He's With the Tralfamadorians Now

Because everyone else is commenting on it, I must as well. After all, I'd jump off of a bridge if everyone else were doing it.

I don't read science fiction. Sure, I've read a couple of the classics (ie, Ender's Game). And I was really into Stephen King for a couple of years, starting in fifth grade (which seems just about right considering the level of his writing), but he's not really a science fiction author. Neither is Dean Koontz, whom I became infatuated with after I abandoned King (whom I think I was most interested in because of all the sex in his stories).

But here's where I'm going with this is: Kurt Vonnegut has passed away, but you probably already know that. You also probably know that he wasn't really a science fiction writer, even though he often got lumped in with them. That means I can still claim to not read science fiction, despite the fact that I had a Vonnegut phase -- as did many other adolescents. It started when I read Slaughterhouse Five in a high school English class. I followed that up with Cat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Breakfast of Champions, Mother Night, Galapagos, and probably some others I'm forgetting (and not in that order because there's no way I could remember the actual order in which I read all those books). Now that he's dead, we're all obligated to reflect upon what his writing meant to us. I can't really say, but I know I followed up my Vonnegut phase with a Sartre/Becket/Ionesco phase. That seems to make sense.

We're also all obligated to end our tributes to Vonnegut with the following sentence: So it goes.