Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I was those seeds, I am this meat
This meat hates pain, this meat must eat
This meat must sleep, this meat must dream
This meat must laugh, this meat must scream
But when, as meat, it's had its fill
Please plant it as a daffodil.

— Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, Slapstick

One of the comments that I've read about Vonnegut's writing was that it was the sort that looked like it would be really easy to imitate, until you actually tried to write like him. A feature of the near-future world of Slapstick was that people were arbitrarily assigned to "second family" groups, like Daffodil and Oriole, as alternatives to their original biological families, because they need something that's family-like. It's something that I'm reminded of, again and again, when I see the connections that people make over the internet, through LJ communities and forums and the like, sometimes on the most tenuous bases. It's not exactly the same thing, of course, but it's the same basic concept, separate from the mechanisms involved. Vonnegut's writing has a lot of neat ideas like that.