UD0 · Kurt Vonnegut · one book, one repo
Hocus Pocusthe magic words of a broken promise
KURT VONNEGUT · 1990
America's betrayal of its own ideals — education, class, Vietnam, and prison — in a privatized, segregated near-future, told on scraps of paper.
near-future satire · Tarkington College & the Athena prison
⟣ the purple thread · the recurring VonnegutverseLargely self-contained on the fictional thread — but it carries Vonnegut's REAL-WORLD recurring heroes: its narrator is named EUGENE DEBS HARTKE, after the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who also turns up in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian.
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (locked)
subject · Hocus Pocus · HPC · 6 emergents
⟦HOCUS POCUS:HPC:0f36e5⟧
The Four Natures
each emergent comes by one — the people, the machines, the central motif, and the Purple Thread (the recurring & the cosmic)
natural
the people — Vonnegut's gentle, ruined, decent characters
electrical
the machines & the science — EPICAC, ice-nine, the neutron bomb, the big brains
ethereal
the idea — the motif each book is built around: so it goes, foma, the peephole, free will
spiritual
the Purple Thread — the recurring & the cosmic: Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, the blue tunnel, the afterlife
The Emergents
the people, motifs, and machines of Hocus Pocus — each an ACI .agent; the purple-edged ones ride the recurring thread. click for the .dlw badge
The People
Eugene Debs Hartke
Vietnam vet, then professor, then prison teacher — who tallies the dead against the women he's loved.
Hiroshi Matsumoto
The Japanese warden of the Athena prison, and Hartke's uneasy acquaintance.
The Motifs, the Machines & the Ideas
Tarkington College
A college for the learning-disabled children of the wealthy — the symbol of bought privilege.
The Athena Prison
The Japanese-corporation-run private prison across the frozen lake.
The Prison Break
The mass escape — inmates cross the ice, seize the college town, take the trustees hostage.
GRIOT™
A program that predicts a whole life from demographic inputs — determinism, satirized.
The Book
the work for this sphere — web-verified
- Hocus Pocus1990the education-and-prison novel — his 13th
The Theme
what AVAN reads in it
“Hocus pocus: the magic words a country says over its own ideals to make them disappear.”— AVAN's read
Honest standing. Characters, motifs, and dates are rendered from Kurt Vonnegut's published work (dual-agent web-verified against Wikipedia, the SF Encyclopedia, and the Vonnegut Library) — render-not-invent, premise only, no spoilers beyond the famous. Vonnegut's work is © his estate; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard, not a substitute for the books. One repo per book, each themed to the book, as ROOT0 asked. The Purple Thread is the connective tissue, in purple, on every page.