Thursday, March 13, 2008

Sci-Fi Giants Cage Fight!

There comes a time in every young gentleman's life when he starts to wonder who would be the victor in a cage fight between two of the giants of 20th century science fiction, Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick. For me, that time is now...

To start, PKD would undoubtedly muster his immense back-catalogue to try to crush Vonnegut under its weight. This would be a brutal blow, as PKD could produce up to 3 kg of short stories or novellas every second. Vonnegut would almost certainly defend by inserting PKD into a novella of his own where he would seem to act freely until Vonnegut himself intervened to demonstrate PKD's impotence and jeopardize his very existence. Ironically, PKD was himself exceedingly deft at this type of referential in-fighting and would retaliate by extending a metaphor, seizing Vonnegut firmly around his foreword, and dragging him into his own work of fiction.

Vonnegut, of course, was famed for his ability to jump back and forth through time, and would seek to employ this non-sequential narrative to undermine PKD's axioms. Defenceless and vulnerable against this attack, PKD would then desperately restart the fight in an alternative history in which Vonnegut had not been a writer of science fiction at all, but rather some kind of pathetic internet "blogger", churning out meaningless crud in an attempt to hammer the numbness out of his fingertips by extemporizing on contrived, allegedly humorous situations.

Philip K. Dick 1 - 0 Kurt Vonnegut

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