Venus on the Half-Shell Read Free

Trout.
    Philip José Farmer, 1988

PREFACE
THE OBSCURE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF KILGORE TROUT
A SKIRMISH IN BIOGRAPHY
BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER
    This is another specimen of the “biographical.” It originally appeared in a fanzine, Moebius Trip , December 1971 issue, edited and published by Ed Connor of Peoria, Illinois. Later on, I suggested to the editor of Esquire that he might want to publish this “life.” Regretfully, he rejected the idea. He did not think that Kilgore Trout was as well known as Tarzan. This is true, but the majority of Esquire ’s readers are probably readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s works and would be acquainted with Trout. So it goes.
    I identify strongly with Trout.
    The editor and readers of Moebius Trip thought that the letter from Trout and the letter describing Trout’s interview in the Peoria Journal Star were made up by me. No such thing. These letters actually appeared in the letter section of the editorial page of Peoria’s only local newspaper, and I can prove it.
    Since I wrote this, I have been fortunate enough to read the galleys of Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions . It contains many new facts which have enabled me to amplify and to correct the original article. Even so, some things are still in doubt because of contradictions in the three books in which Trout figures. Mr. Vonnegut evidently regards consistency as the hobgoblin of small writers.
    Internal evidence in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , the first book about Trout, implies that Trout was born in 1890 or 1898. Slaughterhouse-Five, the second, implies that he was born in 1902. But Breakfast of Champions makes it clear that he was born in 1907.
    There are other discrepancies. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater says that no two of Trout’s books ever had the same publisher. In Breakfast of Champions the World Classics Library publishers have issued many of his books.
    Rosewater states that Trout’s works can only be found in disreputable bookstores dealing in pornography. Yet the same book has Eliot Rosewater picking up a Trout novel from a book rack in an airport.
    Trout’s novels are supposed to be extremely difficult to find. Rosewater is an avid collector of Trout (in fact, the only one), and he has only forty-one novels and sixty-three short stories. Yet the crooked lawyer, Mushari, goes into a Washington, D.C. smut dealer’s and finds every one of Trout’s eighty-seven novels.
    Breakfast of Champions says that until Trout met a truck driver in 1972 he had never talked with anybody who’d read one of his stories. But Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim had read his stories and had met him some years before.
    Trout’s sole fan letter (from Rosewater) reached him in Cohoes, New York, according to Breakfast. But Rosewater says that Trout was living in Hyannis, Massachusetts, when he got the letter.
    The description of the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians in The Sirens of Titan differs considerably from that in Slaughterhouse-Five .
    And so it goes.
    * * *
    Who is the greatest living science fiction author?
    Some say he is Isaac Asimov. Many swear he’s Robert A. Heinlein. Others nominate Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Franz Rottensteiner, Austrian critic and editor, proclaims the Pole, Stanislaw Lem, as the champion. Mr. Rottensteiner may be biased, however, since he is also Lem’s literary agent.
    None of the above can equal Kilgore Trout—if we can believe Eliot Rosewater, Indiana multimillionaire, war hero, philanthropist, fireman extraordinaire, and science fiction connoisseur. According to Rosewater, Trout is not only the greatest science fiction writer alive, he is the world’s greatest writer. He ranks Trout above Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Balzac, Fielding, and Melville. Rosewater believes that Trout should be president of Earth. He alone would have the imagination, ingenuity, and perception to solve the problems of this planet.
    Rosewater, drunk as usual, once