It deserves the title 'SF Masterwork'
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For some reason it was America that held the monopoly on the SF satirical novel. Vonnegut, and later Sladek and Sheckley and indeed Dick with his more subtle comedy, produced some sublime works which turned society on its head and forced us to take a long hard look.
For Nineteen Fifty-Nine this is a remarkable novel, published at a time when SF was arguably becoming very serious about itself.
There is nothing scientific or realistic about `The Sirens of Titan'. As Dick was later to do to incredible effect, Vonnegut used the language of SF to make his own points without letting any of those annoying scientific facts get in the way of the story.
The central figure, Winston Niles Rumfoord, is a billionaire with his own private spaceship which he promptly flies into a Syno-Chronastic Infundibulum which transforms him (and his dog Kazak who happened to be with Rumfoord on the ship) into a wave of energy pulsing between our sun and Betelgeuse. The upshot of this is that Rumfoord can see the past and future simultaneously. Niles reappears on Earth every fifty-nine days and has spoken to no one but his wife and butler until the day he summons fellow billionaire Malachi Constant.
Rumfoord tells Constant that he will travel to Mars, then to Mercury, back to Earth and then to Titan, amongst other things.
Malachi of course is highly sceptical and so Vonnegut begins a tour-de-force of storytelling in which Rumfoord manipulates the entire world, while using Malachi - in some cases quite literally - as a puppet.
What only becomes clear later is that Rumfoord himself is only a tiny part in a two hundred thousand year old plan by the Tralfamadoreans to get a spare part to a stranded messenger on Titan. He is taking a secret message to a race in another part of the galaxy, the final irony being that the message is a simple dot, which translates in Tralfamadorean as `greetings!'
Vonnegut employs many SF clichés in new and surprising ways. The billionaire's private prototype spaceship for instance is straight out of an EE `Doc' Smith adventure. The flying saucers of course, by Nineteen Fifty-Nine were a familiar staple of B-movies. Salo, the Tralfamadorean who has been waiting on Titan for Two Hundred Thousand Years for his spare part, is a three-legged robot who, unaccountably, has developed more compassion and emotion than most of the human cast.
Above all, in a genre that was previously awash with novels about the superiority of Humanity, The Sirens of Titan emphasises the sheer insignificance of our world.
The only British successor of any note to Vonnegut is Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy's central premise (that the Earth was designed by mice as a giant organic computer to answer one specific question) is very similar to that of Vonnegut's. One should also note Kingsley Amis' `The Alteration' which can hold its own as a British novel in the satirical SF novel stakes against all-comers. See also Richard Cowper. These have been unjustly overshadowed by the popularity of the US authors for reasons which cannot be fathomed.
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Superb, bleakly blackly funny and provocotive
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This is my first read of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. I can only say i found it gripping. It's imaginative, and so astoundingly modern in its tone, you could be forgiven for thinking it was written this year!
The pace never lets up. It is thought provoking and enormously (though darkly) funny. It really is a five star read. And I'm going to look in to some of his other novels too. I've been told that "Slaughter house 5" is also a fine read.
It's a weird, warped, beautifully captured universe. I'd find it hard to believe anybody wouldn't enjoy this.
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"God Does Not Care About You"
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Kurt Vonnegut careens from crazed premise to crazed premise like a narrative pinball. A TARDIS in book form, the novel contains more ideas than it seems possible to cram into its 224 pages, with Vonnegut's imagination almost being a chronosynclastic infundibulum of its own, "a place where all truths fit together". And holding it all together is the idea that there is nothing or nobody holding it all together.
Like most of Vonnegut's novels, the humour is fast, sharp and pitch black. In many ways, the story is similar to Voltaire's "Candide", although perhaps more sympathetic. In "Candide", Voltaire's characters are little more than archetypes off which to bounce ideas off, or even collide them headfirst into them. Vonnegut clearly invites us to feel for his characters, despite how repellent and awful they may at first appear.
The new Gollancz edition has much to recommend for itself, being published in a knowingly pulpy format, complete with eyecatching book design and a cheerfully informative foreword by Jasper Fforde.
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Vonnegut's best novel
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I have read this early Vonnegut many times, and it never loses its freshness. If all Sci Fi were like this, the genre might actually attract good writers. This is a masterpiece of ingenujity, black humour, and fine writing that uses sci-fi ideas (but ideas superior to those found in the average sci-fi novel) to produce the most nihlistic ever written. The pay-off (which I will not spoil for others) has to be the darkest comment on human pride and ambition, and on the meaning of the universe that anyone has ever written. Forget Slaughterhouse 5, however good, and buy this right away.
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A different sort of SF
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If you think SF is about Star Wars, then think again.
This is a typical vonnegut novel, with the narrative being a bit odd, even taking on a crazed air. People familiar with other books from the same author will find this familiar.
The book is about fate, religion and mans place in the universe. This all sounds a bit heavy, but it is all done in a humorous and absurdist way. A bit like 'Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy'. For all this, the book does have something serious to say, and as such is a memorable and important book.
Like all of his books, reading it is a bit like taking a fairground ride, and an enjoyable one at that. Read it.
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