The Sirens of Titan

Lyn

Rating: really liked it
Somebody up there likes me.

One of my favorite film directors is Wes Anderson. I’m not sure if he is a fan of Kurt Vonnegut, but he should be and he should produce and direct the film adaption of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Sirens of Titan.

Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s second published novel, was released in 1959. Some aspects of his brilliant short story Harrison Bergeron, which was published in 1961, are revealed in the pages of Sirens. Other aspects of this novel are fairly representative of the later work that many people regard as his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. In fact, interestingly, aspects of several works in Vonnegut’s bibliography can be detected, including Galápagosand Slapstick or Lonesome No More!.

Player Piano may have been the first book published by Kurt Vonnegut, but Sirens of Titan was the first Vonnegut book.

Player Piano was an excellent story, a fine work of science fiction literature written by a man with much world experience and wisdom. But … for the body of work that would come, that great canon of literature that would inspire and entertain and provoke thought from generations of readers, the vanguard was Sirens of Titan.

Kurt Vonnegut, when he wrote Sirens of Titan, was 37 Earth years old, he was 6 feet 2 inches tall and had curly brown hair that his mother, Edith Lieber, called chestnut.

I have read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s books and I think Sirens of Titan was the book that formed the template, the engineering blueprint, for what would become.

And so it goes.

Stephen

Rating: really liked it
5 THINGS I KNOW I learned from reading Sirens of Titan

1. Kurt Vonnegut was a brilliantly insightful GENIUS whose brain waves were ever so slightly out of phase with our universe making complete comprehension of his work by the rest of us impossible;
2. In the hands of a master, literature can be both incredibly entertaining and soul-piercingly deep;
3. Vonnegut had a rock hard MAD on the size of a Dyson Sphere against Organized Religion;
4. Winston Niles Rumfoord is a Gigantanormous, Hobbit-blowing, Douchasaurus Rex (or if you prefer the proper latin phrase Giganticus, SamwiseGamgeeus, Douchbaggius Maximus); and
5. A Martian soldier unable to stand at attention because he has been strangled to death by his best friend...can be VERY, VERY FUNNY!!

There is quite a bit more that I’m pretty sure of after reading this Vonnegut classic, but on the above I am very confidant. I had so much fun with this book and I am sure that I still missed some of what Vonnegut was trying to say. His delivery is so dry and understated that if your attention wonders even for a moment, you can miss his point. I think this is one of those books that just screams to be read in a group and discussed. Maybe that’s why books like this lend themselves so well to re-reading every so often, because there is so much more there to find upon closer inspection.

PLOT SUMMARY

Here is a brief rundown of the plot (for what it’s worth). The story is told by an unnamed far future historian and takes place over a 40+ year period during the “Nightmare Ages”…“sometime between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.” The story revolves around 3 main characters are Malachi Constant, the aforementioned Winston Niles Rumfoord and Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice.

The story begins with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world, being granted a rare invitation to the Rumfoord Estate to witness a “materialization.” You see Winston Niles Rumfoord, while traveling between Earth and Mars with his pooch came in contact with a phenomenon called chrono-synclastic infundibulum (one of the truly remarkable concepts created by Vonnegut, but you’ll have to read for yourself). As a result of his encounter, Rumfoord now exists as a wave phenomena, has complete knowledge of the past a future, and “materializes” for a few minutes at his home every 59.9 days. Malachi is the first person (other than Beatrice) to be allowed to see and speak to Rumfoord during his visits.

During the visitation, Rumfoord tells Malachi all about his future (and the future of his wife Beatrice) and explains that Malachi will go on a series of journeys and will eventually end up, with Beatrice, on one of the moons of Saturn called Titan (hence the title). Malachi, not liking the idea that his path is set goes about doing everything he can to prevent the events Rumfoord has ordained.
This event starts the series of events that make up the novel. Along the way, Vonnegut bitch-slaps organized religion; puts forth a funny, witty and piercing examination of the question “Free Will: YES or NO?;” and follows his characters as they experience growth and change through the constant loss and destruction over everything they are.

A FEW FAVORITE MOMENTS

Without leaking too many details regarding the myriad of uncut gems that Vonnegut includes in this story, I do want to point out a few of my favorites.

On Religion

Clearly, Kurt's most all up in your face critiques are directed at “organized religion.” He doesn’t spend time bashing “belief” in any mean-spirited way. Rather, he focuses his ample ire on the “actions” that organized religion often leads its followers to perform. In this regard, my favorite satirical nuggest in this area were:

1. The Bible as Financial Analyst and Stock-picker.
2. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent (this name still makes me chuckle)
3. The Earth as God’s Spaceship and the 10 commandments reworked as a launch countdown.

On Free Will and Why We’re Here

My single favorite “idea” from the entire book is the central idea of the novel in which Vonnegut answers for us the “what’s it all about” question. His answer, delivered with classic VonnegutSHOTness is sublime. When you take:

a. The intro to the story by the narrating future historian; plus
b. The final “reveal” regarding the purpose behind all of the actions of the characters in the story; plus
c. Some additional inter-story commentary from our narrator who hindsights this period of our history…
…and add it all together…the result for your eyes, gut and mind is a truly popping, wrenching, expanding STOP YOU IN YOUR TRACKS moment that may require a few injections of Whiskey (or stronger) to take the razor sharp edge off. It is certainly commentary that will burrow into your memory and lay idea eggs.

So I really, really liked it.

In sum, a truly exceptional work by a truly exceptional author expressing some exceptionally powerful ideas that made my exceptionally tiny brain scream for an exceptionally long time until I downed an exceptionally large glass of some exceptionally good stuff and suddenly felt exceptionally well….and exceptionally wobbly.

HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!

Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1960)

Adina

Rating: really liked it
The Sirens of Titan is the 5th novel I’ve read by Kurt Vonnegut so you can say I am a fan. While it does not compare with Slaughterhouse-five and the Cat’s Cradle it was still good and I enjoyed returning to the humour the absurdity that I love. If you are interested to read Vonnegut I would not recommend starting this one. Any of the two that I mentioned above are a better choice.

Trying to summarize a book by Vonnegut is a very hard task to perform without sounding crazy but I will do my best. One guy, Winston Niles Rumfoord, sets to travel to Mars together with his dog where he falls into a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum which makes him to repeatedly and periodically materialize in different places. He materializes at his mansion every 50 days or so. During one of his appearances Rumfoord meets with Malachi Constant, the richest man on Earth, and predicts that the latter will travel to Mars, Earth and Titan. He also tells Constant that he will have a child with Rumfoord’s wife. Malachi refuses to believe the prophecy and does anything in his power to disprove it, even selling his stakes in the only company which was producing a ship capable to fly into space. From here, the novel follows a series of extraordinary and absurd events that will lead to the fulfilment of Rumfoors’s words. For people who read Slaughterhouse-five, Tralfamadore makes an appearance here as well.

Obviously, the Sirens of Titan is more than a novel where crazy stuff happens. Each of Vponnegut’s work is a satire and this one is no exception. However, the deeper meaning is not so obvious and it was not clear to me what the point of the novel was. I realized it questions free will and destiny, also questioning the idea of God and our belief that someone out there takes care of us. It seems the author believes that the fate of each human is “a victim of a series of accidents” without offering any possibility of control over them. He also muses that ‘the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.’ It also touches the absurdity of religions and wars among other subjects.

Manny

Rating: really liked it
I'll start with a roundabout introduction. Garry Kasparov was not just one of the best chessplayers of all time, he was also one of the best analysts. Even as a teenager, he was always coming up with the most amazing ideas. Chessplayers often prefer to hoard their ideas; it can be worth a lot to surprise your opponent in a critical game, and there are many stories about grandmasters keeping a new move in the freezer for years, or even decades. Kasparov asked his trainer if he should be hoarding too. "No, Garry!" came the sage reply. "Use them now! You'll get new ones." And, indeed, this turned out to be a correct prediction.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote Sirens of Titan early in his career, and I wonder if he didn't receive similar advice. The novel contains enough ideas for half a dozen normal books, and fairly bubbles with creative energy. I like it much more than Slaughterhouse Five, and I've always wondered why it isn't better known. I suppose it doesn't actually make sense; but, for goodness sakes, do things always have to make sense? Free associating for a moment, Candide, A Grand Day Out and the Old Testament are all undisputed masterpieces. None of them make sense, and they would be greatly diminished if they did. Put them together and package the result as a 50s SF novel, and you might get something a little bit like Sirens.

So, you have a naively optimistic central character, who suffers the most appalling reverses of fortune in a way that somehow ends up being more comic than tragic; but, instead of going to South America, he spends most of the book wandering around a Solar System which is very slightly more credible than Nick Park's cheese-flavored Moon. He's pursued by a God who's rather too fond of elaborate practical jokes, but who is simultaneously trying to use the story to convey deep truths about the meaning of life. Unless He's just kidding. It's a bit hard to tell, but isn't that normal for pronouncements made under the influence of divine inspiration?

I see I've left out all the good bits. I haven't mentioned the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Or Bea's sonnet, "Every Man's an Island", about how to breathe in space. Or Salo, and his message for the people at the other end of the Universe. Or Universal Will to Become. Or even the Sirens. If you haven't already done so, why don't you buy the book and check them all out for yourself? It's an easy read, and it even has a happy ending. I think.

Ahmad Sharabiani

Rating: really liked it
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

The Sirens of Titan is a Hugo Award-nominated novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., first published in 1959. His second novel, it involves issues of free will, omniscience, and the overall purpose of human history. Much of the story revolves around a Martian invasion of Earth.

Malachi Constant is the richest man in a future America. He possesses extraordinary luck that he attributes to divine favor which he has used to build upon his father's fortune.

He becomes the center point of a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars in preparation for an interplanetary war, to Mercury with another Martian survivor of that war, back to Earth to be pilloried as a sign of Man's displeasure with his arrogance, and finally to Titan where he again meets the man ostensibly responsible for the turn of events that have befallen him, Winston Niles Rumfoord. ...

تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و یکم ماه فوریه سال2012میلادی

عنوان: افسونگران تایتان؛ نویسنده: کورت ونه گات؛ مترجم: علی اصغر بهرامی؛ تهران، نیلوفر، سال1390، در376ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده20م

مردی با سفینه اش، وارد چاله های فضایی شده، و اکنون بیرون از زمان است، و در زمان مسافرت میکند؛ او فهمیده، زنش و یکی از هنرپیشه های هالیوود توسط مریخیها دزدیده شده، و با هم بچه دار میشوند و ....؛ «ونه گات» باورهای روز دنیای غرب را، در این اثر به رشته ی نگارش درآورده؛ از عصر روشنگری، تا نظریه‌ های فیزیک کوانتوم؛ خوانش و درک طنز، و درونمایه های اثر، برای خوانشگرانی که با اسطوره های غربی آشنا نیستند، بسیار کند است، گاه خوانشگر منظور متن را درنمییابد، با اینحال اثری با چشم اندازی نو، و جهانشمول است؛ «ونه گات»، در این رمان، با دستمایه قرار دادن اسطوره‌ و کلان روایتها، و شوخی، و دست‌ انداختن آنها، در پی به چالش کشیدن وضعیت بشر کنونی است، که علیرغم خیال تسخیر کهکشانها، و دستیابی اش به کره ی ماه، و سیارات منظومه شمسی، نه تنها همچون نیاکان خویش، خوشبختی، هنوز هم برایش میسر نیست، بلکه زندگی، برایش از بگذشته ها نیز، ناآشناتر نمایان است؛ عنوان رمان، برگرفته از عنوانهای اسطوره ها، و کهن الگوهای غربی است، شخصیتها: «خدایان»، «الهگان»، یا قهرمانانی هستند، که به سبب برخورداری از نیروهای فرابشری، توان انجام کارهای فراطبیعی را دارند؛ «ملاکی کنستانت»، یا انسانها، در این اسطوره‌ ها، یا باید شاهد فرود عذاب از جانب خدایان باشند، یا به جبر سرنوشت خویش، تن دهند، و نیروهای فرابشری را قهرمانان خویش بدانند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 12/10/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 03/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

BlackOxford

Rating: really liked it
Love the One You're With

Most of Vonnegut's enduring tropes start life in Sirens :
- Time and its distortions
- Places like Newport and Indianapolis
- People such as Rumfoord and Ben and Sylvia
- The planet Tralfamadore and its inhabitants
- And of course the Volunteer Fire Department

What holds these oddities together is what holds everything of Vonnegut together, an ethical theology. His sci-fi is a way of displacing talk about God just enough to do some serious thinking. And he may indeed have inspired a new generation of thinkers about God as a consequence.

Vonnegut's Church of God the Utterly Indifferent follows a teaching remarkably like a Christian theology developed almost 40 years after Vonnegut's novel. This theology of the Weakness of God rejects the idea of God as the all-powerful fixer of the universe. And it rejects the idea that power flows downhill, as it were, from the divine source to spiritual and secular leaders. Its ethical import is that all of us are engaged in a search for God, and that the only help we have in this search comes from our fellow human beings.

This is essentially Vonnegut's Titanic Theology. “The two chief teachings of this religion are these: Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God." God does not interfere in human affairs; he is what in traditional theology is called 'apathetic'. He is not affected one iota by human action. In short "God Does Not Care." Whatever morality there is in human life comes not from His interests or the possible benefits from pleasing Him, but from the necessity for the community life of human beings.

So the ethic of Vonnegut's theology is direct and clear. There is only one commandment: "These words will be written on that flag in gold letters on a blue field: Take Care of the People, and God Almighty Will Take Care of Himself." This mandate requires no complicated exegesis or commentary. Nevertheless it's profundity takes a while to sink in: “It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

In a world ruled by such an ethos there is the possibility of pain, but of a particular sort: “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody,” she said, “would be to not be used for anything by anybody.” So-called ‘Weakness Theologians’ like John Caputo are apt to agree: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

J.L. Sutton

Rating: really liked it
“The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.”

Always prophetic. Always relevant. In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, we accompany Malachi Constant on adventures through time and space. He is unlike any other hero you're likely to read about; Malachi "was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." The plot, which seems ridiculous and completely random (like those series of accidents), takes on visionary proportions in Vonnegut's hands. Especially in this novel, I thought about how much Vonnegut had influenced Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Whereas Vonnegut uses the absurd to explore what makes us human (because what else really is there besides the absurd?), Adams takes the absurd and turns it into a funny and highly entertaining romp. (I was so struck by the similarities that I began to re-read Adams even before finishing Sirens). I recommend this book for any fan of Vonnegut or Adams. Finally, by having our 'hero,' Malachi, as an unwitting victim of his own adventures (during a lifetime of learning and unlearning), Vonnegut approaches tragedy, but he turns away from it because that would be taking this life much too seriously.

jessica

Rating: really liked it
‘the sirens of titan’ (or as i have alternatively titled it, ‘why life is the universes greatest long con’) is the perfect catalyst for my impending existential crisis - all courtesy of john!

in this review, i will explore the two major themes of the novel, state what we can learn them, and explain how these lessons apply to our meager lives.

lets get started.

free will || ah, the biggest illusion of them them all. if the universe was a magician, the fact that we somehow believe we have control over our lives would be considered the finale, the best trick saved for last. because we are nothing more than 'victims of a series of accidents.' the combination of random events created us and will continue to lead us and nothing we can do or say has any influence over that. there is no way to control that which is unpredictable. (alexa, play despacito.)

meaning and purpose || if you choose to believe vonnegut, intrinsically everyone knows how to find the meaning of life within themselves. meaning that, even though we just established we have no control over our lives, we can still find meaning/purpose and make it highly personal in nature. in this instance, i agree with the book, in that ‘the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.’ unfortunately for me, im painfully single.

in closing, what have we learned? its that life is meaningless but we should be happy about it.

because even though we may not be able to control what life throws at us, we have the innate disposition to be able to make it meaningful. thats what makes us human.

and that is something we all could do well to remember.

thanks for coming to my ted talk.

↠ 4.5 stars

Fergus

Rating: really liked it
Salo is a foreign emissary from a risibly-remote planet. He's travelled trillions of light years to deliver a loony-toons message.

He's a likeable little gnome.

And if you said that's a ridiculous satire on the gee-whiz Boys from NASA spending umpteen gadzilions of Taxpayers' Dollars for a (whoops) Intimately Freudian rocket ship thrusting into deep space, bearing greetings from us poor humanoids - yes, complete with kiddy-like line drawings of two healthy, well-adjusted WASPS (male and female, of course) - well, then, I guess you read ole Kurt's mind.

Well.

And what if you belong to a dirt-poor part of the populace, and don't much care for Rich Folks' Gentrification Projects for Deep Space?

Kurt Vonnegut can read your lips!

So it goes.

That and a buck fifty may buy you a nice coffee.

It drove the poor man down the path of despair, right into the Monkey House, in fact. If you think the zany situations from Welcome to the Monkey House's collection of fictional gems were made up by an average normal American male, think again.

Vonnegut was as real as they get.

Warts and Blooming All.

Back in the early sixties, there was a little song - I think Bobby Goldsboro sang it - about a Funny Little Clown:

See the funny little clown -
I'm laughing on the outside
But I'm crying on the inside...

Don't let anyone tell you Kurt Vonnegut wasn't that clown -

For though his satire may SCALD -

His Endless Compassion could HEAL this poor old world.

Leonard Gaya

Rating: really liked it
For one thing, according to Epicurean philosophy, the gods are in a state of perfect ataraxia and mind their own business. They have no needs and, although they are omniscient and can observe all points in the space-time continuum, nor do they bother themselves much about us, insignificant human beings. Perhaps the same could be said of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. In Slaughterhouse-Five, they abduct poor Billy Pilgrim to their intergalactic zoo and observe with mild interest how he breeds with a porn-star mate. So it goes.

For another thing, here too, in The Sirens of Titans, we’ll meet the creatures from Tralfamadore and see if they can or even wish to do us, humans, any good. The unfortunate Malachi Constant (the protagonist) will travel across the whole solar system, from Earth to Mars, from Mars to Mercury and from there back to Earth and on to Titan, in the periphery of Saturn and the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Meanwhile, he will suffer all sorts of hardships and strokes of bad luck — “a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all...” (LoA, vol. 1, p. 485). Still, despite it all, he will maintain to the very end that “somebody up there likes me” (p. 313). Malachi Constant is, in many ways, like Candide in Voltaire’s short novel, a die-hard optimist who, in the end, comes back from the dead, and gains a modicum of wisdom along the way. While Candide concluded that “one must cultivate one’s own garden” (an Epicurean motto, if ever there was one), Malachi declares that “it took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” (p. 528)

For another thing, The Sirens of Titan was published in 1959, the same year as Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The former was already touching on the nature of reality, and the latter already preaching about America’s moral standards. In The Sirens, Vonnegut, like PKD, plays with memory manipulation and all sorts of mindfuck; like Heinlein, he touches on the topic of war and the military but doesn’t linger on it for very long.

For another thing, what Vonnegut does here, though, is lay out one of his first “mosaic of jokes”, as he liked to call his books. Indeed, The Sirens of Titan is primarily a parody of trashy pulp science fiction novels, a boisterous, chucklesome book, written in syncopated, eclectic, dense textures, high energy, tangled threads, plot twists aplenty, extended techniques and unorthodox uses of language, and finally landing on its feet at the end. In this sense, The Sirens of Titan, twenty years early, precedes and foreshadows (and, I would say, is superior to) Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Vit Babenco

Rating: really liked it
There are plenty of space travels in The Sirens of Titan but it isn’t a space opera… It is a spaced out satire, a cosmic comedy of manners…

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth – a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Some enigmatic space phenomenon had turned a lonely space scout into something similar to photon, possessing properties of both particle and wave, and spread him all over outer space and time, making him periodically appear and disappear in different places as his material self…

Winston Niles Rumfoord vanished slowly, beginning with the ends of his fingers, and ending with his grin. The grin remained some time after the rest of him had gone.

This smart allusion to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland surely gave me an agreeable frisson.
Consequently, to improve humankind and to better its destiny omnipresent and omniscient Rumfoord decided to become a universal do-gooder and began to commit a hellish lot of preposterous deeds and even fashioned a new religion…

“O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!”

But however absurd new religion may seem it can’t be more absurd than those religions that already exist.

Danger

Rating: really liked it
3RD READ-THROUGH 4/18/17: Since I was about 19, I’ve been referring to this novel as my “favorite book.” I don’t know if *quite* holds that distinction still, having read a lot more in the succeeding 15 years, but it is STILL, without question one of the best! This book might be the “plottiest” of all of Vonnegut’s novels, while I enjoy the voice later Vonnegut much more (The Sirens of Titan was only his second book) the ideas presented here are deep and varied, lying what is obviously the philosophical and spiritual groundwork for a lifetime of work to still come. This book still hits, and it hits HARD. If you haven’t read this and don’t rectify that immediately, then I don’t think we can be friends. 5 GIGANTIC STARS!

This is my favorite Vonnegut book, and I've read them all, except for one, which I am afraid to read because he is dead now and once I read that last book there won't be any more to read and my life will be meaningless.

Vince

Rating: really liked it
It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

That wasn't funny. That wasn't funny at all. In fact I'm heartbroken. I went into this expecting a science fiction/satire but instead I got an emotionally moving story about the meaning of life by none other than one of the greatest writers that ever lived. Period.

Malachi Constant is rich, filthy rich and lives a wasteful and feckless life on planet earth. He later gets invited, seemingly at random, to go to the estate of one, Wintson Niles Rumfoord, a man who has the ability to travel through space and time, materializing in and out of thin air with his dog, Kazak. With this omniscient ability he tells Constant that he will impregnate his wife Beatrice Rumfoord, have a child named Chrono and end up on the biggest moon around Saturn called Titan to live out the rest of his days. On top of that Mars will declare war on Earth with interesting results that will change humanity forever. It's quite out there, but that's Vonnegut for you.

I'm so afraid of saying more in regards to spoilers so I'd advise going into this book blind as it's filled with many surprises. Slaughterhouse 5 was my all-time favorite Vonnegut book but this book is giving it a run for its money. One of the greatest books I've ever read.

5 harmoniums out of 5.

I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.

Dave

Rating: really liked it
Is it Fate or Coincidence?

The Sirens of Titan is an odd satirical twist of a science fiction novel which explores nothing quite as grand as the meaning of life. There are echoes here of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide, but guess what. Sirens of Titan came first. Legend has it that Vonnegut wrote this in a few hours while at a dinner party. Obviously, some of the ideas were percolating in his head for awhile.

It is most of all a book of ideas. Vonnegut has the reader pondering the nature of luck, of fate, of coincidence, of predestination, of higher powers, and of course free will. Like stories about time travel, he posits the question of whether, knowing your destiny, can you avoid it or are you fated to fulfill that destiny no matter what. Even knowing the future only weds you to that future (as Leto Atriedes later discovered).

And what is free will. Are we controlled by destiny? By ancient space aliens like just so many marionettes? By the March of preordained history? If we are controlled by fate is it so different from a radio controlled army marching in lockstep? One of Vonnegut’s oddest satires is the notion of the invasion by Martians who are mind-controlled earthlings kidnapped and trained and who have their memories wiped.

Sirens of Titan is by no means a normal novel. It’s plotting is odd, different, unusual. The characters are all odd, disjointed, and never quite fit in or get along.

But what makes it work is the questions it keeps posing. Vonnegut plays with our sense of reality in ways that would make Neo and the Matrix proud. And, all throughout, Vonnegut keeps bothering the readers with issues of what’s fair and just. He asks if being lucky 🍀 is just some random thing like picking stocks based on the letters of biblical passages or if the fair thing is to handicap those born with advantages. Is it fair that some can run a four minute Mile and the rest of us mortals can’t. By George, let’s make the fastest carry weights so we can all be equal.

Vonnegut also has fun with mass media and the rumor mill, fortune tellers, and televangelists. He looks at mass hypnosis and the psychology of crowds. But, in the end, he keeps coming back to the meaning of life and whether playing music for ten thousand amoebas 🦠 is more important than finding your way home.

Kedar

Rating: really liked it
Do you read a Vonnegut book, or does the book read you? Does it expose your thoughts to the most detailed analysis of humanity, human behavior, and human mind and then tells you to not give a damn? Except that it also seizes the phrase 'to not give a damn' from your control. Leaves you hanging midair. Questioning.

So what to do? What is to be done? Apart from whatever has already been done?

You go beyond the story. See Unk staring at you pointedly with a hazy gaze. Figure out if he thinks whether you are in control of the story or is he the real commander. Go beyond the cliché, beyond the at-times stupendously obvious humour. Look at the blanketed irony. Then either sleep in the warmth of ignorance or throw away the cover and dive deep in the chills of reality.

Reading Vonnegut is probably a religion. The Church of God the Exquisitely Sarcastic.

Shake hands with Rumfoord. If he allows you to do so.

Peer through the kaleidoscope of allusions. The allusions in the form of the War, Harmoniums, Old Salo. A machine with a heart, as opposed to humans with emotions hardened as Titanic peat due to over exposure to something unrecognized or overtly familiar. Kazak, the dog on the leash. The soulless slave of gravity.

In between become "unstuck in time" while reading the events that led to the initiation of the formation of "The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent". Keep reading and re-reading several passages.

I have a feeling that I am lost. Lost while comprehending the gravitational depth for each line Vonnegut has written. I don't know whether I really liked this book or I really want to like it more than I did. I wonder what planet influenced me to write this review. The Hindu religion does give a lot of importance to planets and their influences on your life and the reviews you write.

I will abstain from asking myself these questions after a Vonnegut book in future. Best is to try and emulate the sweet sounds of Poo-tee-weet.

I need a stiff drink.