* CompleteMonster--"All the King's Horses": [[DirtyCommunists Communist guerilla chief Pi Ying]] is a wealthy, sadistic, racist {{PoW Camp}} commander who despises America and its values. Taking Colonel Bryan Kelly, his troops, and his family hostage, Pi decides to showcase his superiority by challenging Bryan to a [[HumanChess chess game]], with his troops and family as the pieces. Each piece claimed by Pi results in the person dying, with Pi threatening each of Bryan's pieces with torturous deaths should they take too long to decide where to move. Prolonging the game just to make Bryan suffer as he hopes to eventually kill his entire family, Pi is eventually [[TheDogBitesBack fatally stabbed by his abused girlfriend]] before he could give orders to [[WouldHurtAChild kill one of Bryan's sons]].
* HilariousInHindsight:
** In ''God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'', Senator Rosewater manages to get an anti-obscenity law passed that passed muster with the Supreme Court: namely, the presence of pubic hair makes a piece obscene, not art. It's commonly thought that such a law in Japan resulted in the rise of {{Lolicon|AndShotacon}}; it's not hard to imagine that something similar would have happened in Sen. Rosewater's America as well.
** Vonnegut had a mild obsession with overpopulation, writing several stories (among them "Welcome to the Monkey House" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow") where it results in massive social issues. One wonders what he'd think given that ''under''population is now an issue in multiple developed countries (namely due to population-graying).
* ValuesDissonance: In the short story "Welcome to the Monkey House", set in a future where SexIsEvil is the prevailing belief, the main male character kidnaps the main female character and rapes her at gunpoint (with several assistants holding her down) to show her that sex can be good. This may have flown by without comment in its original time and location of publication (''Magazine/{{Playboy}}'' in the 1960's), but today it's seen as an apologia for the concept of "corrective rape" and even Vonnegut's most ardent fans avoid defending it.
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