I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.

I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.

If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.

The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII.

People contain multitudes.

And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.

Starship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense to give control over society to those who felt a responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and run with.

That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said militarism was good, haw haw".

No, the Federal Service was not completely military --- that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to determine which would have orbits which would intersect with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.

While I agree with your premise, it’s worth noting that much of the military is also “bureaucrats doing necessary government work.”

Which is why there is a rather marked divide between the "pencil-pushers" and "the tip of the spear".

That said, there are lots of instances of the clerk-typist being told to grab his rifle and fill out a billet for a patrol and similar things --- RH actually speaks to this and other similar, but broader concerns in _Starship Troopers_

True. Honestly, I thought it was a great film, and I’ve watched it a bunch of times. I thought it explored that topic quite well.

While not a complete satire in tone, Starship Troopers was very much a "bildungsroman" showing a child growing up in that society and getting lectured about it and growing up (and growing more cynical as childhood naivety wanes). The book is extremely didactic and written "this is the way society should/must be", but that doesn't mean they were the actual didactic thoughts of the author (especially as the protagonist does start to question them late in the book, despite being a proponent of it all in youth). As much as anything the book seems to me a "gedankenexperiment" (thought experiment) meant to ask hard questions of an extreme take on a possibly good idea. The possibly good idea wasn't intended to build a militarized society, but the fact that it led to an awfully militarized one, seems to me to be an intentional contradiction in the narrative that Heinlein asks of the reader, in the way of a satire/farce (even if not actually satire/farce) to question the extremes of the thought experiment, to question the didactic lectures for their problems and failed assumptions.

Modern social media has beaten the idea of any nuance out of its consumers. I think it's very challenging for younger people today to understand satire and subtext, even the very concept of a thought experiment. When one's primary mode interaction with the world is short thoughts that are designed for maximum engagement and outrage, there's no room for subtlety. There has been a ratcheting effect of social discourse, and one who dares defy the orthodox positions, even to positions that were not controversial 10 years ago, draws the wrath of legions of anonymous mobs. Ultimately, people are rewarded for increasingly polarized discourse and disincentivized from moderation and especially from challenging thoughts. It's no wonder people are incapable of anything but taking something like Starship Troopers at face value.

I've been saying a bunch of similar things for a while now. I sometimes refer to it as being past a Poe's Law Singularity and good satire is hard/impossible/dead. Poe's Law examples (someone taking satire as serious surface level only takes) are too easy to find today, including in the very names of modern startups and corporations. RIP satire, you were a good friend once, and so it goes. It's possibly a good thing Vonnegut did not survive to see this world on the other side of the singularity. (Or it is possible it only happened because too many writers like Vonnegut passed away out of this timeline.)

In the words of Barry Humphries (RIP):

"If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up".

First of all, it's Sixth Column. Secondly, the "white people" were the remnants of the US military after the United States had been invaded and conquered by a pan-Asian bloc that emerged that had previously conquered and absorbed the Soviet Union. The religion was just a ruse to cover their rebellion. They beat the invaders using a sci-fi mcguffin that, among other implausible things, could selectively be tuned to kill based on genetics.

It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone would derive "genocide" out of it. IIRC, it was a plot point that the invaders also treated Asian-Americans brutally.

Certainly people contain multitudes, but in Heinlein's case some of the diversity of viewpoint was intentional. The happy universalism of "Stranger in a Strange Land", the libertarianism of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', and the patriotic collectivism of "Starship Troopers" were, I think, the result of Heinlein choosing three very different political philosophies and exploring where they led. (This is not my original theory, but I can't seem to find a reference for it.)

To me it's one more sign of how masterful a storyteller Heinlein was that his embrace of the contradictions was conscious and not just a result of some sort of inner conflict.

Also, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" ends in a Socialist Revolution. (This is underscored in "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" where the moon weary noir world-hopping protagonist comes from a worse version of the moon than "Harsh Mistress", one where the revolution was stamped out and is even more the dystopian "libertarian fantasy" people think "Harsh Mistress" is. The protagonist then later gets a chance to hop to "Mike's" version of the Moon and it is a far more pleasant, much more socialist place.) On the embrace of contradictions, it does seem to escape many how in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" the AI Libertarians hope to build on the Moon Libertarians dream to exist says "Libertarians can have a taste of Socialism, for a treat" as the main plot for the second half of the book.

Wha? The best sci-fi novel ever written? An Ode to free love?

Stranger In A Strange Land is so creepy, I started to wonder about the sanity of Heinlein. A sex cult around a pseudo-alien? C'mon. It feels like it was written by a 14 year old.

I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.

But tastes obviously differ.

> I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.

In a world with both Greg Egan and Ted Chiang writing sci-fi, one has to exclude their novels from any best-of comparisons just to give other authors a fighting chance.

Ted Chiang hasn’t published any novels.

Oh damn, DEI has finally made its way into books! The Horror. I totally dsagree. We dont have to shoot down exceptionally good peple just so that the mediocre are noticed. I dont want to notice the mediocre, I dont have time for their stuff.

I think Heinlein's politics are quite consistent. "Right wing libertarian who believes that some social mores should be pushed and challenges and others need to remain unquestioned." A tale as old as time.

> Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?

> What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that too.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Humanity is doing pretty well at glacier reduction. It is true that total glacier eradication is a bigger challenge.

It is Polygon, after all.

But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a military.

Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks often appear prejudicial. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a misinterpretation.

So it goes.

Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine

I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.

Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.

"The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.

The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.

It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.

edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.

It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.

I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.

It depends on the people you’re playing with. With an active group there’s a lot of strategy that goes into the negotiations, and also a good amount of “push your luck” gameplay. In my experience, a lot of the game comes down to one or two extremely intense negotiation sessions that everyone at the table ends up jumping in on.

It also depends on the rules you are playing. Monopoly is a game that most people learn not from the rules but from family and a lot of families have very different house rules.

The in the box rules state that every property must go to auction on first landing if the player refuses their option to buy it at face value. There's a lot of strategy possible in auctions, but a lot of house rules don't like the auctions and either avoid them entirely or make them much rarer than the in-box rules state they should be. (In part because early and often auctions increase the cutthroat feeling earlier in the game, whereas a lot of house rules are about pushing the cutthroat stuff off later into end game.)

True. You also need a group that knows what they're doing and is trying to be cutthroat. Then the whole table is trying to trade for color sets and dissuade others from trading for color sets, which often leads to this absurd mass negotiation where people are just throwing away massive amounts of money and property in order to not be shut out. Sometimes you end up bribing another player just to keep them from undercutting a deal, or you work with that player and cut out the original person you both were haggling with, at which point they're trying to bribe another player to intervene.

As long as you're using the correct rules and everyone is playing the game fast, they know what they're doing, and they're competitive, the game can be quite fun. It's also a lot less time intensive than many other board games where lots of people are negotiating.

Also important is that the supply of money, of houses and of hotels is fixed.

There's an enormous amount of strategy, but all bound up in a few points, and virtually all of them rely on social skills and values that are in short supply these days. It's virtually all in the trading.

If you play Monopoly and you don't trade, you haven't really played. And I don't mean all of the wacky trades that some families do (although I'm not against that), I mean trading money and property with other players. The two keys are:

1. In all games (not just Monopoly), people who cooperate win. If you make a mutually beneficial trade with another player, even if that player gets the better end of the trade, all other players lose ground. If you cooperate with another player by trading whenever there's any reasonable opportunity, the game is between you and that player; no other players will have any chance of winning. If you trade with everyone, and they don't trade between each other, you will inevitably win. Cooperation is making 1 + 1 = 3. No matter how that remainder is split, the more you get in on that split, the more ground you're gaining. Jump in front of every trade offer and offer a better one.

Almost every player that I've talked to who doesn't understand how Monopoly is a good game (and I've had a lot of Monopoly discussions) is completely incapable of understanding how a trade that gives somebody else a Monopoly can result in you winning the game. They look at you like you're stupid when you say you do it all the time. We live in a sick, atomized and alienated society. Getting the property that completes somebody else's Monopoly means you have a good basis for friendship.

2. You may do a lot of little trades during a game, but inevitably you are building up to the big trade which is your big gamble. You've calculated all of the probabilities, you've judged your competitors positions, and you're going to offer another player (or maybe a couple of other players over two succeeding trades) a huge trade which will set the conditions for how the random endgame will play out. You've made it look like you're giving the other end of the trades a chance, but you've calculated ahead of time that you've maximized your own chances. If you're playing against naive players, you'll always win if you do this first and you know what you're doing. If you're playing against someone skilled, it's a question of who calculated the odds better and whether the dice hate you.

edit: Another game with a similar feel and a similar benefit to cooperation is Container. A good game to soften up people who don't know how to trade is Bohnanza. A game designed to show aggressive cooperation is So Long, Sucker, which requires you to cooperate to be in contention, and requires you (mathematically) to betray someone's trust to win.

Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis

Wouldn't the game's rules make the point regardless of the author's intention?

There were two sets of rules to the Landlord's Game, monopolist and anti-monopolist. One of those was left out of Monopoly, making it harder to get the point across, I'd guess:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game#Descript...

George was only "radical" because he sought out the root of the existence of involuntary poverty in the midst of riches, and then described a simple way of eradicating it.

Economists employed by universities founded by monopolists understood that their route to security - tenure - did not have room for even mentioning George's ideas to their students. (Witness what the Wharton School at Penn did to Scott Nearing, whose ideas up to that point (1915) were largely Georgist.)

As Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The evil he was referring to is poverty.

George was pointing out the root, and provided the tool for removing it. It's too bad that it hasn't yet been implemented.

It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.

Which part of that quote do you think is a misreading? That's exactly how I remember it unfolding in the book.

All of human history is manipulated by the Tralfamadorians to get a single piece of metal to Titan to repair the Tralfamadorian spaceship. The army officers, you, me, everybody, we are all the result of Tralfamadore's plan.

Right, but I don't see anything in the quoted text implying that's not the case:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

Because either the person quoted or the article itself wants to highlight an apparent contradiction between making a wargame and writing the novel. If the point is that war is meaningless, then maybe there's a contradiction, but if the point is that everything is meaningless, then there isn't any more of a contradiction than eating breakfast is a contradiction.

This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly

When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?

2014

Around the same time websites like polygon came to the forefront to produce rage bait for echo chambers rather than thoughtful articles.

At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.

Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.

I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much.

Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.

Obama wasn't necessarily anti-gay marriage, but like most liberals at the time (and like liberals for most issues), was sitting somewhere in the middle. He was in support of civil unions which would grant legal rights to gay partnerships but would leave the labeling of it as a marriage up to the states. A sort of "separate but equal" application to marriages. Did he actually believe this in his heart? Who knows, but that's what he said and did as a politician. It almost doesn't even matter what candidates say, they are looking to sway voters and donors, not actually make policies. You really just have to wait until a president's second term for progress to happen.

The slow march of progress has to navigate what is politically acceptable for most people of the time these changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that granted gay marriage rights during his first term.

You're doing a thing here where you're equating "Democrat" with "liberal". That's less true than people think today, but it wasn't even a little bit true in Vonnegut's heyday. It isn't perfectly accurate to say we had four political parties in the 1960s (liberal and conservative Democrats, liberal and conservative Republicans) but it's not far off. The ideological sort picked up in earnest in the mid 1970s, and wasn't a dominant force in politics until the election of Reagan. Prior to Reagan, the Republican party platform was open to abortion!

Chicago under Daley (and long before) was deeply segregated (it still is). But Daley's was a conservative government.

> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others.

This is all sarcasm, right?

yes

Twaddle, actually.

Antiphrasis, actually.

I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war.

I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).