Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake (1997)

"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anyone tell you any different!"

'Timequake' is Kurt Vonnegut's last novel, and appropriately enough it is a novel obsessed with the past. Although it lacks the violent inspiration of his earlier works, it has enough of the trademark Vonnegut charm, wit and worldly wisdom to act as a fitting bookend to his novel writing career.
   The central conceit is that on the 13th of February 2001, the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Unsure whether it should continue on expanding or just call it quits and  collapse, it shrinks back ten years. The end result is that everyone has to relive the past ten years on autopilot, all free will removed, making exactly the same stupid mistakes all over again. The main thread of the plot involves Kilgore Trout, homeless out of print SF writer and Vonnegut's alter ego, helping people deal with free will kicking in after ten years on autopilot with the timeless advice, "You were sick, but you're well again, and there's work to do." The timequake is a witty and apt metaphor for the sheer dismal-ness of the 90s, the effect of finding yourself in a world where people have decreasing amounts of autonomy over their own lives, where pop culture is terminally eating itself and regurgitating the same old ideas over and over again. In fact post-timequake apathy, which Vonnegut describes so well here, is increasingly indicative of our own times as much as anything else.  
   Ever since developing his signature style in 'Cat's Cradle' and 'Slaughterhouse Five' Vonnegut has tended towards unconventionally structured stories where much of the joy comes from the narrative voice and the philosophical diversions it makes. Vonnegut's frank, conversational style has allowed him to effortlessly inhabit a range of very different characters in his past novels, but whatever persona he's using his deadpan humour and warm humanism always shine through. 'Timequake' is like this but more so, with Vonnegut pretty much narrating as Vonnegut. He admits in the introduction that the book is basically a salvage operation, with the original book focusing more on the actual timequake story. The end result is that the narrative is frequently pushed to the side, as Vonnegut uses the themes and ideas raised by the skeleton of the original abortive work to reminisce on his past life in general and dispense worldly wisdom with that unlikely mix of sardonic humour and warm compassion, in the way that only Vonnegut can.

Pictured: sardonic humour and warm compassion

   Spiraling out from the story's central idea, Vonnegut reflects on the illusion of free will and how different people cope with this, leading him to look back on the various people he's know in his life, the circumstances and luck that lead to him taking the path he did through life, and the changing modern times he finds himself in. Fans of Vonnegut's work will notice several themes running through his work that are revisited here. Vonnegut remembers his experiences in World War II and ruminates on the futility of war and humanity's potential for self-destruction, as he does in 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Cat's Cradle', he expounds on the virtues of a supportive network of friends and family, one of the major themes of the underrated 'Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!', and he reflects on aging and death as he does in 'Deadeye Dick' and 'Hocus Pocus'. While this 'greatest hits' approach nicely ties together many of Vonnegut's major themes and concerns, it does point to my main problem with this otherwise very good book: these are all ideas Vonnegut has explored at greater length and developed more fully elsewhere.
   However, one would have to be truly churlish to hold this against 'Timequake' when the book itself is so full of warmth and laughter. Vonnegut is, after all, one of those authors that it is a pleasure to just listen to him ramble on. And 'Timequake' rambles beautifully, weaving together many laugh out loud moments with genuine pathos, and building to a suitably elegiac conclusion, seeing as it is the great man's last book.While it may not stand as the man's best work, that's a harsh grading curve to hit anybody with, and it provides Vonnegut with an opportunity to see Kilgore Trout, and by extension himself, out with style.

Yasutaka Tsutsui - The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1967)

Listen: Kazuko Yoshiyama has come unstuck in time. Kazuko is exposed to a strange chemical while cleaning up the school lab with her friends Goro and Kazuo. Which winds up being fortunate. The next day, an earthquake and a fire wind up making Kazuko and Goro late for school and in their hurry they get hit by a truck. Just before the impact, Kazuko wakes up in her bed two mornings earlier. Kazuko has to convince herself and her friends that she really did travel through time, prevent the accident from occurring  and stop herself from travelling through time. Will she manage? Spoilers to follow!

Yasutaka Tsutsui is a Japanese SF author who I was initially familiar with through his short story collection 'Salmonella Men On Planet Porno'. This is an excellent collection of bizarre, sardonic and somewhat Ballardian dissections of modern culture in an SF framework. Most feature unpleasant or unreliable protagonists and a sadistic twist at the end. 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' could not be more different in tone. It's a sweet, nostalgic YA novella with a bittersweet ending, both breezily engaging and moving. However, bubbling underneath is just enough of a sinister undercurrent to remind you that this is Tsutsui we're dealing with.

The story's short length means that it moves along at a good pace. When faced with evidence, rather than sitting around hand-wringing, Kazuko's friends and teacher opt to believe her and help her find the solution to the problem. She manages to leap back in time to just before she encountered the chemical in the lab, where she finds out that all this was caused by Kazuo, who is actually a time traveler from the far future trying to get home. He confesses that he has developed feelings for her, but has to return to his own time. Kazuko loses the ability to time travel, Kazuo erases everyone's memories of him, and he returns to the future, promising that they will meet again some day, but that she won't remember who he is.

There's a lot to like about how this all plays out. On the surface, you have a deceptively simple story arc - two young people just realise they have feelings for each other when circumstances force them apart - which is both poignant and relatable. The mechanics of the time travel is never explained, but it all works out in an intuitive and pleasing way that doesn't leave any unstable time loops or contradictions. The story is told simply, elegantly and straightforwardly, with no narrative flab.

However, there's a little more going on here than meets the eye. Kazuo winds up being a thoroughly ambiguous and mysterious character. He provides us with the big chunk of exposition towards the end which explains what's going on, but we only have his word for it. The future he describes is subtly dystopian. Tsutsui very neatly avoids any hysteria in describing it, but there are some nice parallels with Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' thrown into the central conceit. Kazuo hints that a violent war is looming, and the spectres of overpopulation, poor people exiled to colonies on Mars and the Moon and computerised ice-schools all rear their ugly heads. While Kazuo suggests that things do eventually improve, again we only have his word to go on, and he admits that he prefers Kazuko's present to his future, perhaps because in this time he is able to make friends and connect with people in a way that's no longer possible in the future.

And of course, there's the whole memory wipe. Kazuo created a false identity and implanted false memories of himself into all his classmates and teachers, as well as the childless old couple who are supposed to pass as his parents. He then proceeds to erase everyone's memories of him without a qualm, to save himself from being arrested by the temporal police when he returns to his present. This is both creepy and manipulative, however believable his arguments that this will be the safest course of action for everyone may be. It is this sinister undercurrent, part of the narrative but wisely left uncommented on by the author, that gives 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' both shade and depth as a story.

The Alma Books translation, which I have, also appends another Tsutsui YA novella, 'The Stuff That Nightmares Are Made Of', which is a welcome addition. While it is less haunting than 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' and has no SF trappings, 'Nightmares' is perhaps more in the vein of the 'Salmonella Men' short stories, with its vivid, horrifying and somewhat Freudian dream imagery. Its story, about a young girl overcoming her fears, is perhaps more typical YA fare, but the reveal at the end, with its trauma-induced amnesia, is typical Tsutsui territory, albeit with a more optimistic and uplifting outcome than is typical in 'Salmonella Men'.

Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano (1952)

N.B.: This one is from the archives, but I feel it's worth preserving here, at least until I get round to putting up more reviews.

Player Piano was Vonnegut's first novel, and if this shows in a certain roughness of style, the author's voice was extraordinarily well developed, showing off his trademark mix of sardonic humour and good natured cynicism to good effect. In the book, the second industrial revolution has occured, so most manual labour is carried out by machines. Thus, the working class have been put out of jobs. People's worth to society is measured by machines which sort them according to IQ. Those smart enough get to join the elite, becoming engineers and managers. Those who aren't are sent off to join the army or the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps, which is about as much fun as it sounds. They are bundled into nasty council houses, given wide-screen TVs to placate them and then forgotten by the rest of society. The engineers and managers justify themselves by saying that they've raised these people's quality of living, but the people have been robbed of the dignity of labour and feel ignored and marginalised by society. Basically, the book questions that all scientific progress is a good thing, saying that we should take the time to stop and ask ourselves if all this new technology is actually making people any happier. The novel warns against a society in which all a man's work, and, more saliently, all a man's THINKING, is done by machines instead of himself. In this day and age, I think these points resonate quite strongly. 

The book is not perfect, by any means. It came out in 1952, so naturally the science fiction side of it has dated quite badly, the machines are all miles and miles of wires, vaccum tubes and flasing lights. However, once you get past this, in it's own way it's actually quite salient in a number of ways, certainly I think a lot of the issues it raises are still relevant. And, before you accuse the book of simply espoucing Luddite-ism in the face of scientific advancement, it's worth reading through to the end because this aspect is actually dealt with quite nicely at the end. The novel's protagonist goes up against the system, but, unlike Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, which leaves the ending open, in Player Piano, there is a really good day-after-the-revolution sequence. Vonnegut sweeps you up in revolutionary fevour only to hit you with the punch-line at the end. Like the novel version of A Clockwork Orange, the focus of the book sweeps out to say something about human nature and the way society works. It's both funny and very affecting. Thus, whilst Player Piano is certainly one of the better 'Man vs Machine' science fiction novels, its central focus is on humanity, and is both cynical and hopeful. Many of the themes and ideas would be expanded upon and developed more succesfully in Vonnegut's later novels, but Player Piano has plenty to reccomend it on its own terms. It certainly reminded me where my intense dislike of those self-service checkout machines at Tesco comes from.