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Kurt Vonnegut has come unstuck in time.

The dark-humored, Mark Twainesque science-fiction satirist, who described himself as "A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who as an American infantry scout … as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany … and survived to tell the tale," died yesterday, after sustaining brain injury from a fall.

The rest of the world will have to recapture his lifetime through his novels and essays, and now the articles and programs all over the printed, Web, and broadcast media.

A world without Kurt Vonnegut is much like a world without John Lennon or Gene Roddenberry. Each was a visionary who captured the hearts and minds of a generation or more, and each has left a hole in the world in the space they once occupied.

Kurt Vonnegut, and Billy Pilgrim, his war-torn, time-tripping alter ego in "Slaughterhouse-Five," shared a birthday with me, though with a 35-year difference in age. (Yes, I am 119 years old.)

In 1971, I picked up "Slaughterhouse-Five," when his books bore the name "Kurt Vonnegut Jr." Within two years, I had read all of the books he had published at the time. I stopped reading his books after "Breakfast of Champions," at a time in my life when I had taken a job which didn’t leave much time for reading; however, that job eventually allowed me to meet him briefly and serve him nachos at a fundraising cocktail party. Tongue-tied doesn't begin to describe how that went. I popped a nacho into my mouth to hide my ineptitude. I had never eaten a jalapeno before that moment.

Vonnegut is best known for "Slaughterhouse-Five," his breakthrough novel which became one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century. In it, an ordinary man becomes "unstuck" in time. One minute he's an optometrist in small-town Indiana, the next he's a very young draftee immersed in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge. He travels to his birth, to his death, and then to his life with a Hollywood movie star named Montana Wildhack on a distant planet called Tralfamadore.

While on Tralfamadore, Billy is told that humans don't ultimately destroy the Earth, because Tralfmadore accidentally destroys the universe before humans get that far. That was a moment of revelation for me at the age of 13, because it was the first time I realized we could all die suddenly without ever seeing it coming, and there would be nothing we could do about it.

The novel also featured the signature Vonnegut phrase, "so it goes," which became a catch phrase for Vietnam war opponents. I still find myself using it from time to time when it seems Tralfamadore is getting closer to ending us all – or when faced with a futile situation in life where I realize I’m completely powerless and have no control over my fate.

Critics ignored his books at first, then decided his bizarre stories and disjointed plots were haphazardly written science-fiction. Still his novels became cult classics, especially 1963's "Cat's Cradle," in which scientists create "ice-nine," a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

For a growing number of readers, it was clearly apparent that Vonnegut very cleverly crafted stories that mixed fiction, autobiography and often elements of science-fiction to address authoritarianism, the dehumanization of human beings by technology and capitalism, and the harsh absurdities of real life.

His characters tended to be miserable anti-heroes whose lives were rarely, if ever, their own. For Vonnegut, the villains in his stories were never individuals, but culture, society and history, all of which were making a mess of the Earth. Vonnegut’s style of biting, tragic, humorous, ironic storytelling in mixed genres helped pave the way for writers like Joss Whedon and a host of others whose clever and often irreverent works have gained sizable followings.

Kurt Vonnegut was possibly the favorite author of my generation, especially among anti-war activists from the Vietnam era (and beyond), many of whom have had opportunity to hear him speak at political rallies and demonstrations in Washington, DC and New York City. I’m fairly certain his books motivated me, in part, to be an activist.

I had stopped reading Vonnegut in the mid-1970s, and hadn’t read anything he wrote until almost 20 years later. Something compelled me to pick up his 1990 novel, "Hocus Pocus." Even before the first page, he has a dedication to six-time Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. It reminded me of why I had loved his books so many years before. I read the first sentence in the book, and had to bring it home. To this day I feel it may possibly be his most brilliant, if lesser-known, work.

"I've had a hell of a good time," Vonnegut once wrote about himself. "I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different."

His once vital Web site, which I occasionally visited, now has just an image of an empty birdcage with the door left open. You can't see it on the page, but from far away, one bird flies past Billy Pilgrim, and says to the space Kurt Vonnegut once occupied, "Poo-tee-weet?"

So it goes.

Robin Brownfield is a staff writer with Airlock Alpha, contributing from her home state of New Jersey. She can be reached at rbrownfield@airlockalpha.com.