Introduction to
THE BIG SPACE FUCK

If The New York Times Magazine of 24 January 1971 is to be believed, this will be the last new piece of fiction you will ever read by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The article said, in part, "Vonnegut says repeatedly that he is through writing novels; I took it at first as a protective remark, but then began to believe it . . . ."

"After Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut began work on a novel called Breakfast of Champions, about a world in which everyone but a single man, the narrator, is a robot. He gave it up, however, and it remains unfinished. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because it was a piece of—.' "

I think the word for which the Times writer was groping, was shit. That's s-h-i-t, entered in The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Random House, New York, 1966), as follows: n., v., shit, shit-ting, interj. Slang (vulgar).—n. 1. feces. 2. an act of defecation. 3. pretense, exaggeration, lies, or nonsense.

Always glad to help the Times through these ticklish matters.

Which language discussion points up Mr. Vonnegut's selection of title for this story. It is his own, of course, and retained faithfully from the original ms., on view at the Editor's Literary Museum daily between the hours of 12 noon and five p.m., admission thrupence. As this is the first time (to my knowledge) (I'm sure Andy Offutt or Dick Geis or Brian Kirby will correct me if I'm wrong) the word fuck has been used in a title, it becomes something of a minor literary landmark; and since the number of critics and librarians who are impressed by Names and will be drawn to this anthology because Kurt is herein will be balanced by the numbers of provincial mommies and gunshy librarians who will ban the book from their kiddies' eyes, it should be commented upon. Syntax. Blues.

Sum of comment: nice title.

Onward.

Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11th, 1922, in Indianapolis. His first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952, and I never cared for it very much, not even in its original paperback incarnation from Bantam, in 1954, as Utopia 14. But Kurt forgives me that.

You notice I call him Kurt, not "Mr. Vonnegut" or even the semi-distant "Kurt Vonnegut." Apart from my need of sick ego to name-drop, I am entitled to call him by his first name. You see, Kurt and I belong to the same karass. Now, before I prove that statement, for those of you just rescued from Mohole shafts and unaware of who Vonnegut is, what he's written, and what it is a karass, these quotes—in explanation of the term—from Cat's Cradle:

(Vonnegut sets forth the religion known as Bokononism, codified by the calypso singer and philosopher Bokonon, from the Republic of San Lorenzo.)

"We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended." (Chapter 1)

" 'If you find your life tangled up with somebody else's life for no very logical reasons,' writes Bokonon, 'that person may be a member of your karass.'

"At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, 'Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.' By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

"It is as free-form as an amoeba." (Chapter 2)

"Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person's trying to discover the limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete." (Chapter 3)

"Which brings me to the Bokononist concept of a wampeter.

"A wampeter is the pivot of a karass. No karass is without a wampeter, Bokonon tells us, just as no wheel is without a hub.

"Anything can be a wampeter: a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail. Whatever it is, the members of its karass revolve about it in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula. The orbits of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally . . . . At any given time a karass actually has two wampeters—one waxing in importance, one waning." (Chapter 24)

"—my seatmates were Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador to the Republic of San Lorenzo, and his wife, Claire. They were white-haired, gentle, and frail . . . .

"They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts: sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by. They were, I think, a flawless example of what Bokonon calls a duprass, which is a karass composed of only two persons.

" 'A true duprass,' Bokonon tells us, 'can't be invaded, not even by children born of such a union.'" (Chapter 41)

"Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.

" 'My God,' she said, 'are you a Hoosier?' . . .

"Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere." (Chapter 42)

Essentially, that's all you need to know about what a karass is; and for those millions of delighted readers on college campuses, in rural ivory towers, in sunny sitting rooms, on streetcars, who've read Cat's Cradle and know it for the contemporary classic it has become, who may wonder why I have gone on at such length to explicate the obvious, well, let's say I did it for the three or four poor souls who have not yet found the joys of Vonnegut for themselves. And as a lead-in to a letter I have before me, dated 16 March 1963, sent from Scudder's Lane in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, from Kurt, to me, explaining why it is I presume to call him Kurt. It reads, in part, as follows:

"Dear Harlan:

"Yes, I realized before you did that you were a member of my karass—not the one I own, the one I belong to. I don't own or manage one."

It went on with a great deal of personal stuff we had between us, and at that point we'd never met.

How it was I came to know I was in Kurt's karass was in 1959, when Knox Burger, then-editor of Gold Medal Books, asked me my opinion of the stories of a certain Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who had had a few pieces here and there in sf magazines. I had read The Sirens of Titan, which Dell had brought out as an original in 1959, and I remembered from 1954 a story in Galaxy called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" which I thought was the very best Malthusian pastiche I'd ever read. I told Knox Vonnegut was sensational, and wanted to know why he'd asked. He said he was considering putting together a collection of Kurt's short stories, even though Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan hadn't been such hot sellers. It was a brave thing to do: short story collections are traditionally poison, particularly for paperback houses, and Gold Medal had only done one or two, each time with disastrous results. But Knox was a dynamite editor, and a good friend, and he'd known Kurt since college, where Kurt was a big wheel on the campus newspaper and Knox was a wheel on the humor magazine.

So Knox asked me if I'd help package the book, and I said it would be a joy to do so, and I contacted Leo & Diane Dillon (whose artwork you'll remember from Dangerous Visions and the Ace Specials paperback line, not to mention the cover of almost every book I've ever written) and asked them to do the cover, and I wrote the blurbs, and Knox published it as Canary in a Cat House in 1961, following it in 1962 with Mother Night (which many hardcover houses had rejected). Why had Knox called me, rather than any one of a thousand other writers and anthologists closer to hand? Had nothing to do with my qualifications and certainly is not stated here to make me out a big macher. It was that I was a member of Kurt's karass and at that point Knox may well have been our wampeter.

I don't remember now where or when it was that Kurt and I finally met, but by September of 1964 we were friendly enough for me to be outraged and dismayed that the voting membership of that year's World SF Convention had awarded the Hugo for best novel to something other than Cat's Cradle. I sent him a telegram the essence of which, if I recall correctly, was, "The assholes suffered total brain damage and ignored the finest novel of the past twenty-five years by passing-over Cat's Cradle. They do themselves, sf and literature a greater disservice than they will ever know. I am ashamed for them."

His response, via Western Union, was: "Prouder of your telegram than I would be of Hugo. Much love, Kurt."

By 1967, Kurt was supposed to do the introduction to my first hardcover collection of mainstream stories, Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled, but something went wrong, he wasn't sent the galleys till too late, and the intro never was written. As a result—and here's karass again, eerily, spookily—Robert Scholes, the academician who came up with the generic title "fabulators" for a group of writers including Barthelme, Vonnegut, Barth and others, reviewed the book and gave it the most killing review I've ever had. Since Scholes is absolutely leech-like ga-ga over Vonnegut, chances are good that had Kurt been in that volume, I'd have gotten a better review. God, Bokonon and Vonnegut must have had a reason. I question not.

And most recently Kurt and I have had reason to know we're in the same karass because: one of my dearest lady friends, for many years, in New York, is Holly Bower. Holly grew to know Kurt from me. But never met him. Kurt moved to New York. He moved into Holly's neighborhood. Holly's friend is Jill Krementz. Holly met Kurt on the street and said hi, I'm a friend of Harlan's. They got talking. Holly introduced Jill to Kurt. Now Jill is Kurt's official photographer (Saturday Review, Time, etc.) and constant companion. And so it goes.

Now Kurt is ultrasuperfamous. But he's still Kurt, though shaggier. And so it goes, with our karass: it falls to me to publish the final short story of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—who wrote Slaughterhouse-Five and Welcome to the Monkey House and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and the very successful play Happy Birthday, Wanda June. It cannot all be merest chance. And perhaps chance will play less of a part in getting Kurt to write more stories than the karass of which he and I are parts. Because a talent as pure and original as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. doesn't happen too often; to think that even a story as hilarious and incisive and deadly as this one is to be his last, is a sad-making thing.

But, as Bokonon invites us to sing:

"Around and around and around we spin,

"With feet of lead and wings of tin . . ."