The Sirens Of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan is a space novel in the same way a piano falling down a staircase is a musical event. It has rockets, Mars, Mercury, Titan, interplanetary travel, alien manipulation, human destiny, free will, religion, war, wealth, stupidity, loneliness and the usual Vonnegut suspicion that the universe may be less a grand design than a practical joke with casualties.

At the centre is Malachi Constant, the richest and luckiest man in America, which is a dangerous position in a Vonnegut novel because luck usually arrives carrying a bill. Malachi is swept into a cosmic itinerary he neither understands nor deserves, while Winston Niles Rumfoord, having become unstuck in space-time, turns up periodically with the irritating confidence of a man who has already read the next chapter of everyone’s life. Between them unfolds a journey through planets, armies, prophecies and humiliations large enough to make personal dignity seem almost antique.

Vonnegut takes the machinery of classic science fiction and fills it with human absurdity. Mars has an army, because of course it does. Earth invents religion around misunderstanding, because of course it does. People search for meaning, because they are built that way; the universe supplies explanations that are either cruel, ridiculous, accidental or all three, because the universe has never been especially customer-focused. If there is a plan, it may not be flattering. If there is purpose, it may involve spare parts.

The irony of the book is that it is wildly cosmic and bitterly domestic at the same time. Whole planets are involved, but the emotional scale remains painfully human: vanity, love, resentment, obedience, loneliness, shame, hope. Vonnegut’s future is not sleek. It is dented, bureaucratic, militarised, sentimental, stupid and oddly tender, which is to say it resembles the present wearing a space helmet it found in a cupboard.

This is early Vonnegut at his bleakly comic best: science fiction used not as escape, but as a viewing platform from which humanity can be seen more clearly and found waving the wrong flag. His sentences have that deceptively casual snap, as if the end of civilisation were being explained by a man leaning in a doorway with a cigarette and no great faith in management.

For readers of satirical science fiction, existential comedy, anti-war fiction, cosmic farce, fate, free will, and books where the meaning of life may turn out to be both enormous and insulting, The Sirens of Titan is essential shelf material. It is funny, sad, strange, sharp and deeply suspicious of anyone claiming to know what it all means.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Indigo paperback, ready to sit on the science fiction shelf looking harmless while quietly suggesting that the universe has been making arrangements behind your back.

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