Night Waves - 08/11/2007

An exploration of the cultural legacy of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut tells the story of GI Billy Pilgrim, focusing on Pilgrim's experience of the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, which was largely based on the author's witness of the raids as a prisoner of war. On publication in 1969, the novel was labelled both as science fiction and a political trigger to re-evaluating the carpet bombing of German cities.