The Fiction of Ideas


Upon hearing we’d be cover this subgenre of science fiction, fiction of ideas, I immodestly jumped into an old favorite of mine, Slaughter House Five. 

This subgenre seems to avoid certain characteristics of other forms of syfy that tend to make them cornier. It instead directly tackles real world issues and imbeds them in key parts of the story. Slaughter House Five is an incoherent tale that conveys long-term effects of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is forever psychologically damaged by ww2 and his imprisonment in German camps. The book itself goes in depth on how he was abducted by aliens and taken to their space zoo where he experiences time travel as a result. Billy seems to be devoid of all emotion for the entire book and I interpret these events that happen to him as his way of coping with his uninteresting life/ marriage and the horrors he experienced during the war. He gets a movie star wife while he was abducted and lives out the fantasies of what he truly wants his life to be like all while trying to balance his constant cycle of past war memories. Being unable to do this he creates the time travel as an excuse to explain the thought loop that seems to keep him so distant from his real world family.

This book finds an amazingly creative way to show psychological damages all while rounding it out strangely with a unique science fiction story.


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