Boko Reprot: Kilgore Trout Collected Short Stories (vol. M)

After some years of avoiding reading any of Kilgore Trout’s prodigious output, Your Humble Blogger happened on the Collected Short Stories (vol. M) on the new book shelf, and as things were pretty sparse around there, took it home and laid it on the shelf. I don’t think I was expecting to actually read the thing, or at least not to read all of it. I’m glad I did.

Perhaps, though, it would be better to read the things one at a time. In the aggregate, they come off more as ideas for stories than as stories; the kind of thing where, having told my Best Reader the central conceit of, say, “The First District Court of Thankyou”, in a sentence or two, YHB had to admit that there wasn’t much point in actually reading the thing, now, not so much because of any spoilers (most people, it turns out, would rather lose their liberty than admit public gratitude), but because the only thing to enjoy about the story is the idea, rather than character or narrative, wordcraft or structure, suspense, surpsise, or humor.

Rather than spoil any more of the stories (although I love the one where the people love the sound of language as music, rather than the meaning, so in order to make citizens focus on the content of their speeches, politicians have to invent the ugliest vocabulary possible), I’ll just point out that fewer of the ideas have dated than a Gentle Reader might expect. That was a bit depressing; one hopes that satire on human foolishness would date. On the other hand, if the ideas had dated, there would really be nothing left to make this tome worth reading.

I was, by the way, reminded of the recent Woody Allen movies, the few I’ve seen, anyway (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Small-Time Crooks, and even Mighty Aphrodite), where he seems to have realized that he has more ideas for movies than he will have time to make, and so he just gets the thing up on the screen without bothering to write it first. As a result, the funny bits are scattered across a mess of a movie, with good but aimless characters and actors wasted. At least Mr. Trout keeps things, for the most part, short. Of course, Woody Allen keeps his movies comparatively short, too, but a short movie is an hour and a half, while a short story is twenty minutes.

Longer pieces by Mr. Trout may suffer from this more; while finishing this collection was a bit of a relief, I could imagine myself picking up one of the other umpty-’leven volumes in a few years. I can’t really imagine attempting one of the novels (although I suspect they are more novellas than novels, but there it is).

Frankly, I don’t think I can really recommend the collection to Gentle Readers. If you already like Mr. Trout’s stuff, I imagine you either have read this one or will get around to it in your copious spare time. If, on the other hand, you dislike what you’ve read of his, nothing in this is likely to change your mind. And if you’ve never heard of him, well, then there isn’t anything wrong, in this case, with maintaining your ignorance.

On the other hand, it’s clear that, despite never really getting (or, iYHBao, deserving) fame outside the specfic world, it’s clear that a lot of authors owe a good deal to his influence. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine that authors from Avram Davidson to Cory Doctorow haven’t read stories such as “Hail to the Chief” (about a orangutan that likes the processional music so much he runs for President, and wins) or “The Gutless Wonder” (about a homicidal but very popular robot who overcomes his halitosis), and thought “but what if somebody actually wrote a story like this?”

On the other hand, again, why not spend your time reading stuff that somebody who can write has actually written?

Lastly, I suppose, I should add that Mr. Trout is one of those writers for whom religious belief of any kind is a sign of imbecility. Well, and I suppose any human attribute is, for Mr. Trout, a sign of imbecility, but while a lot of misanthropic stuff shows up in my reading, lately, it’s been a long time since Your Humble Blogger read anything showing such total contempt for religion. It would be interesting, I suppose, to mark those things over his long career, when anti-clericalism went from fashionable, to unfashionable, to fashionable, to unfashionable all over again. Since he died last year (which, one supposes, is the reason for the rushed state of the series, in which the editors don’t appear to have bothered correcting typos), he won’t live to see the next swing of the pendulum; although I myself am a believer, I sure hope I do.

So it goes,
-Vardibidian.