Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Billy Pilgrim, a dazed WWII veteran who survived the firebombing of Dresden, claims a flying saucer carried him to the planet Tralfamadore, where he was exhibited in an alien zoo. The two-foot Tralfamadorians perceive every moment of time at once, which is why the novel answers each death with its flat refrain, "So it goes."^[1] Vonnegut never asks us to believe the abduction literally; the saucer and its aliens read as symptoms of a mind trying to survive an unbearable memory. Published in 1969, just as real "missing-time" abduction stories were entering American culture, the book borrows the shape of a contact experience — capture, examination, display — and turns it into a meditation on fate, free will and the numbness of the traumatized.^[3]