Title:: [[Breakfast of Champions]] Authors:: [[Kurt Vonnegut]] Tags:: #fiction #vonnegut #satire Read:: [[2022-09-03]] ## Editions - Edition:: Delacorte Press, 1973, Third Printing - Original Copyright:: 1973 - Pages:: 295 ## Annotations I love this book.  “There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.” 50 years later and same as it ever was.  My critique of a lot of dystopian novels is the absence of the stupidity and absurdity that is inherently human. Humanity is very good at stepping on rakes and the world we live in is full of rakes (many of which we put there ourselves). When you keep stepping on rakes you lose your sense of direction and sometimes you fall in a hole or off a cliff and so on.  Dystopian worlds that brush over this fact don’t feel very dystopian because it’s precisely the idiotic stumbling that makes them possible. Here I will point out that the all-knowing, data-overlord company with the dystopian sounding name Meta got started as a way to poll whether college women were hot or not.  And this is what I love about Vonnegut. His writing and worlds seem prescient, but he just clearly sees the truth that people are gullible as hell and absurdity is the fundamental law of the universe and that can be a very toxic or lovely thing depending on the random directions the rake stepping takes us.  (Yes, I am critiquing The Resisters).