“The Big Space F**k” - Kurt Vonnegut

“The Big Space F**k”
Kurt Vonnegut

“What was the dirtiest story I ever wrote?” wrote Kurt Vonnegut in “Palm Sunday,” his 1981 “autobiographical collage.” “Surely ‘The Big Space F**k,’ the first story of literature to have ‘f**k’ in its title. It was probably the last short story I will ever write. I did it for my friend Harlan Ellison, who printed it in his anthology ‘Again, Dangerous Visions.’” It’s a terrific, and terrifically relevant, story. I found only a fragment of it on the Web. Here’s the story in full as it appeared in “Palm Sunday,” courtesy of the Notebooks’ head clerk, O.C.R.

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In 1987 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised. He could take them to court and make them pay money and even serve jail terms for serious mistakes they made when he was just a helpless little kid. This was not only an effort to achieve justice but to discourage reproduction, since there wasn’t anything much to eat any more. Abortions were free. In fact, any woman who volunteered for one got her choice of a bathroom scale or a table lamp.