Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) hovered on the border of science fiction and literary fiction, deploying time-travel, aliens and apocalypse as tools of savage, tender satire. Slaughterhouse-Five, drawing on his survival of the Dresden firebombing, and Cat’s Cradle, with its world-ending ‘ice-nine’, are modern classics. Though he chafed at the ‘SF writer’ label, his invented author Kilgore Trout and his fatalistic humour left a deep mark on the genre and far beyond it.