I'd forgotten -- but that's pretty good [laughs]. It is preposterous to imagine that you belong to something as big as the United States. It's like saying, "Howdy, I'm from Asia. Where are you from?" [laughs] You know, every artist in the United States worth a shit was against the Vietnam War, which was, you know, cruelly stupid and unnecessary. So every writer, every painter, every poet, every musician was against the Vietnam War. And I have said that it's like a laser beam, you know, where all the beams of light are aimed in one direction and so all art, the total art world, and also a whole lot of other decent people, would form this laser beam, everybody aimed at the Vietnam War to stop it. And the power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie, two feet in diameter, dropped from a stepladder six feet high [laughs]. It made no fucking difference.
In a number of your novels you state that evolution was really a bum deal, supplying man with brains that were far too large for his own good. With the attacks of Sept. 11, and the current bombing campaign in Afghanistan, do you think maybe we're seeing some effects of these large brains of ours?
The Salon Interviews index -- links to all the interviews related to the Sept. 11 attacks and the events that have followed.
Well yes. Evolution is utterly -- whatever the mechanism is, and I don't think much of natural selection as a mechanism -- but whatever the mechanism is, it has no conscience, it has no purpose.
But, you know, a science fiction clichi is that we don't know how to stop war or cure cancer, till people in flying saucers come and tell us how to do it, or till we grow an extra lobe on our brains and get smarter. We're getting smarter. Human beings are getting smarter, just like elephants in trouble, you know, saying, "Hey, you know, we're in trouble but we'll be OK if we put on a couple of hundred more pounds." Or a giraffe saying, "Boy, life is hell now but if we add a couple of feet to our necks we ought to be OK."
What would your alter ego Kilgore Trout say about the terrorist attacks?
Oh, I'll have to think a minute because I'm not really his spokesperson -- he's a separate personality. [Pauses] He ignored an awful lot. And specific events. I think he probably didn't make a comment. It would have been like an automobile accident or something.
Not too important, then?
No, but he's certainly interested in oceanic changes. Huge slow ones. Irresistible ones.
How would you like to die?
I don't know. When I was a soldier I just didn't want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn't hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep. My dear sister died of cancer and her very last words were, sort of wondering, "No pain. No pain." That was so nice.
I once read an interview in which you were asked how you would like to die and you said, "In a plane crash on Mount Kilimanjiro." Were you in a better mood that day?
[Laughs] No, that was actually a Ray Bradbury story and that's how he thought Hemingway should have died. Maybe I said it sometime. Just fucking around. I have the feeling now that I had at the end of the Second World War: I've done everything I'm supposed to do, please can I go home now? And I have that feeling now, and then I think, "Well, where the hell is home?" And what I'm yearning for is back in Indianapolis when I had a brother and a sister and a mother and a father and I can't get that, but, if it were possible, I would like them alive and I would die among them.
Do you believe there is anything afterward at all?
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