Collecting Imaginary Authors : Kilgore Trout

I’ve collected the works of Kurt Vonnegut for many, many years – and usually in multiples when I find them cheaply. I can mail the extra copies to friends and have them treat me oddly until the eventual demise of our relationship. I dated a girl once because she read Galapagos. Vonnegut’s entire bibliography is pretty easy to assemble, with a few weird odds and ends to be scraped together inexpensively.

The great thing about Vonnegut’s body of work is that each story is part of a larger picture of a Vonnegut-driven universe. Stories have characters and locations that bleed into other stories, and nowhere is this thread of commonality more strong than with the character of Kilgore Trout.

Trout was originally created to act as an homage to Vonnegut’s friend, Theodore Sturgeon – one of Vonnegut’s typically blunt, heavy puns. As the character grew, it became clearer that Trout, who is a struggling (and often pathetic) author of science fiction, was also very much an aspect of Kurt Vonnegut himself. The fictional Trout lived in obscurity, having roughly three fans in the whole world (all dedicated collectors), and writing hundreds of novels and short stories that didn’t really exist. Which made it very strange when I found a paperback with ‘Kilgore Trout’ listed as the author.

This book, allegedly by Kilgore Trout, is called ‘Venus on the Half-Shell‘ and was published in 1975, and for a considerable amount of time, readers assumed that Vonnegut himself penned it. In actuality, the book was rather upsetting to Vonnegut. While indirectly derivative of his work, the association with Vonnegut was inevitable. This title was mentioned by Vonnegut in 1965’s ‘God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater‘.

In actuality, ‘Venus’ was written by noted author Philip Jose Farmer. Farmer intended on writing at least a few books under the Trout pseudonym, but communicating with Vonnegut only through publishers and agents, it became clear that Vonnegut wasn’t interested in the project. Garbled interviews with both parties only made things worse, and after ‘Venus’, no more books were ever published under the Trout name, out of respect for Vonnegut’s wishes.

Many Vonnegut collectors consider this weird piece of meta-fiction to be an essential part of a truly complete Vonnegut library, even if it was not written by him. The original story was serialized in ‘Science Fiction and Fantasy Monthly’ in 1974, but was collected in paperback form a year later, still under the Trout name. When the story was reprinted in 1988 and subsequent collections, Farmer’s name had replaced that of Trout.

It’s definitely not hard to obtain a copy for under ten dollars (or far less if you’re okay with Farmer’s name on the cover), but it’s a piece of Vonnegut lore that’s very neat, and very easy to overlook.