Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This classic anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut is semi-autobiographical. The title is taken from the Dresden, Germany Prisoner of War camp building assigned to Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, after his capture during the winter of 1944-1945. Pilgrim manages to survive the Dresden firebombing while time-shifting to other life scenes in the past/future. This includes being abducted by an alien spacecraft and taken to the planet Tralfamadore many light-years from Earth. The Tralfamadorians treat Billy as a zoo exhibit during his time there, and are amazed by the Earthling's belief in "free will" - the aliens can see in four dimensions, seeing everything in the space-time continuum. This ability leads to a universal fatalistic worldview - death is meaningless, each human is viewed as a 4D centipede with a baby at one end and the death personna at the other - "so it goes".


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