Philip Farmer: Venus on the Half-Shell

I wish to thank Mr. Vonnegut for his generosity in permitting me to publish Venus as by Trout. I am sorry that it may have caused him any perturbation. I am even sorrier that he could not understand that Venus was my tribute to him and my repayment for all the delight his pre-1975 works gave me.

For several years, I’ve been trying to get Venus published under my own name. Finally, it has come about.

But, for a brief though glorious period, I was Kilgore Trout.

Philip José Farmer, 1988

This is another specimen of the “biographical.” It originally appeared in a fanzine, Moebius Trip , December 1971 issue, edited and published by Ed Connor of Peoria, Illinois. Later on, I suggested to the editor of Esquire that he might want to publish this “life.” Regretfully, he rejected the idea. He did not think that Kilgore Trout was as well known as Tarzan. This is true, but the majority of Esquire ’s readers are probably readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s works and would be acquainted with Trout. So it goes.

I identify strongly with Trout.

The editor and readers of Moebius Trip thought that the letter from Trout and the letter describing Trout’s interview in the Peoria Journal Star were made up by me. No such thing. These letters actually appeared in the letter section of the editorial page of Peoria’s only local newspaper, and I can prove it.

Since I wrote this, I have been fortunate enough to read the galleys of Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions . It contains many new facts which have enabled me to amplify and to correct the original article. Even so, some things are still in doubt because of contradictions in the three books in which Trout figures. Mr. Vonnegut evidently regards consistency as the hobgoblin of small writers.

Internal evidence in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , the first book about Trout, implies that Trout was born in 1890 or 1898. Slaughterhouse-Five, the second, implies that he was born in 1902. But Breakfast of Champions makes it clear that he was born in 1907.

There are other discrepancies. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater says that no two of Trout’s books ever had the same publisher. In Breakfast of Champions the World Classics Library publishers have issued many of his books.

Rosewater states that Trout’s works can only be found in disreputable bookstores dealing in pornography. Yet the same book has Eliot Rosewater picking up a Trout novel from a book rack in an airport.

Trout’s novels are supposed to be extremely difficult to find. Rosewater is an avid collector of Trout (in fact, the only one), and he has only forty-one novels and sixty-three short stories. Yet the crooked lawyer, Mushari, goes into a Washington, D.C. smut dealer’s and finds every one of Trout’s eighty-seven novels.

Breakfast of Champions says that until Trout met a truck driver in 1972 he had never talked with anybody who’d read one of his stories. But Eliot Rosewater and Billy Pilgrim had read his stories and had met him some years before.

Trout’s sole fan letter (from Rosewater) reached him in Cohoes, New York, according to Breakfast. But Rosewater says that Trout was living in Hyannis, Massachusetts, when he got the letter.

The description of the extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians in The Sirens of Titan differs considerably from that in Slaughterhouse-Five .

And so it goes.

Who is the greatest living science fiction author?

Some say he is Isaac Asimov. Many swear he’s Robert A. Heinlein. Others nominate Arthur C. Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, or Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Franz Rottensteiner, Austrian critic and editor, proclaims the Pole, Stanislaw Lem, as the champion. Mr. Rottensteiner may be biased, however, since he is also Lem’s literary agent.

None of the above can equal Kilgore Trout—if we can believe Eliot Rosewater, Indiana multimillionaire, war hero, philanthropist, fireman extraordinaire, and science fiction connoisseur. According to Rosewater, Trout is not only the greatest science fiction writer alive, he is the world’s greatest writer. He ranks Trout above Dostoevski, Tolstoi, Balzac, Fielding, and Melville. Rosewater believes that Trout should be president of Earth. He alone would have the imagination, ingenuity, and perception to solve the problems of this planet.

Rosewater, drunk as usual, once burst into a science fiction writers’ convention at Milford, Pennsylvania. He had come to meet his idol, but he found, to his sorrow and amazement, that Trout was not there. Lesser men could attend it, but Trout was too poor to leave Hyannis, Massachusetts, where he was a stock clerk in a trading-stamp redemption center.

Who is this Kilgore Trout, this poverty-stricken and neglected genius?

To begin with, Kilgore Trout is not a nom de plume of Theodore Sturgeon. Let us dispose of that base rumor at once. It is only coincidence that the final syllables of the first names of these two authors end in ore or that their last names are those of fish. The author of the classical and beautifully written More Than Human and The Saucer of Loneliness could not possibly be the man whom even his greatest admirer admitted couldn’t write for sour apples.

Trout was born in 1907, but the exact day is unknown. Until a definite date is supplied by an authoritative source, I’ll postulate the midnight of February 19th, 1907, as the day on which society’s “greatest prophet” was born. Trout’s character indicates that he is an Aquarian and so was born between January 20th and February 19th. There is, however, so much of the Piscean in him that he was probably born on the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces, that is, near midnight of February 19th.

Trout first saw the light of day on the British island of Bermuda. His parents were citizens of the United States of America. (Trout has depicted them in his novel, Now It Can Be Told .) His father, Leo Trout, had taken a position as birdwatcher for the Royal Ornithological Society in Bermuda. His chief duty was to guard the very rare Bermudian ern, a green sea eagle. Despite his vigilance, the ern became extinct, and Leo took his family back to the States. Kilgore attended a Bermudian grammar school and then entered Thomas Jefferson High School in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from this in 1924.

Though Trout was born in Bermuda, he was probably conceived in Indiana. His character smells strongly of certain Hoosier elements, and it is in Indianapolis, Indiana, that we first meet him. This state has produced many writers: Edward Eggleston (The Hoosier Schoolmaster), George Ade (Fables in Slang), Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, The Genius), George Barr McCutcheon (Graustark, Brewster’s Millions), Gene Stratton Porter (A Girl of the Limberlost), William Vaughn Moody ( The Great Divide ), Booth Tarkington ( Penrod , The Magnificent Ambersons), Lew Wallace (Ben Hur), James Whitcomb Riley (The Old Swimmin’ Hole, When the Frost is on the Punkin’), Ross Lockridge (Raintree County), Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor (Osiris on Crutches, The Vaccinators from Vega), Rex Stout (author of the Nero Wolfe mysteries), and, last but far from least, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle , The Sirens of Titan , “Welcome to the Monkey House,” Mother Night , God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , Slaughterhouse-Five , and Breakfast of Champions ).