Hello Survivors.  Gather ‘round the firepit and pull your animal skin blankets tight against the foul apocalyptic winds.  We’ve got a good meal of turf and earthworm stew in the cauldron.  Don’t mind that they glow a bit from the irradiated soils.  Dig in. Fill your bellies and I will tell you a story…

I always joke that ‘if you are a time traveler’, because that’s on of the strange things about podcasts as a medium.  I’m here in my present, in my now, talking to you.  But you may be on the receiving end of this conversation 200 years in the future. 

Especially in a serial audio story, like After the Apocalypse, where you may be binge listening through the entirety of the story in a week. 

So, if you are time-traveling, today, in my temporal coordinates is the end of March 2025.  We are approaching the end of our five-year journey and I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to do next but I’m open to suggestions if you have any. 

I would offer a couple of lessons for you from this trip across the last five years. 

First is that you can accomplish most any project a little bit at a time if you are consistent.  My original goal was to create this five-book story about the apocalypse and I have done so by putting effort into it every two weeks. 

For reference – it takes 4-8 hours to create each new chapter or show.  As Hemmingway said, “Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

This would bring us to a second lesson; It doesn’t need to be perfect.  Give yourself permission to write a shitty first draft.  Give yourself permission to experiment. Give yourself permission to have fun in the work. 

And, Although I could go on all day with lessons from this project, I’ll chose one more – When you take action on a project like this and keep plugging away at it you will naturally draw others into the gravity well of that action. 

I can see that involvement and ownership in my editors and in Robert as he gets each new chapter to read into audio.  They are invested. Invested in this thing I made up five years ago. 

And the 554 survivors who have joined our Facebook group are, in a sense, owners, and co-creators. 

You can’t keep the ball rolling on your own, but you can get the ball rolling and see who shows up to help.

Creation, in this sense, is an act of community.

OK, enough waffling on.  What have I been reading?  Well, quite a few things but today we’ll talk about Vonnegut.

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Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos

I think I told you my Kurt Vonnegut story last season when I reviewed his early work of science fiction “The Sirens of Titan”. 

Unfortunately for you I must dust off my ‘Vonnegut story’, and present it to you again, as I have just finished reading his eleventh novel, “Galapagos”. 

So, here is that story. 

It was the early 1980’s.  We all wore suits and ties and carried around fake leather brief cases that you could drop on your desk and open dramatically. 

Dramatically in a ridiculous business sense. 

It was a silly, self-important time.  I had a new job at a new location and every day I would go to the cubicle they assigned me to. 

And I had nothing to do. 

So I made up things to do, to stay busy.  And one of the things I made up was reading Kurt Vonnegut novels. 

I read Slaughterhouse 5 and God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Breakfast of Champions as I waited for them to find me something to do. 

This would have been before or just about as Galapagos was written. 

In 1985.

The thing about Mr. Vonnegut was, that just because I read my way through his existing cannon, he had the hubris to keep writing novels until he passed through the blue tunnel at 84 years old in 2007. 

Here, in my mind, I had mentally checked off Kurt Vonnegut as a journey completed and digested and he has the temerity to keep living and writing. 

Hi-ho!

He continued to churn out novels as I was living my life.  Satirical novels, commentaries on the human condition, winking knowingly at our hubris and the trouble our big brains get us into. 

He was as prolific a writer as the estimable Kilgore Trout.

I was recently reading something about something and whatever the something was referenced the Vonnegut novel Galapagos.  I thought, “Hold on.  Here is another work that the crafty Vonnegut has tried to sneak past me in his profligate writing.” 

So I went and bought it, second hand of course, slightly bent of cover, with some half-hearted pencil scratching in the margins.  No doubt some poor community college student being forced to read it by some shaggy ne’er-do-well English Lit professor – God love ‘em.

Many of Vonnegut’s novels were classified as science fiction.  I think that was only because the reviewers didn’t know what to do with them.  Like “What the hell do we do with this? Well…it’s got an alien in it, so hey, science fiction it is!”

The truth is Vonnegut was a category of his own.  Humanist satire might be a better description.  I would even go so far as to say most if his work is vaguely apocalyptic.

Anyway – that’s a long way around saying that Galapagos as a novel does not disappoint.  It has the classic wry-commentary and satire of all Vonnegut works.  Like he’s looking at the f-ed up human world and shaking his head at the absurdity of it.

Maybe ‘Absurdist’ would be a fitting category.

The novel is playful. 

Vonnegut loves the craft of writing.  He invents mechanisms to tell the story and plays with them.  It’s nonsensical in a way that highlights how nonsensical life is in general.

It’s about humans.

It’s about evolution and de-evolution.

It’s about life and death.

It’s also making a case about the randomness of evolution.  How innocuous events have lasting impacts.  The butterfly’s wingbeat taken as an absurdity.  Maybe more appropriate would be the butterfly passing gas. 

It’s classic Vonnegut. 

I’m a better writer and a better human for having read it.

…

That’s it for this week.  Please go purchase the book, or heck, if you’re far enough in the future, go purchase all the books of the After the Apocalypse literary juggernaut available anyplace you buy books. There are tens of thousands of you listening and, heck, for the price of a cup of coffee, (why do people always use coffee as an economic measure?)  Anyhow – buy a book – it won’t bankrupt you and it will make  me very happy.

Buy a book -> https://booklocker.com/books/13731.html

Website -> http://www.oldmanapocalypse.com

So my friends as the last embers of the fire sparkle and die, let’s mover our party inside the bunker and bar the door.  The roving packs of dire wolves are at the window.  Let’s stay warm and safe together.