“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.

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.

I must not be smart enough or high enough to understand this book.

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.

Disappointing. Really was. The story was lacking and the philosophy was thin. Not worth reading. Some good quotes though.

Actually, the quotes were really good.


Quotes:

"Winston Niles Rumfoord's smile and handshake dismantled Constant's high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel."

"Look forward to behaving aristocratically without any outward proofs your aristocracy. Look forward to having nothing but the dignity and intelligence and tenderness that God gave you-look forward to taking those materials and nothing else, and making something exquisite with them."

"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' And he says, 'Oh, fine, fine-couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."

"Life was like that, blanks and glimpses, and now and then maybe that awful flash of pain for doing something wrong."

"'Man,' said Boaz to Unk, trying to conceal the pathetic formlessness of his aspirations. 'We're going to go into some fine places and order us up some fine things, and circulate and carry on with some fine people, and just generally have us a good whoop-dee-doo.'"

"The more pain I train myself to stand, the more I learn. You are afraid of the pain now, Unk, but you won't learn anything if you don't invite the pain. And the more you learn the gladder you will be to stand the pain."

"The recruits' eyes were as empty as the windows of abandoned textile mills."

"Break every link with air and mist,
Seal every open vent;
Make throat as tight as miser's fist,
Keep Life within you pent.
Breathe out, breathe in, no more, no more,
For breathing's for the meek;
And when in deathly space we soar,
Be careful not to speak.
If you with grief or joy are rapt,
Just signal with a tear;
To soul and heart within you trapped
Add speech and atmosphere.
Every man's an island as in lifeless space we roam.
Yes, every man's an island; island fortress, island home."

"All I can see is people. They push me this way, then they push me that-and nothing pleases 'em, and they get madder and madder, on account of nothing makes 'em happy. And they holler at me on account of I ain't made 'em happy, and we all push and pull some more."

"Why thank God? He doesn't care what happens to you. He didn't go to any trouble to get you here safe and sound, any more than He would go to the trouble to kill you."

"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."

The Sirens of Titan, published in 1959, is now my favorite sci-fi novel by Kurt Vonnegut and one of the best sci-fi books that I’ve read.

The only other novel that I compare it to is hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Sirens is a bit more satirical and a little less comedic than Douglas Adam’s classic but the planet hopping travelogue motif is very similar nonetheless. In fact in the midst of typing up this review, I read that Douglas Adams read Sirens of Titan at least six times. Aha vindication! Great writers all get their inspiration from somewhere.

In any event, It’s remarkable how well this novel has held up after 60 years. Of course, I didn’t buy into the creatures living in caves on Mercury. Nobody did in the 1950’s either. But the overall story of Unk, Bee, Chronos and Winston was innovative and brilliant. Surprisingly humanistic book.

There are many plot summaries elsewhere, so I won’t give a synopsis here. As far as characters go, although the insolent child Chronos possesses zero redeeming qualities and doesn’t advance the plot, he is my favorite. Pure sarcasm and comic relief.

I was wary of picking up Vonnegut for a long time, because even though he's such a well regarded author, his plots are so science fiction based, and I have little to no interest in science fiction. After asking for book recommendations for my trip to Europe, my friend Amanda recommended this to me and I trust her taste, so I figured it was time for me and Vonnegut to get together. And I am so glad that we did.

As anticipated, yes, the plot was a bit ridiculous and very science fiction based, but the thing about Vonnegut is that there's so much going on outside of it that the plot almost becomes a supporting role in the entire construction. That sounds strange, I know, but if you've ever read him, you'll know what I mean.

I can't really go into detail too much about this or it will ruin the last portion of the book, but there are some incredibly interesting parallels between the war in Sirens and the war in Iraq.

This might be one of his lesser known works, but I love it, and it's absolutely a worthwhile read. Read it, read it, read it!

Observations from a first-time Vonnegut reader:

▫️It's a challenge going in to a well-loved / classic author and text. Will it work for you? Will you 'get it'? This book was highly recommended by several of my #bookstagram friends, and I had some of these thoughts before starting.

▫️KV's writing style took me a good 30 pages to get used to. Meandering, quick scene changes, and wryness. I expected that going in, but was still surprised. I came to love it, but it did take a few minutes to adapt to. It worked well for me to go back and reread the early portion after I had a feel for the style.

▫️Melancholic humor and philosophical in tone. Discussion of free will and purpose. That really worked for me. Unk's letter to himself on Mars - That was when I knew this was going to be special.

▫️Is this scifi? It happened to include interplanetary space travel, time warps, mechanized alien species... But it was specifically human. Of course, many scifi stories fit this same description and explore these same human themes.

▫️I noted, dog-eared and ruminated on many passages.

▫️Favorite scenes: Boaz and Unk on Mercury, Rumfoord's church on Earth, Rumfoord and Kazak on Titan, Chrono's life progression, Salo, and the ending.

As I read, it became obvious to me that this book was going to be hard to discuss. Especially without giving anything away. It's one that you feel more than you read, and when a fellow bookstagrammer told me it helped shape their life's philosophy, I totally got that. Those things can't be put into words in a "review".

The Sirens of Titan: An early Vonnegut classic about the randomness of life
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
This is a tough book to review. And it’s not really SF at all though it adopts the trappings of the genre. The thing about Kurt Vonnegut’s books is that they are so deceptively simple. The prose is spare, humorous, ironic, and to the point. And yet the story is very ambitious, as it seeks to provide answers to some very basic questions. Why do we exist? What is the universe for? Do we have any free will to determine our lives? Should we have chicken or fish for dinner?

The story focuses on Malachi Constant, the richest man in America; Winston Niles Rumfoord, an older wealthy man who travels throughout the solar system with his dog Kazak, manifesting in various locations in space and time; Unk and Boaz, two buddies in the Martian Army preparing to invade the Earth; Beatrice Rumfoord, who is afraid of living but ends up having a troubled son named Chrono; Salo the Tralfamadorian, an alien robot stranded far from home who has more emotions than many of the human characters.

The plot sounds ridiculous when written down. Winston Niles Rumfoord roams throughout the solar system, manifesting in various times and places after encountering a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. He can see the past and the future, and intercedes in human affairs, such as arranging an elaborate and utterly inept invasion of Earth by a Martian Army of conscripts controlled by radio antenna.

He also founds “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent” in the aftermath of this failed invasion, which turns the invaders into martyrs and makes the people of Earth feel guilty for eradicating them. The Church teaches people that they really shouldn’t expect any divine intervention in their lives, because clearly God doesn’t give a toss. This should liberate people to live their lives unencumbered by superstition, aware that life is what they make of it, and nobody is watching out for them.

Malachi Constant is the other main character, a fairly unpleasant person whose wealth was inherited from his absurdly lucky father, who spent his entire life in a hotel room betting on stocks with a unique and bizarre strategy, and also completely neglected Malachi as a child.

Malachi is a rich man in search of answers, but instead he finds himself spirited off to Mars after losing his fortune, losing his memory, getting embroiled in the fails Mars invasion, and finally ending up on the moon Titan with his lover and child, before being granted some final peace of mind at a bus stop in Indianapolis. Makes sense? Of course not, but then neither do our lives or the universe at large.

The Sirens of Titan, like all of Vonnegut’s books, really has a simple message behind the irony and absurdity. Our lives are not dictated by a divine plan, and people are free to be either good or evil without any particular consequences. But given those circumstances, wouldn’t it be better to be as kind and sympathetic to the people you love? And don’t take yourself so damn seriously.

SF Masterworks 18 - Vonnegut Jr's second published work - reputedly the whole plot was put together at the spur of the moment with no prior planning, when he was asked about his next book! So, first published in 1959, this comedic (yes I said comedic) sci-fi story, although showing all the hallmarks of Vonnegut Jnr's future greatness somehow gets a bit lost for me, not knowing if it is a comedy or an all encompassing look at the possible futility of human existence!

This does strike me as one of those books you need to read more than once to fully appreciate. I enjoyed the first half of the book, with the richest man in the world, Malachi Constant, getting caught up in a conspiracy with 'unwitting' time traveller and seer, Winston Niles Rumford; it's the shenanigans that result from Rumford's attempted manipulation of human history that kind of lost me. 4 out of 12.

This may be a perfect book. Not like "the most perfect book," but perfect in that there was not one superfluous sentence. Not one throwaway piece of dialogue. No errant threads of plot. Nothing cringe-inducing or trite. It is beautiful and smart and I might just read it again--after I've fully absorbed it this first time.

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 n  Alice's Adventures in Wonderlandn 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.