Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death (1969) is an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut about World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim.
Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, fatalistic, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a prison in Dresden. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse, known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". The POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Billy has come "unstuck in time" and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe in predestination. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories.
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