Books: Mod Scientist

WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE by Kurt Vonneguf Jr. 298 pages. Del-acorfe. $5.95.

In the preface to this sometimes sentimental, often satirical, collection of short stories and essays, Kurt Vonnegut concludes: "Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder in a nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection." It is easier to imagine the author of six novels —among them God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Cat's Cradle—as a zany but moral mod scientist at the controls of a literary time machine. He is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one 45-year-old writer exploring the inner and outer spaces of the man-against-machine perplex. In his hands the Silly Putty of contemporary aspirations becomes the exploding plastic that symbolizes civilization's future. He seems to be saying with a near-confidential tone that man's attempts to reorganize nature and the world through scientific achievements will bring about a future in which man's inventions play tricks on man himself.

Spanning the decades from the '40s to A.D. 2158 and beyond, Vonnegut rockets the reader from the old themes of love, identity, loneliness and the poignancy of human loss to stories concerning population explosion, programmed happiness and the emotions of machines. There are space-age satires about an "ethical" birth-control pill that does not prevent conception or solve the population explosion but takes all the kicks out of sex, and a happiness machine that makes people so euphoric they almost starve to death. Man has once again tripped over his own shoelaces. Though Vonnegut is knocking a misplaced sense of values by showing the horrifying results, he is doing it with an irreverent chuckle.

In another futuristic fantasy, people leave their own bodies and enter at will any one of a stockpile of more attractive bodies. It is a ludicrous extension of the current preoccupation with heart and other body-part replacements, and Vonnegut uses it to poke fun at the idea that social and emotional problems occur only because humanity is locked in decaying protoplasmic prisons. The author is even more pointed in his attack on the notion that if all humans are not born equal, the good society will equalize them. Consequently, in his story Harrison Bergeron, a "Handicapper General" cripples people mentally and physically to keep everyone to the norm. "The year was 2081 and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."