About 180 pages published by Dell, this is the first time I've read anything by Vonnegut. Such a disturbing book. Everything I've heard about him, though, seems to be true. He's a brilliant satirist.
I couldn't help thinking of that Robert Frost poem, Fire and Ice when I read this. You know... Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in Ice . Well, this is a story, a satirical (in the Juvenalian tradition, not the Horatian) effusion of sarcasm, about that subject - The End of the World. The irony here is that the guy who was really the father of the atomic bomb didn't wipe out the earth on his first try using the fiery, nuclear holocaust. So he tries again with this stuff called Ice-9, with spectacularly better results.
War, religion, capitalism, Americanism and the implied hatred that the entire world has for it, politics -- Human Nature are all targets of Vonnegut's caustic satire. It's an interesting story, but it's more interesting as a macabre, yet humorous, languistic feast.
