Kurt Vonnegut would have been 92 years old today, Veterans Day 2014 — which is particularly ironic because although Vonnegut was a veteran himself, his anti-war sentiments were anything but subtle ("I'll be damned if it was worth it," he once wrote in a letter to home when he was deployed). Admittedly, he may have been biased, seeing as how he was held as a POW in World War II during the bombing of Dresden, which inspired his psuedo-autobiographical-time-travel-alien-abduction novel Slaughterhouse-Five. That's the power of science fiction, kids: when a personal experience is so traumatic that you struggle for years to find a way to write about it, just add some Tralfamadorians and some non-linear structure, and somehow through all that fantastical dressing, you will find the heart of the story that you were otherwise too close to and too scared to find...
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Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).