So It Goes: Four Of Kurt Vonnegut’s Best Science Fictional Creations
The author would have turned 85 this week.
This article is more than 2 years old
Kilgore Trout
Vonnegut tended to reuse elements or characters across many different works. The alien Tralfamadorians are best known from Slaughterhouse-Five, but they also appear or are mentioned in The Sirens of Titan and several others. Kilgore Trout is an even better example of Vonnegut’s use of recurring characters and themes. Trout is a fictional science fiction writer who is described as notably prolific, having penned over 117 novels and some 2,000 short stories, but who has never been very financially successful. The other details of Trout’s life, death, and personality vary throughout his appearances. Sometimes Trout is pivotal to the narrative, sometimes he’s just an eccentric bit of filigree. In both Jailbird and Timequake, he’s a central part of the story (although “Kilgore Trout” is just a pseudonym in that former book.
Trout is interesting from the perspective of sci-fi history because he was based on legendary SF writer Theodore Sturgeon (pictured above), who wrote books including More Than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, and who coined “Sturgeon’s Law” — ninety percent of science fiction is crap, but then, ninety percent of everything is crap. Vonnegut befriended Sturgeon in 1957, after Sturgeon moved to Massachusetts, where Vonnegut was then working at a car dealership. Trout mirrored Sturgeon both with his incredible output of writing and his struggles to make a living at it. Since Trout’s portrayal in Vonnegut’s works wasn’t always glowing, the writer didn’t publicly admit the Sturgeon connection until after the latter writer’s death in 1985. Trout has also popped up or been referenced in other works over the years, including Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Writer Philip Jose Farmer even wrote a book under the Trout pseudonym — Venus on the Half-Shell, published in 1975 — but Vonnegut was apparently not happy about it.
‘Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.’
– Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
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