With a certain facile agility, [Vonnegut] has gone genre jumping, assuming the colors, alternately, of short story writer, novelist, playwright, and sometime poet. Critics have attempted to trace an evolutionary pattern through various categories, techniques, styles, and points of view. Yet, however much the form varies, Vonnegut's very personal, readily identifiable products persist in their family resemblance….

Vonnegut entered literature through the door of science fiction, what some would unhesitatingly label the back door…. His works often project the consequences of the modern scientific world in nightmarish sequences of a shocking future, to wit, Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, and Cat's Cradle. The demon-scientist figure is especially well portrayed in the character of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who fulfills the biblical prophesy that tasting of the tree of knowledge will bring destruction on the race. Man is undone by his presumption to tinker with the universe.

The notoriously schizophrenic...