First published in 1959, The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960 (and lost to Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein). It was Vonnegut’s second novel, and, coincidentally, after Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969), it is the second Vonnegut I’ve had the pleasure of reading. It sits more within the science fiction genre than that later work (though it also featured and utilised a number of science fiction tropes), which I understand is the case for Vonnegut’s earlier oeuvre. However, The Sirens of Titan is still written in a style, and tells a story, which seems, based on my admittedly limited experience, uniquely Vonnegutian. In summary, The Sirens of Titan is a darkly satirical story about a Martian invasion of Earth, told in deceptively simple language and comic style, exploring themes of fortune, subjectivity, and determinism.
Malachi Constant starts the book as the luckiest man on Earth, and for this Vonnegut makes him suffer. He suffers so that Vonnegut can ask the question: if there were a God, why would he favour certain people over others? As the richest man in the world, Malachi mistakenly attributes the accumulation of such wealth to divine favour, when it should more properly be viewed as the consequence of extraordinary luck. This is very much a point of fact in respect of Malachi, who inherited his wealth from his father. Malachi’s father in turn made his fortune by using a Gideon’s Bible found in his hotel room to guide his random investment strategy in the share market.
Malachi is kidnapped and taken from Earth to Mars, where his mind is wiped and he is conscripted into a Martian army in preparation for an interplanetary war. However, when the time comes, Malachi is separated from the invasion fleet, and wiles away the short and disastrous war in the deep caves of Mercury, while almost the entire Martian army is wiped out. Malachi eventually finds his way back to Earth, where he is pilloried by the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. The two chief teachings of this new religion are that “Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.” By the end of the novel, Malachi becomes the ultimate symbol of the individual’s propensity to conceive that he or she is favoured by God, as opposed to just damn lucky.
These opposing views of divine favour and luck go hand-in-hand with an examination of the concept of subjectivity in The Sirens of Titan. The man responsible for the turn of events that befall Malachi is Winston Niles Rumfoord, a wealthy New Englander who used his private fortune to fund the construction of a personal spacecraft. Traveling between Earth and Mars with his dog, Kazak, Rumfoord crashed into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum – a kind of wormhole through time and space, “where all the different kinds of truths fit together”. There are many possible ways to observe a universe as big as the one we inhabit, all of which are equally valid. The chrono-synclastic infundibulum are places where these “ways to be right” coexist.
In contrast to the concept of the infundibulum, the presentation of adverse and irreconcilable perspectives of truth recur throughout The Sirens of Titan; one large-scale example being the opposing perspectives of the Martian and Earth civilisations. The Sirens of Titan presents a number of competing truths, and it becomes impossible for the reader to determine which one is the absolute truth. It is tempting to believe that Vonnegut is suggesting there is no absolute truth. However, as events unfold in the novel, a preferable reading is that Vonnegut suggests that an absolute truth may exist, but that it is ultimately unknowable (even to those who have entered an infundibulum).
The notion of an unknowable, but absolute truth is accompanied by the idea that the course of history has been predetermined, and this duality between determinism and free-will laces its way throughout the novel. When they entered the infundibulum, Romfoord and Kazak became a “wave phenomena” and exist along a spiral stretching from the sun to the distant star of Betelgeuse. When a planet, such as the Earth, intersects their spiral, Rumfoord and Kazak materialize, temporarily, on that planet. In this state Rumfoord has become omniscient, and aware of all time and space. With his god-like powers, Rumfoord instigated the Martian invasion, which he designed to fail spectacularly in order to unite Earth in an everlasting age of comradeship.
But things are more complicated for Rumfoord than we first realise. Titan’s orbit around Saturn places the moon constantly within the intersection of Rumfoord and Kazak’s spiralling wave phenomena, and therefore, it is the only place where they permanently materialize. On Titan, Rumfoord befriends Salo, an alien traveller from Tralfamadore, who needs a small metal component to repair his damaged spaceship. Almost immediately upon breaking down, Salo requested assistance from Tralfamadore and has been stranded and waiting on Titan for hundreds of millennium. His fellow Tralfamadorians respond by manipulating human history so that primitive humans evolve and create all of civilization in order to produce the replacement part for Salo’s ship. Rumfoord’s encounter with the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, the invasion by Mars, and Constant’s eventual exile to Titan, as well as the entirety of human history, have all been manipulated by the Tralfamadorians in order to repair Salo’s ship. In the end, Rumfoord is devastated to learn he has been the subject of manipulation, rather than vice versa, right before he is lost from Titan forever when an exploding sunspot blows his wavelength on a tangent.
The Sirens of Titan is a book of internal contrasts. It is a grand tale about an interplanetary war between Mars and Earth. It takes readers to the vistas of Titan and Mercury. It features god-like aliens from a distant galaxy and an immortal man existing across all of time and space. However, it is told in Vonnegut’s simple and conversational prose. This fantastic and apocryphal plot is brought down to the personal level of human tragedy, and ultimately depicts each individual’s struggle to find meaning in a life without meaning. It is as story that questions whether existence might just be a series of accidents, told in prose that appears to be constructed almost casually by accident. But just as the plot reveals itself to be carefully constructed and sophisticated, so does Vonnegut’s overall effect.
I liked The Sirens of Titan more than my previous experience with the author, as I found it a less self-conscious piece of work and it makes me keen to read more Vonnegut. I can see why this book was included by David Pringle in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels. When I read the final line of the book, I realised I had a lump in my throat, and I’m not sure how it got there. This is Vonnegut’s art.
The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN: 978-1-4072-3995-8
224 pages
Published by Gollancz, September 1999
First published by Dell, October 1959
Review by Luke Brown
I read this back in the mid 70’s…time to pick it up again!