The Sirens of Titan

Product Information

There's really three basic characters that are having things happen to them. Three main characters. [Malachi,] Rumfoord, and Bee. It's like a triangle, a complex, convoluted love story. And it's really that simple... So our task has been to take the essential dramatic relationships, make it playable for actors, so that it's free from the Big Picture emphasis of the book. There's also some extremely lovely, touching moments in the book. It's one of the few Vonnegut books that's really sweet, in parts of it, and it has some really lovely stuff in it. It's the range of it that gets me off. c. Some additional inter-story commentary from our narrator who hindsights this period of our history… Mercury. Planet nearest to the Sun to which Unk and Boaz are taken from Mars by an automatically piloted spaceship, which lands in a labyrinthine cave complex more than one hundred miles below the surface of Mercury’s perpetually dark side. During the three Earth years that Unk remains there, he tries to figure out how to escape, while he and Boaz lead increasingly separate lives. Boaz becomes enamored of the cave’s eerie harmonium creatures—the only lifeforms on the planet—which are nourished solely by vibrations. With the help of clues left by Rumfoord, Unk eventually leaves the planet by turning the spaceship upside down, so the sensors on its bottom side can find a way out of the caves. The only ostensible reason for Unk’s time on Mercury is to keep him safe from the slaughter of Martians taking place on Earth. 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.

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. A similar conclusion is reached when one looks at The Sirens of Titan as alternative history, i.e. as an account of the way things would have been, if they had taken a different turn at some point. Because the story is told by a future historian, it could be seen as an example of that class of fiction. But this would imply the possibility of choice or at least of a real alternative, a decisive event that tips the balance in one direction or the other, and this is obviously not the case. Quite to the contrary, history is here seen as absolutely predetermined. 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…

The villainous and super rich Malachi Constant is offered a chance to journey into the far reaches of outer space, to eventually live on the planet Titan surrounded by three beautiful sirens. There is the proverbial "small print" with this incredible offer, which Constant turns down, setting in motion a fantastic chain of events that only Vonnegut could imagine. The result is an uproarious, freewheeling inquiry into the very reason we exist and about how we participate and matter in the scheme of the universe. Mellard, James M. (1973): "The Modes of Vonnegut's Fiction: Or, Player Piano Ousts Mechanical Bride and the Sirens of Titan Invade the Gutenberg", in The Vonnegut Statement, eds. Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer. New York: Dell. Salo is a foreign emissary from a risibly-remote planet. He's travelled trillions of light years to deliver a loony-toons message.

Mayo, Clark. Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space (Or, Yes We Have No Nirvanas). San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. A fairly short book adopting Vonnegut’s style, voice, and satire while writing about Vonnegut. Discusses The Sirens of Titan in detail. The New England aristocrat Winston Niles Rumfoord has encountered a temporal anomaly, called a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" while travelling in his private spaceship together with his dog Kazak, and since then they both exist only as wave-spirals between the sun and Betelgeuse, materialising on Earth for a short while every 59 days. - Malachi Constant, the richest man in America, is invited to one of these materialisations and, while there, is prophesied by Rumfoord that he will travel to Mars and father a child on Rumfoord's disdainful wife Beatrice. Both Malachi and Beatrice try to avoid the fulfilment of this prediction, which is equally disgusting to both, but of course things turn out exactly the way Rumfoord had foretold. They are forced to join an army on Mars that consists of the outcasts of the Earth, who are brainwashed into human machines and consequently lose their identity. Constant is now called Unk and has lost all memory of his former self. He can even kill his best friend Stony Stevenson without any qualms. According to Rumfoord's plans, this army will make an assault on the planet Earth, be destroyed in the attempt, and thereby bring about the end of all wars and the unification of mankind, with Rumfoord as founder of a new universal religion, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Vonnegut answers the mysteries to the universe, particularly about God, but I was neither riled by those answers, nor moved, nor depressed by them. Ultimately, Vonnegut's message is that the universe and/or God doesn't really care about what we do and we should draw some sort of purpose out of that. The thing is, one, Vonnegut doesn't deliver this message in some sort of awe-inspiring way; not his style, I guess. So, I honestly felt like I just had some random stranger on the street walk up to me, say some stuff, and then walk away without it ever hitting me. Second, Vonnegut doesn't seem like he's trying to convince people of this view. Rather, it seems like he's speaking to those who already share his ideology--the influence on Stranger in a Strange Land can be seen! With its unpredictable plot, characters, humour and philosophical themes The Sirens of Titan is a triumphant little novel that confounded my expectations. In spite of the comedic tone throughout the narrative the book is underpinned by sadness and loneliness. The time traveling aspect of the story is of the “predestination model” where the past and future exist simultaneously and both are equally unmalleable. Malachi Constant’s futile attempts to thwart his destiny as revealed to him by Rumfoord is funny to begin with until all his agency is taken away from him and he becomes a tragic and pathetic figure. The storyline is quite unpredictable from beginning to end, the book is often very funny, and the end is wonderfully poignant. Vonnegut makes the reader question his place in the vast uncaring universe, and he (rightly) doesn't offer any easy answer. One very impressive feature of Vonnegut’s prose style is that it is deceptively simple but hides a shrewd perception of the human condition and human compassion. The Sirens of Titan was perhaps the novel that began the Vonnegut phenomenon with readers. The story is a fabulous trip, spinning madly through space and time in pursuit of nothing less than a fundamental understanding of the meaning of life. It takes place at a time in the future, when "only the human soul remained terra incognita ... the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression."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. a pleasant surprise while reading this was how timeless it felt. seriously! for 90% of the book, i was barely even noticing i was reading a story first published in 1959. Mayo, Clark (1977): Kurt Vonnegut. The Gospel from Outer Space. San Bernardino: R. Reginald/Borgo Press. Kurt Vonnegut, Junior was an American novelist, satirist, and most recently, graphic artist. He was recognized as New York State Author for 2001-2003.