- Cawdron, Peter.
Children's Crusade.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2014.
ASIN B00JFHIMQI.
-
This novella, around 80 pages print equivalent and
available only for the Kindle, is set in the world of
Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five.
The publisher has licensed the rights for fiction
using characters and circumstances created by Vonnegut,
and this is a part of “The World of Kurt Vonnegut”
series. If you haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five
you will miss a great deal about this story.
Here we encounter Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack in
their alien zoo on Tralfamadore. Their zookeeper, a
Tralfamadorian Montana nicknamed Stained, due to what looked
like a birthmark on the face, has taken to visiting the
humans when the zoo is closed, communicating with them
telepathically as Tralfs do. Perceiving time as a true
fourth dimension they can browse at will, Tralfs
are fascinated with humans who, apart from Billy, live
sequential lives and cannot jump around to explore
events in their history.
Stained, like most Tralfs, believes that most momentous
events in history are the work not of great leaders but
of “little people” who accomplish great things
when confronted with extraordinary circumstances. He (pronouns get
complicated when there are five sexes, so I'll just
pick one) sends Montana and Billy on telepathic journeys
into human history, one at the dawn of human civilisation
and another when a great civilisation veered into savagery,
to show how a courageous individual with a sense of what is
right can make all the difference. Finally they voyage together
to a scene in human history which will bring tears to your
eyes.
This narrative is artfully intercut with scenes of Vonnegut
discovering the realities of life as a hard-boiled reporter
at the City News Bureau of Chicago. This story is written
in the spirit of Vonnegut and with some of the same
stylistic flourishes, but I didn't get the sense the
author went overboard in adopting Vonnegut's voice. The
result worked superbly for this reader.
I read a pre-publication manuscript which the author kindly
shared with me.
April 2014 