Kilgore Trout - Venus on the Half Shell (1974)

 

Kilgore Trout is a recurring character in the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He's a pulp science-fiction writer and occasional bum providing support to a myriad of satirical points while additionally allowing Vonnegut to season his narrative with ideas which might prove otherwise too laborious.

If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

Venus on the Half Shell was first referenced as one of Trout's many, many novels in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, eventually to be fully realised by Philip José Farmer writing as Kilgore Trout, so it's essentially Vonnegut fan fiction and I gather that despite some initial enthusiasm, Kurt wasn't entirely amused by the time it saw print. It's not difficult to understand why given that, for the most part, Venus reads like fan fiction, imposing linearity on an approximation of Vonnegut's freewheeling narratives, leaving us with a less annoying precursor to Douglas Adams particularly in its fixation with the meaning of life, here serving mainly as a hook for the sake of structure; but the tone is wrong, offering shrugs and impersonations where Vonnegut would at least have said something worth saying. The lesson we take from the creatures of the No Smoking Planet, for one example, seems to be the usual mumbling about polyamory, which is at least at home amongst other parables drawn from clichés of the seventies counter culture.

If falling short of that from which it takes inspiration, Venus is mostly readable, not actively annoying, and seems to develop its own personality once we land on the Prison Planet in chapter nineteen and the author gets around to saying something of more universal import than his initial long-haired preoccupations. The novel as a whole is Swiftian, as is much Vonnegut, in comprising a conveyor belt of absurdist allegories in illustration of this and that, which is underscored by the doubtless inevitable books within the book credited to Jonathan Swift Somers III. Aside from the above reservations and the slightly tiring emphasis on sex, Venus on the Half Shell is honestly a better book than it deserves to be, which may or may not be to do with the quality of the ground upon which its tent is pitched. It's not a bad read, just not an amazing one.