Timequake
by Kurt Vonnegut, Lawrence Pressman, Eli Schreiber · first published 1997
44% recommend50% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
A late Vonnegut novel offering a wry, humane take on free will and the average human experience. Fans of his work single it out.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
On February 13th, 2001, according to Vonnegut, the universe will tire momentarily of expanding forever. What's the point? Maybe it would be more fun to shrink for a change, and have a reunion of all the stuff back where it began. Then it could make a great big BANG again. It will shrink back to February 17th, 1991, but will then decide that expansion is the way to go, after all. As time marches on once more to 2001, though, Vonnegut and Trout and everybody else and everything else will have to do exactly what they did the first time through the decade, for good or ill: marry the wrong person,
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[SPOILER ALERT] If you found the ideas in this book about time and fate and freewill, you will also enjoy TimeQuake by Kurt Vonnegut from 1997. Highly recommended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timequake
on “Ted Chiang on Seeing His Stories Adapted and the Ever-Expanding Popularity of SF” ↗Kurt Vonnegut probably had the biggest impact on me. Mother Night and Timequake in particular. Two quotes I use all the time: "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." And "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about…
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗White Teeth, Zadie Smith Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Tom Robbins Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell Catch 22, Joseph Heller Timequake; Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence The Histories, Tacitus The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger (caveat, it was most effective when I read it at 16) Redwall, Brian…
on “Ask: Read a book that changed your life? Title?” ↗…that the impulse to create 'amazing art' perplexes me. The best anyone can do is to create art. 'Amazing' pertains to peoples' perception of the art. There is a short but very good part of Vonnegut's Timequake where he discusses this with his brother Bernard that may be relevant (http://books.google.com/books?id=cr93q_HVXb0C&pg=PA165#v... - chapter 43, though pg 166 is unfortunately not available. "I like…
on “I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art.” ↗Timequake is one of my favourites too, but really every Vonnegut book I have read is a treat. Sure the Bible might be the greatest story ever told, but the most popular story is about a couple who has a good time…
on “Vonnegut’s Asterisk (2013)” ↗RE: Shed. You just need to ask the correct questions. RE: Poetic Justness: Read TIMEQUAKE and it will being even sweeter, running through your brain the second time around...
on “GPT is all you need for the back end” ↗Not OP, but as someone who found GEB pretentious, I think the most mind-blowing books I have read were probably Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Night and Timequake probably at the top.
on “Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)” ↗Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake? I think it's very applicable to the average human experience.
on “Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?” ↗…all of them but Player Piano (started it twice, just got distracted both times, it wasn't bad) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Of the rest, Hocus Pocus and Jailbird are the two that stuck the least. Timequake was OK as a for-the-fans kind of thing I guess, but not great. Bluebeard is already a kind of summing-up of Vonnegut's major themes and is quite a bit better, so Timequake's just... fine. Slapstick is…
on “Kurt Vonnegut Museum Opens in Indianapolis” ↗…literature, there are stuffy pompous ones and funny snarky ones and everything in between. It's hard to think of it, because we don't consider the books we like as literature. Vonnegut, certainly by Timequake, is deeply postmodern. Murakami undoubtedly is, and is often very funny; Jasper Fforde tickles; hell, a very strong case could be made for Douglas Adams as a leading Postmodern humourist.
on “James Joyce's "Ulysses": Why you should read this book” ↗…barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?" -- Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake p.137-138 (1997)
on “Watch Me Make Mistakes” ↗Since it is a joke, Vonnegut used it on more than one occasion. There is a version in Timequake as well. That was where I originally read it [see: http://books.google.com/books?id=ggiR05avpw4C&pg=PT73...]
on “In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011” ↗…talking with someone about, or to have familiarity assumed by an article or something. If we were to make it a Big Three the third one would be Breakfast of Champions. His worst are probably Slapstick and Timequake, and the latter's so full of references to his earlier works that you wouldn't want to make it an early read regardless. The short fiction/non-fic collections published during his lifetime are generally…
on “How To Write With Style (1999)” ↗There's a subplot of that in Kirk Vonnegut's novel Timequake...though it involves a parking garage in the style of Thomas Jefferson.
on “A house 3D printed from raw earth” ↗…in heart and mind, familiarizes himself with this new virtue-compelling appliance. While doing so, he puts a slug through the Holy Grail and makes a Swiss cheese of Queen Guinevere.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
on “Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling results” ↗