The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand – review

Artificial snow and cloud seeders: how weather experiments inspired Kurt Vonnegut

In 1947, soon after he returned home from the war, Kurt Vonnegut was offered a job in the publicity department at General Electric. At the time, GE was a company growing in confidence. Its ads boasted that “military and naval power drove this enemy to defeat down a road built by research”. Irving Langmuir, the first Nobel prize-winning industrial scientist, was on staff. Its net sales were more than double the peak of the prewar years, and the steady stream of consumer products – televisions, refrigerators, motors and so on – that emerged from its factories made the company synonymous with postwar prosperity.

What GE wanted now was the type of person who could show the public it was trying “to do right voluntarily”. They didn’t want hack PR men; they wanted journalists who could place stories in the New York Times, the Boston Globe and Time magazine. Vonnegut (pictured) took the job, and moved to GE’s campus in Schenectady, NY, where his brother Bernard had been working as a scientist since 1945. It is the intersection of their lives in the late 40s and early 50s that Ginger Strand examines in her entertaining book.

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