“Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.”

“What are you?' Trout asked the boy scornfully. 'Some kind of gutless wonder?' This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robotwho had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what madethe story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespreaduse of burning jellied gasoline on human beings. It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had noconscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening tothe people on the ground. Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on,and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline onpeople. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he waswelcomed to the human race.”

“In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, 'I already know about human beings.”

“he predicted...that human slavery would come bac, that it had infact never gone away. he said that so many people wanted to come here because it was so easy to rob the poor people, who got absolutely no protection from the government. he talked about bridges falling down and water mains breaking because of no maintenance. he talked about oil spills and radioactive waste and poisoned aquifers and looted banks and liquidated corporations. "and nobody ever gets punished for anything," he said. "being an american means never having to say you're sorry.”

“As for the story itself, it was entitled "The Dancing Fool." Like so many Trout stories, it was about a tragic failure to communicate. Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub.”

“It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.”

“Jesus--if Kilgore Trout could only write!" Rosewater exclaimed. He had a point: Kilgore Trout's unpopularity was deserved. His prose was frightful. Only his ideas were good.”