It is the year 2001. Eugene Debs Hartke, a West Point graduate who, in 1975, found himself in charge of the humilitating evacuation of personnel from the roof of the American embassy 'after the excrement hit the air-conditioning' in Vietnam, now finds himself awaiting trial for supposedly masterminding the biggest prison-break in history - the escape of 10,000 convicts from the New York state maximum security Adult Correctional Institution. How did a good soldier who never used profane language come to be in such a mess? Time and luck. Unknowlingly fathering an illegitimate son with the young female war correspondent from the Des Moines Register on the way hoke form Saigon; marrying a pretty and personable young woman whose booby-trapped genes a re primed to fire her off into insanity; becoming a respected teacher of the terminally ineducable pupils of Tarkington College; remarking innocently that the dollar no longer ranks as a basic workd currency, having been supplanted by the Japanese Yen and fellatio - these things may, or may not, have had something to do with it...With Swifian satire and gonzo wit, Kurt Vonnegut juggles his favourite themes in a novel as fresh and brilliantly off-beat as anything he's written. Hocus Pocus is, quite simply, vintage Vonnegut.