Have you heard of Charles Darwin? Irish elk? Antonio José de Sucre? Ikebana? Rudolf Nureyev? Jackie Kennedy Onassis? The Kanka-bonos—I don’t think so, as Vonnegut has made them up. Blue-footed boobies? Vampire finches—the list goes on. No? Well, crack open Galápagos, and you’ll be in the dark no more. Gorgeous and meditative and funny and circuitous, you may just finish it feeling like you’ve stimulated the big brain that is to blame for every single problem in your life. You’re your own worst enemy, as it turns out, and there’s nobody you’d rather have enlighten you on this than Kurt Vonnegut.

Humans, one million years in the future

What would happen if, due to a virus that prevents women from reproducing, all but a handful of humans die out? In which direction would evolution go if we suddenly had to live without modern technology?

This is something I sometimes wonder about. If a virus suddenly wiped out nine-tenths of us, or some idiot wannabe dictator slammed his tiny hands on that big red nuclear weapon button because someone hurt his feelings and tweeting a childish tantrum just wasn't enough to show how yugely pissed he was...... shrouding the world in nuclear radiation for decades to come.

Even if humans don't suddenly have to start over with just a handful of us, what will we be like a million years from now? (That is, provided we don't entirely kill ourselves off through greed or stupidity.)

Whether or not you've ever pondered these questions, Kurt Vonnegut has some answers.

He envisioned a virus that kept women from reproducing. At this time (1986 to be exact, so don't worry. It didn't happen), a small number of humans were isolated and marooned on one of the Galapagos Islands and were the only ones to whom this virus didn't spread. The women of this island were the only ones able to reproduce, passing on their DNA from one generation to the next.

If you know anything about how evolution works, you should have no problem understanding why Vonnegut saw humans, stranded on this island, becoming seal-like.

He writes Galapagos with his usual dry wit and critical view of humanity. He decides our big brains are responsible for our suffering, and we would be much happier without them. 

And if we had flippers instead of hands, we could no longer enslave our fellow human beings, or build weapons to destroy our world and each other. 

It's a fun book and if you've enjoyed any of Vonnegut's other works, you don't want to miss this one. 

The characters are all too-human with their flaws and wants and dislikes and likes and big brains and everything else that makes us the complicated beings we are. 

Oh, and what a fun surprise to find out, 70% of the way through, who the narrator is!!!

Kurt Vonnegut’s 11th novel and as so often before challenges his reader.

A global financial disaster has ruined the world. One million years later the ghost of Leon Trout, son of recurring Vonnegut character Kilgore, narrates the story of a boat cruise for the rich and famous, Mick Jagger was to be one of the famous voyagers, that is off to the Galápagos Islands to see the wild life, a voyage of a lifetime. The celebrities don’t make it as a financial collapse, a useless war between Ecuador and Peru breaks out and the entire world suffers an apocalypse. No one survives the worldwide catastrophe except those on the boat. It eventually makes its way to the Galápagos Islands and from there all life on earth is descended from the survivors.

The thematic points are that human species is a blend of greed, evil, and good. It is generally Humanist if it likes it or not, at times technophobic and just maybe Darwinist survivors. Vonnegut has always claimed that man is essentially a good creature. FWIW, I wonder if I agree with him on that point, though. On the other hand, he survived Dresden and I pontificate from the safety of a place that has never seen war in its existence.

Vonnegut was as usual, and strangely in my opinion, able to make Sci Fi tropes among the satire, comedy and social commentary very prescient. There was a machine called Mandarax, that was a voice translator and able to suggest quotations from literature and historical figures. I have to admit that I was scurrying down the internet wormhole just to read where a lot of these quotes used came from, and what a joy that journey was. Strangely I said? Sci Fi can fail the vast majority of the time in an attempt to use future tropes that work but for many of Vonneguts futuristic ideas he has had in his books, he has senibly used them as thematic tools. Mandrax was the invention of a Japanese man who was going on the cruise at the behest of a US millionaire who had profitable plans to its use. Google now offers on our phones an app that translates text with one’s camera. Mandrax future demise in the book may have been a comment on older generational thought not enjoying new technology. This was sad for the survivors of the apocalypse, really. No longer would they have the joys of (as per wiki and in order of their appearance in the book) Anne Frank, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, William Cullen Bryant, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Byron, Noble Claggett, John Greenleaf Whittier, Benjamin Franklin, John Heywood, Cesare Bonesana Beccaria, Bertolt Brecht, Saint John, Charles Dickens, Isaac Watts, William Shakespeare, Plato, Robert Browning, Jean de La Fontaine, François Rabelais, Patrick R. Chalmers, Michel de Montaigne, Joseph Conrad, George William Curtis, Samuel Butler, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Oscar Hammerstein II, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles E. Carryl, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Lear, Henry David Thoreau, Sophocles, Robert Frost, and Charles Darwin.


Again, one for the Vonnegut reader in my opinion and recommended as such.

My review of number 1 Player Piano.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 3 Mother Night.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 4 Cats Cradle.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 6 Slaughter House Five
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 7 Breakfast Of Champions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 8 Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 9 Jailbird.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
My review of number 10 Deadeye Dick.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...