[ironprism]

Is Kurt Vonnegut science fiction? When I first read Cat's Cradle, I didn't consider it to be sf in any way, even though technically it qualifies. I guess his books aren't detached enough. Any thoughts?

[SusF]

That's a hard call, really. Though I think Galapagos and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow would definitely qualify.

He's written some really good stuff, whatever you want to call it.

Susan

[Lamanai]

What's this fascination with classifying all books into specific genres? Vonnegut writes incredible books with fascinating themes and brilliant ideas. Some of them are decidedly science fiction. Some aren't. And I don't really care. They're all great books.

[The Iron Orchid]

Sirens of Titan is definitely SF. Some SF writers end up confined to the SF gulag, and others allowed by the publishers to mix with the "respectable" fiction. The great thing is, Vonnegut addresses this phenomenon by creating a recurring character, Kilgore Trout (Theodore Sturgeon?), a visionary writer whom no one takes seriously because his work is packaged as pulp SF.

[knox]

All I know is, if it wasn't for Vonnegut, I would have never become such a huge "sc-fi" fan. Just the fact that there were hints of sci-fi in his stuff lead me to check out other science fiction, and before I knew it, I was hooked.