I have a feeling I'm starting in on a serious Vonnegut kick. It's ironic that his writing is philosophically so close to my worldview now, nearly ten years after I last read his work. His ideas about determinism (are people machines?) and humanity's place in the universe are very similar to my own. Timequake is a novel in the purest sense of the word — no fiction like it existed before it was written. It is mostly autobiographical, though the lines between Vonnegut and his protagonist, Kilgore Trout, grow dim. One thing I don't get is how Trout was resurrected — in Breakfast of Champions he was born in 1907 and died in 1981, but in Timequake he is alive in 2001. So it goes.