“... of American SF touched a collective nerve only entrenched Lem’s standing belief that, as Kurt Vonnegut put it: ‘Science fiction writers meet often, comfort and praise one another, exchange single-spaced letters of twenty pages or more, booze it up affectionately … They are joiners. They are a lodge.’ ...”

“... Bonnie and Clyde, the Chicago Black Sox, Gregorio Cortez. Such writers as Terry Southern, Kurt Vonnegut, Studs Turkel and Russell Banks were his partisans (the last three introducing posthumous reissues of the fiction). But Nelson Algren speaks for the Forties: he did not write a major work after the Cold War defeat of the American Left and the ...”

“... this, I think, says something about the aesthetics of the sequence itself. It put me in mind of Kurt Vonnegut’s description of his sister, who was a painter: Alice, who was six feet tall and platinum blonde, asserted one time that she could roller-skate through a great museum like the Louvre, which she had never seen and which she wasn’t all that ...”

“... since folded rather than be corrupted). A short story that comes back to me over and over again is Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Harrison Bergeron’, or one small bit of it. Since all men and women aren’t exactly created equal, in this dystopian bit of science fiction a future America makes them equal by force: ballerinas wear weights so they won’t be more ...”

“... in battle and transformed the experience in his writing. But did he? Among Shippey’s examples is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 (1969). Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the bombardment of 1945. In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is a POW at Dresden, and goes on to live an externally uneventful life ...”