検索キーワード： 著者 "Kurt Vonnegut" すべてのカテゴリー

Three disparate and suspenseful looks at ourselves in three very different worlds. These engaging short stories by three of the masters of American science fiction literature, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Philip K. Dick, open windows into our psyches, our souls, and our surroundings that presage the world we find ourselves in today. Like episodes of The Twilight Zone, cinematic in their language and characters, the stories connect with our times in surprising ways.

In the not-too-distant future, 2185 AD, anti-gerisone is the new drug that stops ageing. People are now living into their hundreds until it's time to take their own big trip up yonder, and in the case of the Ford family and Gramps, the notable patriarch, families are living and fighting together in one home for much longer. Eventually there are no prisons, slums, asylums, poverty, wars, or disease. and 200 years later the population of the US is set at 40 million people. But since no one gets any older, someone must volunteer to die if a baby is born.

"2 B R 0 2 B" (pronounced: to be or not to be), was first published in 1962, and introduces the listener to a future where old age has been cured, population control has been implemented to keep the United States population at exactly 40 million, and death is voluntary. "The Big Trip Up Yonder" was published in 1954, and is similarly themed (old age has been cured), but in opposite. This story follows the Ford family who has 23 members spanning several generations all living together in a small one bedroom apartment under the tyrannical head of the family, "Gramps".

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) was a prolific and genre-bending American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973).

These two short works, "The Big Trip Up Yonder" and "2BR02B", are science fiction tales originally published in the magazines Galaxy Science Fiction and If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1959 and 1962.

What if there were a product that taken daily and barring an untimely accident or murder allowed one to live indefinitely? In Kurt Vonnegut Jr's fanciful tale, that is just what happens. At first the miracle product Anti-gerasone seems like a blessing. But what if the population keeps breeding? How to make room for the new ones. And then there is the problem of the curmudgeon who doesn't get the stuff until he's in his late 70s becomes head of the family and is still going strong 104 years later.

With cutting wit, fierce conviction, and surprising empathy, Vonnegut explores a diverse range of topics including society, politics, sex, literature, and mortality. Fans who believe they've read all of Vonnegut's work will be delighted to find the author speaking frankly about timely and relevant new topics - with an amusing yet insightful style that's instantly recognizable.

I had an uncle who left his hometown and the family business there to become a fine actor. His talent was a minor one, but a pretty one. It lasted for 15 years and was gone. He came home with the ashes of it and died 20 years later, poor and, as it happened, drunk.

The corridor of the Fine Arts Building was deserted, save for two figures at the far end, two men approaching slowly. Rose was about to go into the classroom, where she'd left her purse, when she saw a sign on the door - a crude sign in pencil, on a ragged sheet of paper. "Collapse of Western Civilization - Dr. Norbert Beilstein," it said. "Visitors welcome."

Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey", this 20,000-word novella was never published in Vonnegut’s lifetime. Basic Training is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood, and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American....

According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade.

Eugene Debs Hartke describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

A professor discovers the secret of mind over matter - then struggles to keep his power out of the hands of the military. Based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, this episode of Dimension X originally aired on April 22, 1950.

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door." A new crop of writers emerged from the dawning of the nuclear age, grappling with humankind's place in the universe. While imagining the wonders of space exploration and the rise of technological advancements, they questioned whether we were prepared to encounter aliens, or even control the machines and weapons we'd built ourselves.

Let yourself be swept away by these classic tales of hope and courage!!

- Classic tales (short stories and poems) of hope and courage from the 19th and 20th centuries

Annotated for modern listeners

The third entry in the Classic Tales series, joining "Classic Tales of Horror" and "Classic Tales of Christmas"

For adventure fans of all ages, these stories are guaranteed to intrigue, delight, and sometimes take you by surprise!

Kurt Vonnegut was a groundbreaking American writer, the author of such classics as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. In a future where sickness and disease are a forgotten memory, and death itself has been cured, population control requires special consideration, and the concept of "life for life" has a new definition.

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

Called “our finest black-humorist” by The Atlantic Monthly, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.