Imagine a million years ago, before humans had fur, or flippers, or spent most of their time underwater hunting fish, back in 1986, when they still had these big brains that seemed to cause nothing but big-brain problems like world war, global hunger, economic collapse and nuclear devastation, and the only thing that kept them from absolute and total extinction was absolute and total happenstance as the last few random passengers of the "Nature Cruise of the Century" became the last carriers of the human genome, stranded on Darwin's famous islands of evolutionary opportunity with nothing else left to do on Earth but finally evolve.
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Now It Can Be Told: "Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir: You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next--and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable." "And so on..." These are the opening lines of a fictional novel which drives a fictional man of unwell mental health over the edge at the same time as Kurt Vonnegut himself steps into the schizophrenic imaginings of his own fictional world to speak to the fictional author of that fictional novel quoted above and offer him the one thing he's never known in his fictional existence, independence and freedom of will. Kurt Vonnegut is brilliant in a totally insane way, and Breakfast of Champion is totally insane. In a brilliant sort of way. "The expression "Breakfast of Champions" is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products." After another World War, industrialization through automation brings peace and prosperity to the world. Just about everyone loses their jobs to go on surviving on the benevolence of an essential welfare state while the elite managers of the machines hold out the last meaningful careers as paternalistic overseers. One promising Doctor Proteus, on the verge of a career breakthrough, begins to second guess the system that leaves so many millions floating uselessly through a perfectly benign yet blah existence. This is Kurt Vonnegut's first novel. |
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