Slaughterhouse 5 - discussion questions for Book Groups

S5 discussion q's

who is Kilgore Trout?

"so it goes", a religious incantation to accompany death. Perhaps a reflex to avoid horror. Is this how religious ritual gets going?  Who's doing the avoiding in this case? KV, the reader, society?

Is the whole book a jazzed up therapy act for KV? You can see how the pieces are all like fragmented memories and recollections, probably whiskey-driven late at night. Is it literature (in the sense of being a deliberate work made of text) or is is something like a mental patient's artwork, astounding and healing yet not quite art? Do you even buy the OR in the last sentence? We could replace with AND, and then talk about why it's both healing and artful. 

Trafalmadorians see all of time in a deep, holistic, mode. Does a sense of deep time mean that nothing is anybody's fault? "The moments are just structured that way, and things are as they are. We never worry about such things". 

Nothing, well how about some things? So, turning the dial down a bit, is morality a function of timescale? A evil act this afternoon (killing a person) could turn out to be the right thing to do in a year. A year's atrocity (bombing cities) defensible over a century. What evil would we tolerate to improve life over a millennium?

Are there moral decisions that are independent of the passage of time? Questions involving the verb To BE rather than those including To DO?

Does Buddhism, say, differ from Christianity on moral issues because of its time structure? Cyclic/holistic rather than Linear/atomic. 

Would you like to be a Trafalmadorian specimen?  Advantages: No job, plenty to eat, can prance around naked, have sex with other excellent specimens, make small talk with the keepers. Or would you wish to get back to your real life?

They were rather obtrusive, had obvious spaceships, got involved with their captives, made worrying remarks about causality, and so forth. Perhaps they were just learning their craft. How do you know that you aren't already in the hands of the rather more competent Crypto-Trafalmadorians?  If so, what sort of real life could you wish to get back to?

Player of Games

My colleague's book club dumped The Player Of Games, by Iain M. Banks, on her reading list. "I'm really going to hate this", she said, "not my cup of tea at all".

"It's one of my favourite Culture novels", I said, "I must re-read it". Which I did with great pleasure, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear positive reports the following week. OK, so he's sold a few copies but I thought it was a specialist thing. Perhaps I'm underestimating his quality as a writer.

His commonly-used background culture, called (er, what shall we call it?) The Culture has been well-discussed. It's essentially a post-shortage society, which means that they have all the energy and matter they need. No shortage, no money, (almost) no problems. Tiny sarcastic flying robots that can do almost anything, including saving your life if you fall over a cliff. Enormous sentient spaceships that can do everything else. Banks has stated its origins as a hypothetical society where everything is organised how he would want it to be. Banks is, like me I suppose, a bit of an anarchist so it's almost the opposite of a fascist dictatorship.

The Player of Games, may well, as an essay in realpolitik, be about the way in which the powers that be get their way without seeming to use their weight. Poor old Gurgeh, the wizard of all games, he suspects he's being used. And he is, not only for his mastery of games, but for his naive approach to everything else. But he doesn't seem to mind being a pawn in the end.

The amusing bits of Culture novels are often about its limitless entertainments. You want a firework display the size of a canyon? OK then. You want to surf down a waterfall, without breaking your neck? OK then. There never seems to be any hassle, or queues, or tickets, or cops.

I had a tiny taste of this when we were in Austria for a short break. Parts of Austria are extremely well organised and neat, and at the same time laid back. E.g., when it snows, the roads are cleared within a couple of hours, and the buses all keep going. I've no idea if the following is typical.

On an an afternoon walk in the bright snow, about two miles from the village, we stopped for a coffee and strudel at a forest cafe. Someone in our party spotted a stack of toboggans of various sizes outside. Are they for hire? A school party's?

It turned out these were just laid on, for general use, for free. Having been ridden down to the village, they could be stacked against a barn at the end of the lane, and would be returned by a tractor at intervals.

This is perhaps a side-effect of the outdoor industries of the Tirol (all the serious neck-breakers are busy sking nearby, and the village knows the value of competing for entertainment), but can you imagine this in, say, in Surrey or Yorkshire? (Assuming regular snow). No insurance disclaimers. No Deposits. No chains and guard rails. No, er, chavs. Just good old playful fun:

Matter

The explosions at the end of Iain M. Banks' Matter are still ringing in my ears. He's getting really good at constructing very clever things. Scratch that, he has been really good for quite some time at telling clever stories, that are much easier to deal with at face value, than to properly think about what's inside. I'm sure it's deliberate.

On the surface, it's a typical Culture space western. The high plains drifter is played by a young woman, of course an Agent of Special Circumstances. And of course, accompanied by a lethal bundle of technology and irony in the shape of the hovering offensive drone. Highly dangerous, and yet supremely moral, they can stop an army of heavily armed knights just by thinking about it (and harassing the column with weapons invisible to pre-technological eyes). They pluck some victims of primitive war from destruction, and shelter them aboard their god-like ships. It's primarily these two who we follow, as they crash around, and with their clever tools and tech, save at least one world from horrid alien interference.

However, it's the worlds in question that deserve a closer look. The wider world of the life-strewn galaxy is painted in, like a Victorian genre picture of a day at the races. All types are there, and some of them are those that you might actually want to meet. But with most of them, you are glad to be back in your armchair on Earth. As with other Culture novels, Banks is at the same time completely cynical (all species are bastards, and the bigger species are sometimes the biggest bastards) and also brightly optimistic (generally speaking, trillions upon trillions of members the want-for-nothing super-species just loll around having delightful egalitarian funny naked sexy lives in their sentient super-homes, causing absolutely no trouble at all).

Another world full of humans is depicted. One tribal faction fights another, through sweat, mud, blood and pain, for supremacy of their part of their backward planet. Most of them are firmly trapped in this bubble of pre-development, and while they might know that there are higher beings, such as the Culture people, out there above them, they also know that they are powerless to reach through the bubble. As we read of their wars, we know that their factionalism is pointless (they are the same species) and their religion is void (their god is a squatter who couldn't care less about them). However, although there is hurt and destruction in their slice of the world, there is, there is at the same time love, hope and honour.

The planet, it is realised, is a Shellworld, a Nautilus-like construction, yes a machine!, of concentric chambers. Dozens of species dwell in the spaces, some walking on earthy sub-surfaces underneath the glow of rolling mechanical sunlets (nuclear? stranger physics?), others flopping in enclosed oceans or floating in endless clouds, others enjoying the vacuum of their compartments. Huge struts or arteries, called Towers, let the action slip, via hermetic doors millions of years old, from one sub-world to another. This in the true spectacle of the book, and the other characters and species dance around it and through it.

The humans are effectively pets of the local alien overlords (there are several to choose from), who happen to be floating, slightly smelly, multilegged and hilariously ungrammatical. The turf war is fought out with carbines, swords and lances, and the occasional mounted creature. The faction having recently discovered steam power (probably informed by the spindly wotists or perhaps the stinky blobules) gains the upper hand, and forges an empire. However, there is bittereness. Not only do thousands die in the wars of occupation, but the rightful king is sneakily deposed by an obviously evil schemer. Our heroes are royal splinters in this struggle (and the SC agent is a sister to them). Meanwhile, the world's systems (naturally, it's got an infinity of software and embedded mechanisms) are being interfered with by who-knows-who, and there are these strange movements of starships. It's a little like a quest to restore Narnia in a far-off galaxy. SC drones play the fauns and forest creatures, and a sentient ship plays an Aslan.

So Hoorah when the protagonists not only restore order, but also intervene to stop the whole concentric world from destruction. And then Aahh, when orphans are all given hearths and homes beneath the peaceful rolling anti-gravity ceiling blobs.

But there's doubt, just as Banks intended I'm sure. Just who controlled who in the chain of rebellion and chaos? Did we really just sympathise with the suicide bomber in service of the primitive monarchy? What was the true function of the mechanical world? Not for living in, that's obvious, and purpose of the colossal mechanisms at its centre remains obscure. Why did the eons-frozen egg/bomb/demon so want to destroy it? Was it lying when it said the Shellworlds were a timebomb, an environmental threat of their own? Perhaps the happy-ending pulled from tragedy is really a disguise for a further sinking into a sea of doom.

Perhaps, as for the humans trapped down in level 8, there is much more above and below than we can reliably process. And if we can do anything about it then fine, but if not, then we may as well enjoy ourselves.