Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect. This is a voice from the beyond; a collection of speeches, stories, sketches of Vonnegut’s on war and peace, never before published. That Vonnegut survived the fire bombing of Dresden, but was required to clean up after it, as a prisoner of war certainly offers a contextual frame for his contributions to literature and his lifelong, self-proclaimed “disgust with civilization.” With good reason, and much evidence to support his case.

Some of these pieces are set in the past, fictionalized reflections on his experiences in World War II. Some are contemporary including his last piece of writing, a speech for delivery in Indianapolis delivered posthumously by his son Mark, who edited the collection. And some broaching science fiction, set as they are in the future, or out of time. The title piece “Armageddon in Retrospect” is an example of the latter and describes a program to capture the Devil in a contraption located in the shadows of Schenectady (i.e. of General Electric for whom Vonnegut served as a writer for a period when younger). It is a silly piece of “intelligent playfulness” which satirizes enormous expenditures on futile projects (star war defense systems), recognizes the power of apocalyptic religious culture (the rapture), and still leaves us knowing that there is an evil in the world which we must more proactively confront; whether its source is human nature, original sin, or pathologies of power. Vonnegut gives us pause even from the beyond.