germans are equally miserable, and save Billy from his own squad. The bombing of Dresden is senseless and horrible, but those candles are always burning in the background. Billy is an American taking shelter with Germans from an American and British bombing raid; Campbell is an American working for the Germans, just another part of the blurred boundaries.

But still, it's a bit of a letdown that Vonnegut had to invent the character instead of ripping him straight from history.

The Tralfamadorians' MG/YA cousins?

(MG = Middle Grade, YA = Young Adult. I wasn't quite sure what to qualify the book in question as; I read it during elementary school, but they probably wouldn't let public-schoolers anywhere near it until eighth grade. I'm just bad at gauging reading level. I will henceforth refer to it as a kids' book, since any audience younger than me is clearly composed of kids.)

As I read through Slaughterhouse-Five, I couldn't help but notice that the Tralfamadorians have some stylistic similarities to an alien species I had encountered before: the Boov from Adam Rex's middle-grade/young-adult novel The True Meaning of Smekday, which to this day remains one of the few books I have read more than once. That's how good it is. Adam Rex writes some weeeeeiiiiiird kids' books. But they're really good. He also illustrates them.

Smekday involves a girl named Gratuity, a cat named pig, and a (male) alien named J.Lo traveling in a (hovering) car called Slushious. Needless to say, it's not all that serious of a book.

The Boov (pronounced Bo-o-ov, according to the alien character who is rather rude in his ignorance of the International Phonetic Alphabet) don't have much of a direct relationship to the Tralfamadorians except for glovelike body parts and a general theme of lavatory about their appearance. They don't live in the fourth dimension; they don't see everything all at once; they don't say "So it goes". The Boov are presented flat-out comically, with malapropisms in their speech (the bomb is going to explore!), condescending treatment of humans (sending them to human preserves and feeding them milkshakes), general ineptitude (a second alien race is on its way to destroy Earth because a Boov technician accidentally sent them a recording of an offensive children's song), and odd affinities (they like to wear oranges on their feet). They don't have much to offer in the way of deep philosophical insights about the meaning of time, and they actually don't have such a hard time understanding things the way humans do. Instead, the similarities I see between the Boov and the Tralfamadorians are more tangential, including passing references and stylistic features.

The main passage of SH5 that made me become literarily unstuck and jump to Rex's book was where the Tralfamadorians react to Billy's inspiring speech about everyone living in harmony. The adorable little gloved plungers close their hands over their eyes because Billy has just said something very stupid; they then explain that they themselves are actually more dangerous to the galaxy than humans are, since they destroy the universe while testing new fuels for their flying saucers. Specifically, a Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button and the whole universe disappears.

This passage reminded me of the Boov's own mishaps in space exploration, featuring a Koobish (a type of alien livestock used as a test animal) named Peeches who leans on the Big Red Button Labeled NO, leading to the complete loss of the mission... sort of. I can't tell you what happens to it without spoiling things.

Okay, okay, so maybe not a big connection; just pressing buttons and making bad things happen. But this at least got me thinking about some other connections. Both species view humans as animals, placing them in zoos or herding them off to preserves in Arizona. Both try to focus on the happy parts of life and block out sadness, failure, and mistakes, and yet both are also somewhat defeatist and realize when they can't change something; the Tralfamadorians' destruction of the universe and the Boov losing control of Earth against the invading Gorog. Throw in some weird technology and an astounding number of sexes, and you can see where I might be getting ideas about these two being related somehow.

Since Adam Rex wrote Smekday much later than Kurt Vonnegut wrote SH5, I'll assume a non-Tralfamadorian concept of time and conclude that Adam Rex hid some Vonnegut references throughout his book, and if I go back and read it again, I'll probably find more than just the ones I immediately remembered while going through SH5.

Of course, I could email Adam Rex and ask him about this. He seems like the kind of guy who would answer email from fans.

As one last interesting note, The True Meaning of Smekday is being made into a Dreamworks animated movie. I'm sure they'll ruin it. For one thing, they've retitled it Home (can people really not handle "smek"?) and J.Lo has been possibly been renamed "Oh", perhaps because the female human known as "J. Lo" has been cast as Gratuity's mother, and it would be confusing (BUT OH SO HILARIOUSLY METAFICTIONAL!!!) to have Jim Parson's character share a name with his costar--especially since in the book there is a brief exchange where Gratuity points out that J.Lo is the name of a human actress.


I wonder what they'll do with the parts where J.Lo (the alien) directly adresses the reader to explain certain aspects of Boov history and culture through comic strips?

Basically, if they stay true to the book, it will probably not be popular with a general audience (due to sheer weirdness) but will become a cult classic kids' film. If they try to tone it down a bit, it will be the usual bland silliness you expect from an animated movie that tries to be new and different.

Anyway... I'm judgmental about movies. And Smekday is great. Go read it.

Silliness and Science Fiction...

...do they weaken a message?

This blog post mostly consists of me musing and asking you all for answers. Just warning you.

Today in class we questioned whether Vonnegut can tackle issues like war and and the meaning of life while including flying saucers, toilet plungers, and two-bit sci-fi writers. Does the silliness detract from the seriousness?

Just to get that out of the way, I'll just say that I am of the belief that if you can't take a joke about something, you can't take it seriously, either. Vonnegut's writing style panders perfectly to me. This blog post will not focus on the use of humor to discuss serious topics.

Instead, I'm musing about the inclusion of science fiction, or rather why that might set off some peoples' alarm bells for anti-seriousness.

Maybe it's just because I've been raised in a pro-sci-fi household, but I've never really understood why it's sometimes not considered a "serious" genre (example: while researching education issues and methods for a paper sophomore year, I found out that many educators discourage children from reading adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi). I've often found science fiction to be a much more approachable way to tackle tough philosophical issues than through "literary fiction" (poorly defined term... refers to fiction which has nothing outstanding to identify it by except the fact that it is written?) Vonnegut's characters' use of science fiction for reinventing themselves and their world is something I see as entirely valid: science fiction can look at a potential future to try to make sense of the present.

Most of the time, I'm not complaining about sci-fi not being serious--instead, I'm complaining about certain incredibly-non-serious-and-non-sci-fi things being labeled as sci-fi and thus giving it a bad image (John Carter of Mars, James Cameron's Avatar, The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey, The Host by Stephanie Meyer... the list goes on and on). Are these kinds of works the reason for people disregarding the genre? Too much sex, explosions, Pocahontas, and White Man's Burden in Space obscuring the public's view? I suppose the definition of sci-fi is up for grabs. Here's the one I'll provide: works of fiction that focus on the impact of scientific discoveries and technological developments on society and the human condition. This can be anything from the invention of time travel to newfound political relations with aliens.

Is "real" sci-fi just too weird to appeal to a broader audience? Do the more extrapolated or fantastical elements distance the story too much from the real world? Is it a matter of, "Well, that's someone's imagined future, and they're probably wrong about a bunch of stuff"?

If anyone would like to comment with some reasons why sci-fi is unrelatable or lessens the seriousness of a work's central message, I'd love to hear them. And I promise that I won't give you terrifyingly rabid backlash. I'll give you mild-mannered, constructive backlash.