From the satiric, sometimes dystopian tone of these works Vonnegut would seem happy to have left the world that bred them. After a first try at living the unfettered artist's life in Provincetown, at the Cape's farthest reach, he moved back to common society, as it were, eventually settling his family in a big house just outside West Barnstable, still on the Cape but halfway back to Boston. Here he would write stories on more typically domestic issues, making his way into the high-paying Saturday Evening Post (whose $2,500 per story far outclassed the $750 he had first earned from Collier's). Matters of corporate science and sociology would figure in some of these works, but the emphasis was on life as lived by average Americans, just the people who were reading these magazines. If something exotic appeared, be it scientific, economic, or psychological, that deviation from the mean would by story's end be resolved in a way that reaffirmed the middle-class values underwriting both subscriptions and advertising sales. Though always interested in the humor of an affair, Kurt Vonnegut—liberated from the corporate world and happily running his own short-story business—seemed comfortably at home.

Those who insist that this man is a science-fiction writer should consider the narrative voice he chose for this first material. It is not the “Barnhouse Effect” itself that Vonnegut foregrounds for Collier's issue of 11 February 1950; instead, as his title indicates, it is a “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” that is being presented, with an emphasis from the start on the nature of the person telling it. “Let me begin by saying that I don't know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does” (WMH, 156), the story begins—a terrible admission for someone being evaluated as a laboratory's publicist, but it is supportive of the narrative style its author (still working for GE at the time) finds necessary for telling this type of story. Nor can this narrator tell how to replicate the Barnhouse Effect, which is his second up-front admission. So he scarcely qualifies as a scientist either. Nor is he. In this first story Kurt Vonnegut's narrator is a psychology instructor who has done his academic research under the professor's direction, in the process learning that the socalled Barnhouse Effect existed—not how or why because its inventor never revealed the knowledge behind it. Now, expected to report on the phenomenon, he can only look back on his experiences with the great man and see what they add up to. In other words, all he can do is tell a story.

Any scientist and any scientific publicist would shudder at the narrator's result. “It's all anecdotal,” they would charge. “But that's the beauty of the thing,” this laboratory publicist who was trying to write his way out of the corporation might say in response, for that is precisely the point of “Report on the Barnhouse Effect.” It tells the story of a researcher who discovers a power all out of proportion to his own meagre stature and humble methods. The man's work does not even begin in a laboratory, for he has discovered the principle of “dynamopsychism” (a fancy term for the force of a mind) while shooting dice in an army barracks craps game. The world's first recognition of this technique does not come as any formal acknowledgment from the scientific community but rather in the amazed encouragement from a fellow soldier, who exclaims, “You're hotter'n a two-dollar pistol, Pop” (WMH, 159).

Throughout the story Vonnegut's narrator maintains a straight-faced but essentially comic pose, mixing the language of theoretical physics with the homely manner in which Professor Barnhouse develops his psychic effect. But if the reader of this report is puzzled by this contrast, so is its writer. As the narrator tries to get a thesis under way with the man (remember Vonnegut's own struggles to write an anthropology thesis for a professor on the outs with his department), he becomes increasingly puzzled by the distractions that keep interfering with their work, specifically concerns with destruction wrought during the recently concluded World War II and the threat of more war and destruction to come. Concern for such matters has made Professor Barnhouse an odd duck at his university, but slowly the young narrator is drawn into his confidence. Over time the narrator is converted: not to the man's brand of science, which remains forever a mystery, but to his ethic of pacifism. By the report's end it turns out that there will be no report at all, only the narrator's advice that he is about to go underground with the professor's secret, keeping it safe from both commercial and military exploitation and potent only as a threat to militarism.

That scientists should be responsible for the uses of their discoveries had been part of Kurt Vonnegut's personal ethic since before the war, when as a Depression-era grade school and high school student he had also been taught the elementary civics lesson that a democracy such as America needed a standing army no larger than was demanded for defense. Much of what he had seen at General Electric charmed him, but the amorality of some of its scientists did not, particularly those who became lost in the abstractions of their work. The firestorm he had seen manufactured at Dresden, for example, was a hideous example of what scientific brilliance and military planning could produce when two such ends-in-themselves were united. “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” speaks out against these tendencies so common to the postwar years, making Kurt Vonnegut a protest writer from the start, albeit one closely involved with his popular culture.

“Thanasphere,” “EPICAC,” and “The Euphio Question” draw even more on science and technology of the day but always with the readers of Collier's (and not Popular Mechanics, let alone Scientific American) in mind. As Peter J. Reed establishes in The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut (1997), the author's motivation is not “science fictional” but “sociological. It comes not from a fascination with speculations about technology but from a desire to show the moral and practical consequences of patterns of behavior” (5).

The patterns are evident in all three of these “scientific” stories, which were first published in Collier's for 2 September 1950, 25 November 1950, and 12 May 1951, respectively. In “Thanasphere” the science goes right: an observation station is launched into orbit around the earth, from which doings in the Soviet Union could be monitored—precisely the mission so many Cold War airmen undertook, although in spy planes rather than from space. What fails is the human element, as the officer on board gets distracted by a different kind of intelligence: messages from people in the afterworld who are anxious to send word to the living. These voices soon become more than distracting; they are more interesting than what military forces may or may not be doing. Simple gossip about people one has known counts more than science and technology, especially when technology has inadvertently spiced things up by presenting gossip from the dead. Here is Kurt Vonnegut's definition of humanism, refined many years later for a lecture presented to the American Physical Society and collected in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons: Opinions (1974). Humanists, he says there and demonstrates in this story, are simply creatures who are more interested in human beings than in anything else. In the story it is military science that loses out, as the air force's spy in the sky cares only for the gossipy messages he is intercepting (at one point even seducing the project scientist with a warning from his long-dead mother). In the essay the losers are the zoo animals that Kurt has taken his pet dog to see; he has assumed that the animal will show great interest in all these fellow carnivores, but instead all the dog cares about are people visiting the zoo, qualifying him as a humanist. Who wins? Kurt Vonnegut and his belief that humans fulfilling their own natural purposes are superior to the cold facts of science. Of course, scientists have to disguise this fact, and that is how “Thanasphere” ends, with all those voices from the afterlife kept secret. People still want to know, and as the story concludes, a reporter asks how soon an exploratory rocket will be sent into space. The scientist replies, “You people read too many comic books. Come back in twenty years, and maybe I'll have a story for you” (BSB, 27). For the record, Vonnegut did, attending the Apollo XI moon launch with credentials from the New York Times and CBS Television News. His report of the occasion appears in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, where the sentiments expressed are much the same as in his short story from two decades earlier. The view expressed in this early work remains consistent throughout the author's career, from anonymity to fame and from popular magazines of the 1950s through novels of the postmodern age.

“EPICAC” and “The Euphio Question” have even more technology in them than do Vonnegut's stories about the thanasphere and Professor Barnhouse's invention—and the sociological interest is proportionately greater. From a computer programmed to write love letters (and which then falls in love with the young woman who receives these missives) to the hilariously narcotic effect of radio waves captured from outer space, the author is much more interested in people's behavior. It is no accident that the behavior this futuristic technology provokes is anything but futuristic: Vonnegut's characters react to intoxicating radio waves just about the way they would handle too much alcohol, and when his computer is programmed to perform a human function it is not surprising that the machine starts acting like a human being—a hopelessly lovesick one at that. Even the author's most thoroughly science-fictionish novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), maintains an interest in people as people; this point is made in the narrative when a pair of figures share a drink and amuse the bartender, who finds them familiar from both his trade and his leisure reading: “they were simply two Saturday Evening Post characters at the end of the road” (ST, 86–87).

By the time Vonnegut wrote those lines his career with the family weeklies was coming to an end, largely because television had stolen their advertising, and before closing shop entirely such journals trimmed back the amount of fiction they could publish. But in 1951 Kurt Vonnegut's glory years with Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post were still ahead of him. Following their initial publications his stories went through four cullings: for Canary in a Cat House in 1961, when Vonnegut had no literary reputation except as a regular contributor to the magazines; for Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968, when publisher Seymour Lawrence was relaunching the author's career with Delacorte Press; for Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons in 1974, when in the face of sudden fame he elected not to include the passed-over stories in a collection of his shorter work; and finally in 1999, when at the urging of scholar Peter J. Reed he let the early short stories thought unsuitable for the previous collections take their places in his established canon via the volume Bagombo SnuffBox. Welcome to the Monkey House reassembles all the stories from Canary in a Cat House (a little-noticed paperback original) but one: “Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp,” a Cosmopolitan story from June 1957 that had appeared in the first collection with its last line dropped and which Vonnegut rewrote before letting Reed include it in the final gathering. Given that Monkey House received reviewers' attention in its hardcover edition and has remained in print as a Dell paperback alongside Vonnegut's first twelve novels throughout his tenure as a major American writer, the nature of its selection is instructive.

“Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” “EPICAC,” “All the King's Horses,” “The Euphio Question,” “The Foster Portfolio,” “More Stately Mansions,” “Tom Edison's Shaggy Dog,” “Unready to Wear,” “D. P.,” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” “Adam,” “Deer in the Works,” “Next Door,” “The Kid Nobody Could Handle,” “Miss Temptation,” and “The Manned Missiles”—here stand the stories of Kurt Vonnegut's 1950s that are his first choice to accompany his best-selling and most widely studied novels into literary history. Most are from Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, though Cosmopolitan and the Ladies' Home Journal are also represented, making for good coverage of the era's popular culture. “Deer in the Works” comes from Esquire, a well-paying market the author must have appreciated; “Unready to Wear” and “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” are reprinted from Galaxy Science Fiction but are no more sci-fi stories than are Vonnegut's science-related pieces from Collier's and the Post—they were only offered to the dime-a-word sci-fi journals after the family weeklies (which paid twice to seven times that much) had rejected them. Throughout these narratives the writer returns to familiar themes, and the familiarity spans such variables as scientific innovation and the day-to-day doings in middle-class American lives. Indeed, for Kurt Vonnegut it does not matter if the action is taking place in the present or in the future; nor does it make a difference if the setting is outer space or at the neighbors' house next door. To the eye of this humanist, people are the most interesting subject, and underlying his vision is the theme that people are likely to act in predictable ways—often charmingly so, with a winsome innocence the author encourages his readers to appreciate, but predictable all the same. The art of his work consists in how far he can stretch the occasion to make this predictability serve as a clever solution to the story's problem, as an insight into the nature of the characters involved—in other words, as a surprise.

Consider two of the most apparently diverse of these short stories, “Unready to Wear” and “The Foster Portfolio.” The former, as noted, was published in the trendiest of science fiction journals, while the latter appeared in Collier's, homeliest of the family weeklies with the least-pretentious-toward-brainy content. Each story seems to fit the specific market's needs, with “Unready to Wear” telling about a new world in which folks have learned how to be “amphibious” (borrowing bodies to inhabit as casually as people now wear clothes) and “The Foster Portfolio” describing a poor working stiff's chance to remake his life a much more practical way, by cashing in some investments. The pioneer amphibian tells his own story, while Herbert Foster's is narrated by the man who manages this client's financial portfolio. But readers soon learn that each story's theme is conveyed not so much in the objects and issues involved as by the manner of the telling—and in both “The Foster Portfolio” and “Unready to Wear” that manner is much the same.

“I'm a salesman of good advice for rich people,” the narrator of the Foster piece begins. “It's a living,” he allows, “but not a whale of a one” (WMH, 53), an important distinction because much of the story evolves around the surprising contrast this storyteller discovers. His clients are people much better off than he is, usually so rich that they make his job seem like being a hungry delivery boy for a candy store. Herbert Foster, however, appears just the opposite, looking and acting like the first investor to be worse off—far worse off—than the man paid to do his bidding. For several pages Foster is portrayed as seeming to have no business asking for financial advice at all. His income looks to be well below what is needed for active shopping among stocks and bonds; as an anthropologist might note, his home has all the hallmarks of wage-slave struggle, being “a jerry-built postwar colonial with expansion attic,” furnished on time payment with “three rooms of furniture, including ashtrays, a humidor, and pictures for the wall, all for $199.99” (56). Foster has a wife, and she too submits to the anthropologist's measure: “A skinny, shrewish-looking woman smiled at me vacuously. She wore a faded housecoat figured with a fox-hunting scene. The print was at war with the slipcover of the chair, and I had to squint to separate her features from the clash about her. ‘A pleasure, Mrs. Foster,’ I said. She was surrounded by underwear and socks to be mended, and Herbert said her name was Alma, which seemed entirely possible” (54).

The narrator's snide comment about her name establishes both the Fosters' typicality and his own presumed superiority to it. This posture survives the story's first surprise, that a supposed cog in the wheels of America's lower-middle-class economy is in fact holding a portfolio of stocks worth three quarters of a million dollars, a substantial sum at any time but for a reader of Collier's magazine in 1951 a truly astronomical figure. “My client, Herbert Foster, hadn't had a new suit in three years,” the narrator notes in response to this news, and “he had never owned more than one pair of shoes at a time” (WMH, 57). His secondhand car still has worrisome payments pending, he carries a bag lunch (with a tuna and cheese sandwich instead of meat), and so forth—”the Fosters were going through hell” trying to live within a limited budget, and their adviser admits that “God knows it's no disgrace to live that way.” Of course not, because most readers of Collier's were in similar (if not quite so tight) circumstances. Kurt Vonnegut was too—remember that letter to his father. Therefore the fact that Herbert Foster does not want to draw on earnings from his portfolio, inherited just recently from his grandfather, plunges Vonnegut, his narrator, and all the Collier's readers into an even more anthropologically curious examination of his way of life. Why would someone want to continue this meanly frugal existence when simply drawing interest on one's capital would propel him and his family into the privileged classes of the country's economy?

The answer is probably too simple, as confirmed by the author's worry with some of the stories he kept out of his canon until Bagombo SnuffBox, pieces weaker than “The Foster Portfolio,” stories in which “the premise and the characters of each were so promising, and the denouement so asinine, that I virtually rewrote the denouement” before letting them appear in the collection (BSB, 289). Herbert Foster's denouement is that he does not want to use investments to better his living because the economically tough times he has been enduring allow him the pleasure of slipping away to earn a few extra dollars at a second job. And what a second job it is, playing jazz piano in a honky-tonk dive so refreshingly different from his family life that the contrast is literally intoxicating.

This second piece of news is something the narrator can accept with more ready understanding. Throughout “The Foster Portfolio” he has shown himself to be a highly qualified assessor of middle-class American habits, ways of behavior that are all the more prominent for the tenuous hold the Fosters have on that life—their house is jerry-built, their furniture from a discount mart, their car secondhand, its tires retreads, their brownbag-lunch sandwiches made with the less expensive spread. As he has said, it is no disgrace to live that way; millions of Americans are doing it right now, he knows. Why do they do it? In hopes of someday having something better. Well, Herbert Foster has something better now, the delights of a secret life he can enjoy at will, with the excuse that such outré behavior is underwriting a quest for the same American dream.

No critic would think of calling “The Foster Portfolio” a science-fiction story, but all the elements of Vonnegut's allegedly sci-fi work are there. The Fosters' homely life is described with the precision employed by a visitor to another planet; the glitch in Herbert Foster's behavior—not wanting to use the great amounts of money he has—is as curious a departure from normality as anything encountered in an alien world; and the sudden great amount of money might just as well have come from outer space, so distinct is it from the man's normal existence. But is his existence really so normal? It is human, to be sure, but in a way that violates certain commonly accepted norms—all of which goes to say that these norms may not be so reliable after all.

As for “Unready to Wear,” set in a technologically innovative future and involving the adoption of various other bodies as one's own, Vonnegut's thematic orientation remains much the same as in his stories of 1950s middle-class life. The narrator here shares the roles Herbert Foster and his investments counselor performed in the earlier tale. “I don't suppose the oldsters, those of us who weren't born into it, will ever feel quite at home being amphibious—amphibious in the new sense of the word,” he begins, because this new capability has made redundant “what used to be my business. After all, I spent thirty years building the thing up from scratch, and now the equipment is rusting and getting clogged with dirt” (WMH, 229). This spokesperson for the action is thus both in and out of it, experiencing the change but mindful of how things were beforehand. The joy of this story is the offhand way the narrator handles the exposition, running through information that should be flabbergastin...