The Drone King, An Incredible Animation of a Newly Discovered Unpublished Story by Kurt Vonnegut

The Atlantic has created a really wonderful animation to accompany the newly found Kurt Vonnegut story “The Drone King“. This story along with four others, were written early in Vonnegut’s career and were discovered by Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz at the Lilly Library at Indiana University as they were working on “Complete Stories“, an upcoming compilation of short stories by the prodigious author. The story itself was somewhat prophetic, in that Vonnegut wrote about the use drones of bees to carry inter-office messages in the 1950s.

While reading through Kurt Vonnegut’s papers in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, as they worked on the first comprehensive edition of his short fiction, Vonnegut’s friend Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, a scholar of Vonnegut’s work, came across five previously unpublished stories. Klinkowitz dates “The Drone King,” one of those five, to the early 1950s, when Vonnegut hadn’t yet written a novel and was only beginning to publish short fiction. Complete Stories will be published this month by Seven Stories Press.