Posted on 03/07/2002 10:28:59 AM PST by PJ-Comix
Kilgore Trout was bom in 1907 of American parents on the British island of Bermuda. Trout attended grammar school there until his father's job with the Royal Ornithological Society terminated. The family moved to Dayton, Ohio, where Trout graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1924. Thereafter, he wandered around the country, workng at menial low-paying jobs and writing science-fiction in his spare time. His only known residences during, this period are Hyannis, Mass., Indianapolis, Ind., and Ilium and Cohoes, N.Y.
He has been married and divorced three times and has one child, Leo, a veteran of Vietnam.
As of 1974, Trout has written one hundred seventeen novels and two thousand short stories. Yet until recently he was little known. This regrettable situation is due to Trout's extreme reclusivity and his indifference to the publication of his stories. He was ill-advised in his choice of publishers, the chief one, World Classics Library, being a firm specializing pornographic novels and magazines. This ensured that his works would be distributed only to stores specializing in this genre. Yet Trout's work, with one exception,* contained no explicitly erotic content. Without Trout's permission or knowledge, World Classics Library put lurid covers on his novels and used his short stories as fillers in ''girlie'' magazines.
In the past few years, however, his fiction has come to the attention of some notable critics and writers in both mainstream and science-fiction. It has been praised for its high imagination and Swiftean satire. Professor Pierre Versins, for instance, in his massive study, Encyclopgdie de l'Utopie, des Voyages Extraordinaires, et de la Science Fiction, Editions l'Age d'Homme, S.A., Lausanne, Switzerland, 1973, says of Trout, ''A thesis on the too neglected works of this author would be most welcome.''
This is true, but the task of collecting his entire corpus of works is formidable. Even the wealthiest and most indefatigable of collectors cannot boast that they have all of Trout's stories. Venus on the Half-Shell is so rare that its only known possessor required payment of several thousand dollars for its purchase by Dell Publishing Company.
However, as one prominent writer has predicted, Trout's career is on the upswing. Dell is proud to be the first to launch Kilgore Trout into the literary-mainstream. That the author is no longer indifferent ,to his brain-children is shown by his insistence on rewriting Venus on the Half-Shell, updating it somewhat, and expanding the character of Chworktap.
Today, there are few writers not pushing an 'agenda'. IMHO, Card and Willis are two of them. Jerry Pournelle also seems to be "one of us" and there's a guy named James Hogan who seems to be libertarian, but other than that you'll find shelves full of liberal ideas and theories.
Awww! Come on! It's fun. It makes you feel goooooood....
Heh, your post is number 42, heh, heh, that's cool.
Kilgore Trout has a much greater depth than Robert Henlein.
Depends upon what you want. KT (aka K. Vonnegut) is great at social satire. His characters are wild and unusual. RH is great at plotting and simply telling a story. His characters are well drawn, but he only has about 3-4 types of characters that he re-uses from book to book. RH has some political axes he likes to grind, but I often agree with him, so I don't mind. I much prefer RH to KT (or KV). I have read all of RH's novels and many of his short stories. I've read Venus on the half Shell, Slaughterhouse 5, and one or two others by KV.
No- as noted by someone else on this thread, "VENUS ON THE HALF SHELL" was written by Philip Jose Farmer (an author who seems to me to be virtually unreadable).
I have a copy of "VOTHS", though, and if it's worth "thousands" as this story indicates I may have to auction it off on eBay!!!
Yep. That's why after many years of fandom I hung it all up in the 1980s. The real decline came after the death of J.W. Campbell Jr. when "Analog" was taken over by the liberal new breed. Stan Schmidt offered a little reprieve, but his editorship was mechanical and unimaginative although he did bring some exciting new writers on-board (Card was one, I think).
Also, SF ran afoul of reality: no more space operas about Venusians or exotic Martian locales. We knew their environments were largely hostile to life. The Moon was no longer much of a mystery. Even warp drives were futzed-up by that stinkin' Einstein, so visits to other star systems were largely out unless the writers cobbled up some teleportation scheme. And Marxist "social justice" 1960s-style seemed to be the "in" thing, with liberal editors trying to lead readers by the nose. It was the era of Carl Sagan and his sybaritic clones. B-O-R-I-N-G.
Though SF magazines struggled on, that "sense of wonder" described by the late Hugo Gernsback was largely gone. For me it became much more exciting to read non-fiction. Do you realize how many SF themes of the 50's through the 70s are now reality? Sadly, our imaginations failed to keep up with the pace of real science. Still, lots of the older writers are still fresh. Heinlein was a Libertarian mechanic: his lackluster writing bored me when it was new although I learned from him (but not Libertarianism). In my opinion some of the best writing was done by people like Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner (under lots of pseudonyms like Lewis Padgett, etc.), L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, P.K. Farmer and dozens more.
It was better than the book. Not saying much.
What's with the phoney bio? I thought everybody knew that Trout was a nomme de plume of Kurt Vonnegut.
I thought Finney's character was fictional. Guess ya never know, huh?
The best of the lot is "Just Slow Tuesday Noght," which many of you have probably seen in fine anthologies.
However, I agree that there is no one who is better than Kilgore Trout.
Congressman Billybob
Not quite correct. It is obvious that the imaginations of those who have made these themes reality DID manage to keep up!
Also, I would go farther back for SF themes which have been realized- all the way to Jules Verne and the submarine (as well as deep-sea exploration and development), or Aldous Huxley and in-vitro fertilization, widespread psychotropic drug use, etc etc (1930's!)
I meant imaginative fiction, not the imaginations of scientists themselves. What really happened was that the big, bold SF themes of the 20s through the 60s or so were mostly supplanted by reality. There were/are plenty of highly imaginative writers but they were increasingly corralled by the complexity of the themes they could explore. An analogy might be the difficulty of explaining the Whitewater mess to a broad audience except for the part about the Bent One and Monica in the Oval Office. Real political aficionados stuck with it, but most people tuned to "Baywatch" instead.
When SF became more purely cerebral than action-oriented (i.e., singularities or sociological themes instead of human-oriented studies and action stories) magazine circulations and book sales took a dive. I personally became tired of being hammered with what eventually became known as Political Correctness. Compare the original "Star Trek" with the "New Generation" PC dreck.
My favorite scene is where he's on the planet where Political Correctness has run amuck, and the Police wear heavy boots and backpacks, goggles, earplugs, etc. when chasing a suspect, so as not to have any unfair advantages.
The turning point for me was the acendance of Ursula Leguin, a stoned-out hippie chick from the Northwest, as a "MAJOR Science-Fiction writer". It seems to me that sword-and-sorcery and various other childish fantasy themes took over and swamped "real" science fiction about that time (mid-70's).
The list of really first-rate writers of science fiction is quite limited- I would include Arthur Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein (but not his post-"Stranger in a Strange Land" New Age nonsense!), Fred Pohl (of course!), William Tenn, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, A.E. Van Vogt, and a handful of others. (Note that Ray Bradbury is NOT on my list...)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.