The brothers Vonnegut : science and fiction in the house of magic
Strand, Ginger
In the late 1940s, Kurt Vonnegut is back home after surviving the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker beneath Slaughterhouse 5. Anxious about supporting his family, Kurt quits school and takes a job in the PR department of General Electric, in Schenectady, New York, where his older brother, Bernard, is a leading scientist in what's called the House of Magic - GE's Research Lab.
While Kurt writes zippy press releases by day and labors over short stories by night, Bernard sends planes to bomb cloud banks with payloads of dry ice. These cloud-seeding experiments, dubbed Project Cirrus, attract the attention of military men keen to control clouds, fog, and snow so they can fly more bombing missions. But as evidence mounts that Project Cirrus is causing alarming changes in the atmosphere, Bernard begins to have misgivings about the harmful uses of his inventions, and Kurt starts writing a new kind of story depicting scientists grappling with fantastic inventions gone awry. Set against a backdrop of atomic anxiety, Ginger Strand's The Brothers Vonnegut is a wild collision of science and literature.
Accès à la notice sur le site du portail documentaire de Météo-France