So It Goes: Four Of Kurt Vonnegut’s Best Science Fictional Creations

The author would have turned 85 this week.

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

S5Becoming Unstuck in Time
Time is a subject Vonnegut returned to over and over in his career, most famously with his best-known work, Slaughterhouse-Five. But even if you weren’t forced to read the book in middle school, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that Vonnegut’s vision of time travel is a long way from the antics of Marty McFly, or even the “set right what once went wrong” of Quantum Leap’s Sam Beckett. As with the latter, Slaughterhouse-Five protagonist Billy Pilgrim has no control over where or when he will find himself at any given moment, slipping back and forth along his own timeline at the whim of a capricious universe. Pilgrim gains perspective on this process from the alien Tralfamadorians, who kidnap him and keep him in a zoo for a time. The Tralfamadorians can see all of time simultaneously, beginning to end, but are not bothered by the larger implications of that. Namely, if you can see everything that has or will happen, does the concept of “free will” mean anything at all?

Vonnegut returned to the concept of time travel in a big way with his last published novel, 1997’s Timequake. It takes a classic sci-fi notion — traveling back and getting to relive your past — and puts a thoroughly Vonnegut spin on it. In the book, everyone living in 2011 suddenly finds their consciousness ripped back to 1991. From there, they get to re-experience those 10 years again…but they can’t change anything at all. In fact, they’re little more than helpless spectators, riding inside their younger body as it goes through the motions of a decade’s worth of already-lived history. There are many time travel stories that posit similar notions of fruitless time travel — Twelve Monkeys, for one — but you’d be hard pressed to find a less enticing version than in Timequake.

‘All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.’
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five


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