Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books

20 All Time Classic Sci Fi Novels - Slaughterhouse 5, or The Children's Crusade - A Duty-dance with Death

Reviews
 

Short, weird, immensely readable, witty, occasionally incomprehensible, but overall a moving indictment of modern warfare. The reverse bombing description (a version of which device Martin Amis dragged out over an entire book) is worth the price of purchase alone. If you liked anything at all about "Catch-22" you will love this, although for my money this delivers the same message in a more concise way - although this does inevitably mean there's less in the way of character development.
A walk on the weird side that everyone should take at one time or another.
Lucas John

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In one scene in this book the hero, or anti-hero Billy Pilgrim watches a war film backwards. Fire and explosions are sucked back into bombs which go back into the planes which fly back to their base; a city rebuilds itself, bullets come out of torn-apart people and go back into the guns, people stop being afraid and broken everything is made normal again and it's like watching a miracle as everything is put right. This seems to sum up the ridiculousness of war in this brilliant little book which I read in a couple of hours. Ostensibly about the bombing and massacre of Dresden as seen through Billy's eyes - it actually encompasses so much more, it's really about people and how war makes killing machines of us all.

Billy, like most soldiers, was really only a child at the time and his whole life is shaped by his experience in the war. His life story is told via a series of 'time travel' vignettes, including some sci-fi, but this is not confusing and the story is very easy to read. In the first pages the author, who really was in Dresden at the time of the massacre, explains how he has always felt compelled to write a book about the war, but it took him a long time to work out how to do it without glorifying it or turning it into an adventure story. Because of this, it is a quiet book. There's not a lot of graphic detail about war and death, but enough to leave the reader feeling cold and disturbed and very sad afterwards. An example would be when the prisoners of war spend two days packed into a railway carriage going nowhere in the middle of winter. Rather than describing how terrible this must have been, all we hear is the voice of a tramp-like prisoner saying: "It's not so bad." Heartbreaking!
Love Books

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In a word; brilliant. Slaughterhouse 5 sits between genres, part science fiction, part gritty war novel and part absurdist existentialism. The way the story is told, flitting between different events in the protagonist's life, works perfectly to show the effects of war and trauma on an individual. It also works rather nicely to deliver the philosophical message of the novel; that time is not linear and one should view death not as an ending, but as one point within a life. This point, coupled with the clear anti-war stance, provides an absurdity to the plot and to the characters. The idea that someone can witness and survive a massacre and return with a zen attitude towards life is both beautiful and ridiculous.

I also greatly enjoyed the manner in which the novel starts. The opening chapter is more an introduction, explaining how the book came to be written and why it was written it that particular style. As both an artist and a consumer of art I loved the insight into the mind of the author that this provided.
J. Crosse

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I purchased this book after reading all the reviews and I just didn't get it. I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Maybe it's just not to my taste. There are a few parts which are quite interesting but for the majority of it, I felt myself waiting to get to the end just to see if anything happened but... nothing. And if I read the phrase 'So it goes' one more time, I'll go crazy.

It is my friend's favourite book though so maybe I was missing something.
Mr. C. Lloyd

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If you are the type of reader who likes to get from a novel a conventionally structured narrative with a beginning, middle and end, plausibility and explanations for everything, then Slaughterhouse 5 is definitely not for you. Thankfully, Vonnegut discards all of the above making Slaughterhouse 5 a stunning chaotic read.

Slaughterhouse 5 is truly amazing. In the first few pages Vonnegut reveals that this is his novel about his experiences in Dresden during World War 2, but that is far from all Slaughterhouse 5 is. His protagonist Billy Pilgrim is stuck in a cycle of reliving scenes from his life in a seemingly random order, and among the narrative about Dresden we are treated to banal scenes from his career as an optometrist and incidents on the far off planet of Tralfamadore following his supposed abduction by aliens. Along his way Billy meets a variety of colourful individuals including characters from Vonnegut's other novels and the author himself.

This book is brilliant on so many levels. As well as being a moving metaphor for the helplessness of victims of war it's also overtaken Dorian Grey as most quotable novel I've read.

At just 150 pages it's far too brief. I could have read on and on and on.
Oracle

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