Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84 – New York Times.
My introduction to Vonnegut was the novel Slapstick, featuring low gravity days, the Chinese shrinking themselves to combat overpopulation (eventually becoming microscopic and infecting the rest of the world, I recall), and the church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped. His other novels soon followed.  He was brilliant and hilarious, searing and playful, and he will be missed.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

Hi Ho