Galapagos: A Novel

By Kurt Vonnegut

“A madcap genealogical adventure . . . Vonnegut is a postmodern Mark Twain.”—The New York Times Book Review

Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’ s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.

Praise for Galápagos

“The best Vonnegut novel yet!”—John Irving

“Beautiful . . . provocative, arresting reading.”—USA Today

“A satire in the classic tradition . . . a dark vision, a heartfelt warning.”—The Detroit Free Press
 
“Interesting, engaging, sad and yet very funny . . . Vonnegut is still in top form. If he has no prescription for alleviating the pain of the human condition, at least he is a first-rate diagnostician.”—Susan Isaacs, Newsday
 
“Dark . . . original and funny.”—People
 
“A triumph of style, originality and warped yet consistent logic . . . a condensation, an evolution of Vonnegut’s entire career, including all the issues and questions he has pursued relentlessly for four decades.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Wild details, wry humor, outrageous characters . . . Galápagos is a comic lament, a sadly ironic vison.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“A work of high comedy, sadness and imagination.”—The Denver Post
 
“Wacky wit and irreverent imagination .  . . and the full range of technical innovations have made [Vonnegut] America’s preeminent experimental novelist.”—The Minneapolis Star and Tribune

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 11, 2009
• ISBN: 9780440339083

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Siren's of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene has declared, "one of the best living American writers."

Book preview

BOOK ONE

THE THING WAS

    1

THE THING WAS:

One million years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains. Guayaquil was two degrees south of the equator, the imaginary bellyband of the planet after which the country itself was named. It was always very hot there, and humid, too, for the city was built in the doldrums—on a springy marsh through which the mingled waters of several rivers draining the mountains flowed.

This seaport was several kilometers from the open sea. Rafts of vegetable matter often clogged the soupy waters, engulfing pilings and anchor lines.

Human beings had much bigger brains back then than they do today, and so they could be beguiled by mysteries. One such mystery in 1986 was how so many creatures which could not swim great distances had reached the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago of volcanic peaks due west of Guayaquil—separated from the mainland by one thousand kilometers of very deep water, very cold water fresh from the Antarctic. When human beings discovered those islands, there were already geckos and iguanas and rice rats and lava lizards and spiders and ants and beetles and grasshoppers and mites and ticks in residence, not to mention enormous land tortoises.

What form of transportation had they used?

Many people were able to satisfy their big brains with this answer: They came on natural rafts.

Other people argued that such rafts became waterlogged and rotted to pieces so quickly that nobody had ever seen one out of sight of land, and that the current between the islands and the mainland would carry any such rustic vessel northward rather than westward.

Or they asserted that all those landlubberly creatures had walked dry-shod across a natural bridge or had swum short distances between stepping-stones, and that one such formation or another had since disappeared beneath the waves. But scientists using their big brains and cunning instruments had by 1986 made maps of the ocean floor. There wasn’t a trace, they said, of an intervening land mass of any kind.

Other people back in that era of big brains and fancy thinking asserted that the islands had once been part of the mainland, and had been split off by some stupendous catastrophe.

But the islands didn’t look as though they had been split off from anything. They were clearly young volcanoes, which had been vomited up right where they were. Many of them were such newborns out there that they could be expected to blow again at any time. Back in 1986, they hadn’t even sprouted much coral yet, and so were without blue lagoons and white beaches, amenities many human beings used to regard as foretastes of an ideal afterlife.

A million years later, they do possess white beaches and blue lagoons. But when this story begins, they were still ugly humps and domes and cones and spires of lava, brittle and abrasive, whose cracks and pits and bowls and valleys brimmed over not with rich topsoil or sweet water, but with the finest, driest volcanic ash.

Another theory back then was that God Almighty had created all those creatures where the explorers found them, so they had had no need for transportation.

Another theory was that they had been shooed ashore there two by two—down the gangplank of Noah’s ark.

If there really was a Noah’s ark, and there may have been—I might entitle my story A Second Noah’s Ark.

    2

THERE WAS NO MYSTERY a million years ago as to how a thirty-five-year-old American male named James Wait, who could not swim a stroke, intended to get from the South American continent to the Galápagos Islands. He certainly wasn’t going to squat on a natural raft of vegetable matter and hope for the best. He had just bought a ticket at his hotel in downtown Guayaquil for a two-week cruise on what was to be the maiden voyage of a new passenger ship called the Bahía de Darwin, Spanish for Darwin Bay. This first Galápagos trip for the ship, which flew the Ecuadorian flag, had been publicized and advertised all over the world during the past year as the Nature Cruise of the Century.

Wait was traveling alone. He was prematurely bald and he was pudgy, and his color was bad, like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria, and he was bespectacled, so that he might plausibly claim to be in his fifties, in case he saw some advantage in making such a claim. He wished to seem harmless and shy.

He was the only customer now in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel El Dorado, on the broad Calle Diez de Agosto, where he had taken a room. And the bartender, a twenty-year-old descendant of proud Inca noblemen, named Jesús Ortiz, got the feeling that this drab and friendless man, who claimed to be a Canadian, had had his spirit broken by some terrible injustice or tragedy. Wait wanted everybody who saw him to feel that way.

Jesús Ortiz, who is one of the nicest people in this story of mine, pitied rather than scorned this lonesome tourist. He found it sad, as Wait had hoped he would, that Wait had just spent a lot of money in the hotel boutique—on a straw hat and rope sandals and yellow shorts and a blue-and-white-and-purple cotton shirt, which he was wearing now. Wait had had considerable dignity, Ortiz thought, when he had arrived from the airport in a business suit. But now, at great expense, he had turned himself into a clown, a caricature of a North American tourist in the tropics.

The price tag was still stapled to the hem of Wait’s crackling new shirt, and Ortiz, very politely and in good English, told him so.

Oh? said Wait. He knew the tag was there, and he wanted it to remain there. But he went through a charade of self-mocking embarrassment, and seemed about to pluck off the tag. But then, as though overwhelmed by some sorrow he was trying to flee from, he appeared to forget all about it.

Wait was a fisherman, and the price tag was his bait, a way of encouraging strangers to speak to him, to say in one way or another what Ortiz had said: Excuse me, Señor, but I can’t help noticing—

Wait was registered at the hotel under the name on his bogus Canadian passport, which was Willard Flemming. He was a supremely successful swindler.

Ortiz himself was in no danger from him, but an unescorted woman who looked as though she had a little money, and who was without a husband and past childbearing, surely would have been. Wait had so far courted and married seventeen such persons—and then cleaned out their jewelry boxes and safe-deposit boxes and bank accounts, and disappeared.

He was so successful at what he did that he had become a millionaire, with interest-bearing savings accounts under various aliases in banks all over North America, and he had never been arrested for anything. For all he knew, nobody was even trying to catch him. As far as the police were concerned, he reasoned, he was one of seventeen faithless husbands, each with a different name, instead of a single habitual criminal whose real name was James Wait.

It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait—until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.

So I raise this question, although there is nobody around to answer it: Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?

A second query: What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere?

My answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet, except for those great big brains.

    3

THE HOTEL EL DORADO was a brand-new, five-story tourist accommodation—built of unadorned cement block. It had the proportions and mood of a glass-front bookcase, high and wide and shallow. Each bedroom had a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass looking westward—toward the waterfront for deep-draft vessels dredged in the delta three kilometers away.

In the past, that waterfront had teemed with commerce, and ships from all over the planet had delivered meat and grain and vegetables and fruit and vehicles and clothing and machinery and household appliances, and so on, and carried away, in fair exchange, Ecuadorian coffee and cocoa and sugar and petroleum and gold, and Indian arts and crafts, including Panama hats, which had always come from Ecuador and not from Panama.

But there were only two ships out there now, as James Wait sat in the bar, nursing a rum and Coca-Cola. He was not a drinker, actually, since he lived by his wits, and could not afford to have the delicate switches of the big computer in his skull short-circuited by alcohol. His drink was a theatrical prop—like the price tag on his ridiculous shirt.

He was in no position to judge whether the state of affairs at the waterfront was normal or not. Until two days before, he had never even heard of Guayaquil, and this was the first time in his life he had ever been below the equator. As far as he was concerned, the El Dorado was no different from all the other characterless hostelries he had used as hideouts in the past—in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, in San Ignacio, Mexico, in Watervliet, New York, and on and on.

He had picked the name of the city where he was now from an arrivals-and-departures board at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. He had just pauperized and deserted his seventeenth wife—a seventy-year-old widow in Skokie, Illinois, right outside Chicago. Guayaquil sounded to him like the last place she would ever think of looking for him.

This woman was so ugly and stupid, she probably never should have been born. And yet Wait was the second person to have married her.

And he wasn’t going to stay at the El Dorado very long, either, since he had bought a ticket for the Nature Cruise of the Century from the travel agent who had a desk in the lobby. It was late in the afternoon now, and hotter than the hinges of hell outside. There was no breeze outside, but he did not care, since he was inside, and the hotel was air conditioned, and he would soon be away from there anyway. His ship, the Bahía de Darwin, was scheduled to sail at high noon on the very next day, which was Friday, November 28, 1986—a million years ago.

The bay for which Wait’s means of transportation was named fanned south from the Galápagos Island of Genovesa. Wait had never heard of the Galápagos Islands before. He expected them to be like Hawaii, where he had once honeymooned, or Guam, where he had once hidden out—with broad white beaches and blue lagoons and swaying palms and nut-brown native girls.

The travel agent had given him a brochure which described the cruise, but Wait hadn’t looked inside it yet. It was supine on the bar in front of him. The brochure was truthful about how forbidding most of the islands were, and warned prospective passengers, as the hotel travel agent had not warned Wait, that they had better be in reasonably good physical condition and have sturdy boots and rough clothing, since they would often have to wade ashore and scramble up rock faces like amphibious infantry.

Darwin Bay was named in honor of the great English scientist Charles Darwin, who had visited Genovesa and several of its neighbors for five weeks back in 1835—when he was a mere stripling of twenty-six, nine years younger than Wait. Darwin was then the unpaid naturalist aboard Her Majesty’s Ship Beagle, on a mapping expedition that would take him completely around the world and would last five years.

In the cruise brochure, which was intended to delight nature-lovers rather than pleasure-seekers, Darwin’s own description of a typical Galápagos Island was reproduced, and was taken from his first book, The Voyage of the Beagle:

Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance. A broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life. The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noon-day sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.

Darwin continued: The entire surface … seems to have been permeated, like a sieve, by the subterranean vapours: here and there the lava, whilst soft, had been blown into great bubbles; and in other parts, the tops of caverns similarly formed have fallen in, leaving circular parts with steep sides. He was vividly reminded, he wrote, …. of those parts of Staffordshire, where the great iron foundries are most numerous.

There was a portrait of Darwin behind the bar at the El Dorado, framed in shelves and bottles—an enlarged reproduction of a steel engraving, depicting him not as a youth in the islands, but as a portly family man back home in England, with a beard as lush as a Christmas wreath. That same portrait was on the bosom of T-shirts for sale in the boutique, and Wait had bought two of those. That was what Darwin looked like when he was finally persuaded by friends and relatives to set down on paper his notions of how life forms everywhere, including himself and his friends and relatives, and even his Queen, had come to be as they were in the nineteenth century. He thereupon penned the most broadly influential scientific volume produced during the entire era of great big brains. It did more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome. Imagine that! And the name of his book summed up its pitiless contents: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Wait had never read that book, nor did the name Darwin mean anything to him, although he had successfully passed himself off as an educated man from time to time. He was considering claiming, during the Nature Cruise of the Century, to be a mechanical engineer from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, whose wife had recently died of cancer.

Actually, his formal education had stopped after two years of instruction in automobile repair and maintenance at the vocational high school in his native city of Midland City, Ohio. He was then living in the fifth of a series of foster homes, essentially an orphan, since he was the product of an incestuous relationship between a father and a daughter who had run away from town, forever and together, soon after he was born.

When he himself was old enough to run away, he hitchhiked to the island of Manhattan. A pimp there befriended him and taught him how to be a successful homosexual prostitute, to leave price tags on his clothes, to really enjoy lovers whenever possible, and so on. Wait was once quite beautiful.

When his beauty began to fade, he became an instructor in ballroom dancing at a dance studio. He was a natural dancer, and he had been told back in Midland City that his parents had been very good dancers, too. His sense of rhythm was probably inherited. And it was at the dance studio that he met and courted and married the first of his seventeen wives so far.

All through his childhood, Wait was severely punished by foster parents for nothing and everything. It was expected by them that, because of his inbred parentage, he would become a moral monster.

So here that monster was now—in the Hotel El Dorado, happy and rich and well, as far as he knew, and keen for the next test of his survival skills.

Like James Wait, incidentally, I, too, was once a teenage runaway.

    4

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHARLES DARWIN, underspoken and gentlemanly, impersonal and asexual and blankly observant in his writings, was a hero in teeming, passionate, polyglot Guayaquil because he was the inspiration for a tourist boom. If it weren’t for Darwin, there would not have been a Hotel El Dorado or a Bahía de Darwin to accommodate James Wait. There would have been no boutique to clothe him so comically.

If Charles Darwin had not declared the Galápagos Islands marvelously instructive, Guayaquil would have been just one more hot and filthy seaport, and the islands would have been worth no more to Ecuador than the slag heaps of Staffordshire.

Darwin did not change the islands, but only people’s opinion of them. That was how important mere opinions used to be back in the era of great big brains.

Mere opinions, in fact, were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be. So the Galápagos Islands could be hell in one moment and heaven in the next, and Julius Caesar could be a statesman in one moment and a butcher in the next, and Ecuadorian paper money could be traded for food, shelter, and clothing in one moment and line the bottom of a birdcage in the next, and the universe could be created by God Almighty in one moment and by a big explosion in the next—and on and on.

Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren’t diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinions anymore.

White people discovered the Galápagos Islands in 1535 when a Spanish ship came upon them after being blown off course by a storm. Nobody was living there, nor were remains of any human settlement ever found there.

This unlucky ship wished nothing more than to carry the Bishop of Panama to Peru, never losing sight of the South American coast. There was this storm, which rudely hustled it westward, ever westward, where prevailing human opinion insisted there was only sea and more sea.

But when the storm lifted, the Spaniards found that they had delivered their bishop into a sailor’s nightmare where the bits of land were mockeries, without safe anchorage or shade or sweet water or dangling fruit, or human beings of any kind. They were becalmed, and running out of water and food. The ocean was like a mirror. They put a longboat over the side, and towed their vessel and their spiritual leader out of there.

They did not claim the islands for Spain, any more than they would have claimed hell for Spain. And for three full centuries after revised human opinion allowed the archipelago to appear on maps, no other nation wished to own it. But then in 1832, one of the smallest and poorest countries on the planet, which was Ecuador, asked the peoples of the world to share this opinion with them: that the islands were part of Ecuador.

No one objected. At the time, it seemed a harmless and even comical opinion. It was as though Ecuador, in a spasm of imperialistic dementia, had annexed to its territory a passing cloud of asteroids.

But then young Charles Darwin, only three years later, began to persuade others that the often freakish plants and animals which had found ways to survive on the islands made them extremely valuable, if only people would look at them as he did—from a scientific point of view.

Only one English word adequately describes his transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical.

Yes, and by the time of James Wait’s arrival in Guayaquil so many persons with an interest in natural history had come there, on their way to the islands to see what Darwin had seen, to feel what Darwin had felt, that three cruise ships had their home port there, the newest of which was the Bahía de Darwin. There were several modern tourist hotels, the newest of which was the El Dorado, and there were souvenir shops and

Reviews for Galapagos

[burritapal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love Vonnegut. This book made me very happy; it was entertaining and it made happen what I fantasize about.

[magicians_nephew · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos is a book he wrote in the latter end of his career. Now instead of "Kilgore Trout" we have Kilgore Trout's son telling the story of a pandemic and mass diet from the perspective of a million years from now. He could have left - gone through "the Blue Tunnel" to the afterlife, but don't you know - he wanted to stay and hear the end of the story.

The human race has gone through a plague and a purge and has almost died out. A ragtag band of survivors have taken a ship and found themselves stranded on an island in the Galapagos chain. Will the human race survive? Yes . . . and no.

This is a novel of ideas much more than a novel of character or plot. Like Mark Twain before him, Vonnegut is chronicling "The Damned Human Race" and frankly he doesn't think much of it.

But even here is this slow moving and very didactic book there are characters you care about and acts of great kindness and generousity and love.

Perhaps there are worse fates for the human race than to spend its time catching fish and having exuberant guilt free sex play in a sunny paradise.

It's no "Slaughterhouse Five" but its still Vonnegut and still thoughtful and interesting.

[ffortsa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

was not much impressed with this book when I read it, but it made for a very interesting discussion in our reading group. Even people who, like me, found the tone annoying were adding to the discussion, and it did give me some added perspective. So maybe three stars, for its ability to stir the discourse.

[technodiabla · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Galapagos is a highly cynical Darwinian tale of the demise and rebuilding of the human race told in true Vonnegut style. I found it to be an approachable read that seems like it must have been ahead of its time in 1985. It's as if Vonnegut was peering well into the 21st century and cautioning us. The subtle and less-than-subtle commentary of the natural selection and survival of the fittest makes for an interesting conversation. I suspect Vonnegut had mixed opinions. One of my favorite Vonnegut novels!

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was decent, but I felt that Vonnegut really didn't put as much effort-- or style, into this one as his other books. While the quotations were interesting, I felt that he didn't expand enough on them to make them really worthwhile and therefore it made me question the integrity and purpose behind them in the book. Overall, not bad-- but nothing that great.

[amobogio · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Terrible, mean spirited book lacking even a single likeable character and without a trace of humour.

[unclebob53703 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read a lot of his stuff back when I was in college (in a previous century) and saw this book on a list of post-apocalypse novels, which I am collecting. It was more or less what I expected, sad, funny, very much in the style I remembered. His thesis here is that our species big brains are an evolutionary disadvantage, and the book follows this to a conclusion that is at once bizarre and entirely sensible. There are even a couple beloved old characters of his tossed in for good measure. Very happy I got this

[lamotamant · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I think Vonnegut is one of those authors that should be read by everyone at some point in their lives and that point largely differs for everyone. For me, the point might have passed where the overall theme of the book would have been novel and ensnaring. So, strictly from an analytical point, it's a good enough book with a simple theme, the value of humans/humanity. We're led along by a seemingly omnipresent narrator and introduced to characters that have quite a lot going on under the surface but it's also so briefly touched upon that it seemed pretty vague. Which kind of makes the point of the theme, neatly enough.

I don't know, I'm still a little undecided about this book. I didn't fall for it quite as much as I imagined I would but I liked it well enough.

[altheaann · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I've kind of intentionally avoided Vonnegut since disliking the couple of books I read by him back in highschool. But, on the urging of many Vonnegut-fans, I agreed to read this one. Well, it was OK.
I might have really liked it if it had been about a fifth of the length it was. It really is a one-joke story, and it stretches out for far too long. It's also much too enamored with its own cleverness.
The concept is that it's narrated from the point of view of a ghost, a million years in the future. He reiterates, repeatedly, that the downfall of humanity was their big brains, and that now that the descendants of humanity have evolved into simple, seal-like creatures, there's no trouble.
And how did we get there? Well, back in the 80's (present, for this book) there was advertised a 'Nature Cruise of the Century' to the Galapagos Islands. It was supposed to be filled with all kinds of celebrities, but due to political and economic strife, most of the scheduled guests don't show up. The destined parents of future humanity are an odd, ragtag bunch...

[rockinghorsedreams-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent silly book. I like the way everything is pretty much right on the table from the beginning.

[behemothing-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The copy I read had a really nice cover. That's about all I've got to say. Oh and I liked it a lot a lot.

[nickidemus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Basics

A disembodied spirit "living" a million years in the future gives us the lowdown on exactly how evolution reached the point it did. Which is to say mankind took a sudden leap from having big brains to having small ones. And why having small ones is actually better.

My Thoughts

This is a hard one to talk about. This is the first Vonnegut I’ve read that didn’t knock my socks off. Did I hate it? No, not at all. But after reading five Vonnegut novels last year and being head-over-heels for each one, I’m bemused by the fact that I just thought this one was good. Not great. Good. Maybe even just… okay. I’ve over-analyzed like a mother trying to figure out why that is. Technically, it should have all the charm of his other books, but somehow I wasn’t feeling it here.

And that’s where reviewing becomes hard. Because I don’t think it has anything to do with aspects of the book that need to be picked apart, though I’ll probably try to anyway. I think in this case it’s me and my tastes and the semi-slump I’ve been in when it comes to reading this month. I felt like I plodded through this book, whereas Vonnegut has been a writer I devour every time. I’m reluctant to blame him with that.

I find myself wanting to compare this book to Breakfast of Champions. I’ve seen people accuse that book of being too flighty, all over the place, no direction. I felt like there was a distinct method to the madness in that book. By contrast, there were times when I felt I was seeking the method with Galapagos and finding only a lack of damns that Vonnegut gave when it came to story structure. That’s typical of him, but I think Galapagos proved to me it works better some times than others.

He’s clearly the type to not focus on the science in his science fiction, and that has never bothered me. Over-explaining isn’t always fun and can just bog things down. But there was a moment in this book that made me bristle. It’s not science-related really. It’s more just a symptom that connects with his need to skim over the science. This book is a story about an apocalypse, and it starts with everyone deciding money is now worthless. Maybe he meant the stock market crashed super hard, but the way he put it was to say people realized money is worthless, and it felt cheap to me. Social commentary, I get it. But it didn’t work for me. Then he goes on, over halfway through the book, to come up with more ways that humankind is going extinct, and it felt like he was shrugging and saying, “oh yeah, I forgot to put that in. Sorry. Here’s some BS that should cover it.” It made me unsure that he cared about what he was writing at all.

But were there things I liked? Of course! Vonnegut’s unique brand of philosophy is here in abundance. So is his trademark sense of humor. It’s full of universal truths and nods to old characters and amusing tidbits and everything I love about his writing. I just didn’t connect with it like I normally do.

Final Rating

3.5/5

[steadfastreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Classic Vonnegut. Commentary on Vietnam, the human condition and how we'll eventually destroy ourselves. Satire. Awesome.

[lararose · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was my first Vonnegut novel, and I'm not sure what to say about it. Its a quick and sometimes thought-provoking read but lacks character development. It doesn't have me rushing to read Vonnegut again.

[wethewatched · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a writer myself, I am so impressed with just how coherently Kurt Vonnegut can ramble. Vonnegut takes a goofy story about the time when humans still had big brains, chops it up into pieces and reorders into it into an even goofier story. Quite fun, if perhaps not as substantial as Slaughterhouse-Five.

[isabelx_21 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

People still get the hiccups, incidentally. They still have no control over whether they do it or not. I often hear them hiccupping, involuntarily closing their glottises and inhaling spasmodically, as they lie on the broad white beaches or paddle around the blue lagoons. If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a million years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than with the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently.

(PEOPLE)
And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.

The Nature Cruise of the Century is the over-hyped maiden voyage of a new cruse ship to the Galapagos Islands, which has attracted celebrities from Jackie Onassis to Mick Jagger, but a world economic and political crisis means that only six passengers have made it to the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador and they expect the cruise to be cancelled at any moment.

There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.

When a small group of people end up marooned on an uninhabited island in the north of the Galapagos, they expect to be rescued, but humanity is in melt-down, and the islanders end up as the sole fertile representatives of the human race.
Over the next million years, they evolve into creatures rather like seals and their brains shrink to allow their heads to be more stream-lined. According to Leon Trout, the ghost of a ship worker killed during the construction of the cruise ship, all mankind's problems were caused by our big brains. Apparently our descendants are much happier, lying round on the beach, with plenty of fish to eat and sharks to keep their numbers down so the population doesn't outgrow the Galapagos Islands (since the bacteria that causes human infertility is still extant everywhere else).

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut tends to be one of those authors that you just get or you don’t. I love his sarcastic style, but I know it doesn’t work for everyone. I also think I have a particular soft spot for him because he is a fellow Hoosier.

In this novel we meet Mary, a widow who is taking a cruise to the Galapagos islands. Little does she know that their cruise ship will soon become a second Noah’s ark when the world ends and the only people left are those on the ship. The story is told a million years in the future by the son of Kilgore Trout. The few remaining humans must attempt to restart the human race on the Galapagos islands.

One of the themes in Vonnegut’s work is the absurdity of man; our willingness to destroy both ourselves and each other. This is a central point in Galapagos as well. He can’t help but add a few lines about his own big brain’s crazy idea to go fight in Vietnam, which echoes his own experience fighting in WWII.

BOTTOM LINE: An overlooked classic and one of Vonnegut’s better books. If you’ve already checked out his big ones (Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle) then pick this one up. It’s an incredibly quick read and sure to make you laugh if you love Vonnegut’s sense of humor.

“I say the same thing about the death of James Wait: "Oh, well - he wasn't going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway." This wry comment on how little most of us were likely to accomplish in life, no matter how long we lived, isn't my own invention.”

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this book while in the Galapagos - pure Vonnegut - odd, quirky, laugh-at-loud funny.

[kirstiecat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've seen some well deserved ratings for many of Vonnegut's other books but oddly enough not this one and it's definitely one of my favorites.

I hadn't read this book since 2003 and this was my third time, after the last of the giant tortoises on Galapagos died so recently I felt I needed to have this re0visit with Vonnegut, who was much like the giant tortoise at the end I think..strange wonderful and one of a kind and when Vonnegut became extinct, it was just as much a loss to the world. A re-occurring theme in Galapagos (instead of the So it Goes saying that frequently invades the writing style of many of his others) is a yet similar sentiment when a human being dies that well this human being wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyways. But Vonnegut did far greater things than Beethoven did for people like me. He was a philosopher who forever sensed the tragicomedy of the past, present, and future, and even more wondrous was able to share all his notions and ideas with the rest of the planet. Vonnegut gave us many gifts. They are gifts to enrich and pass along to others just as they are gifts to help increase our sense of insight into the world and to humanity.

Vonnegut, if you are a ghost who, like our storyteller of Galapagos, has chosen to exist for a million years before venturing into the blue afterlife tunnel, I hope you sense your value on this planet and how much you are missed by people like me.

Getting more specific to the novel, there is a clear sense of Vonnegut exploring ideas of evolution and possibilities of war and nuclear radiation factoring into all that...and, for most of the novel the ghost of the protagonist (who is also the son of Kilgore Trout, an often appearing character in some of Vonnegut's other novels), seems to think it's just fine that human beings evolved into furry seal like creatures with fins instead of hands, smaller brains, and much shorter lifespans (and therefore able to avoid all of the pain of so many genetic diseases such as Huntington's and also diseases of aging such as Alzheimer's.) Yet, it's obvious Vonnegut sees avoiding all this pain and agony also leads to the sacrifice of great art, music, and literature. It's just too bad humans typically prefer to build weapons to kill each other instead of all that, of course.


It's always a delight to see some reappearing characters like Kilgore Trout mentioned as well, even though he's not the center of the story by any means. In many ways, I've always thought one must re-read all of Vonnegut's novels again and again throughout life because they all make sense as one grand intersecting story in a way that enhances them. In other words, one cannot sense the same kind of greatness reading them singularly. They are all like great friends on Vonnegut's journey through life and understanding the adventures of all of his characters simultaneously seems key to fully comprehending Vonnegut's meaning and perhaps his own rich journey.

Truly, though this book takes place in 1986, Vonnegut's ideas about humans as they are having the capacity to act on destroying each other and what that would lead to as well as looking at the trends then now that still exist today such as food scarcity and extreme classism are very relevant. Take heed! Because, as Vonnegut talks about all of the easiness of humans evolving into smaller brained creatures who care more about their own survival than any other high concepts, he is simultaneously revisiting all of humanity's best words on all sorts of topics. It is so clear there is a loss to be had even if our big brains are diabolocal.


As in many Vonnegut novels, this will make you question, search, laugh, and cry quite a bit. It's written in more of a matter of fact kind of narrative-like it or not, this is how humans died and how others evolved but I believe Vonnegut was a deep feeling person and for as many times that he wrote the words "So it Goes" throughout his life, he was able to despair in humanity's pitfalls because he was able to sense them so deeply within his own life's experiences. I do believe Vonnegut also took joy in the idea of random luck, too, and the utter absurdity of luck sometimes. Thank goodness Vonnegut didn't perish in war. Thankfully, he led a very long life. He was no Beethoven...he was something better, something richer, something fully evolved.


Favorite quotes:

pg. 25 "To the credit of humanity as it used to be: More and more people were saying that their brains were irresponsible, unreliably, hideously dangerous, wholly unrealistic,-were simply no damn good."

pg. 29 "If I may insert a personal note at this point: When I was alive, I often received advice from my own big brain which, in terms of m own survival, or the survival of the human race, for that matter, can be charitably described as questionable. Example: It had me join the United States Marines and go fight in Vietnam.

Thanks a lot, big brain."

pg. 98 "In the era of big brains, life stories could end up any which way. Look at mine."

pg. 129 "This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America's and Europe's forests by acid rain, say might really be."


pg. 187 "His name was Guillermo Reyes, and he was able to survive at such an altitude because his suit and helmet were inflated with an artificial atmosphere. People use to be so marvelous, making impossible dreams they made come true."


pg. 233 "Human beings were so prolific back then that conventional explosions like that had few if any long term biological consequences. Even at the end of protracted wars, there still seemed to be plenty of people around. Babies were always so plentiful that serious efforts to reduce the population by means of violence were doomed to failure. They no more left permanent injuries except for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then did Bahia de Darwin as it slit and roiled the trackless sea.

It was humanity's ability to heal so quickly. by means of babies, which encouraged so many people to think of explosions as show business, as highly theatrical forms of self expression, and little more.

What humanity was about to lose, though, except for one tiny colony on Santa Roaslia, was what the trackless sea could never lose, so long as it was made of water: the ability to heal itself.

As far as humanity was concerned, all wounds were about to become very permanent. And high explosives weren't going to be a branch of show business anymore."

pg. 259 "Nothing ever happens here anymore that I haven't seen or heard so many times before. Nobody, surely, is going to write Beethoven's Ninth Symphony-or tell a lie, or start a Third World War.

Mother was right: Even in the darkest times, there really was still hope for humankind."

pg. 266 "That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, 'Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It's just there to think about.'

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it-have slaves fight each other to the death in the Colosseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blue up whole cities, and on and on."

pg. 270 "And why was quiet desperation such a widespread malady back then, and especially among men? Yet again I trot onstage the only real villain in my story: the oversize human brain.

Nobody leads a life of quiet desperation nowadays. The mass of men was quietly desperate a million years ago because the infernal computers inside their skills were incapable of restraint or idleness; were forever demanding more challenging problems which life could not provide."

pg. 289 "This animal had its eyes on the ends of stalks, a design perfected by the Law of Natural Selection many, many millions of years ago. It was a flawless part in the clockwork of the universe. There was no defect in it which might yet need to be modified. One thing it surely did not need was a bigger brain.

What was it going to do with a bigger brain? Compose Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?

Or perhaps write these lines:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players/
They have their exists and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many
parts.....?

(William Shakespeare (1564-1616)



pg. 292 "Do people still know they are going to die sooner or later? No. Fortunately, in my humble opinion, they have forgotten that."

pg. 294-295 "But that Swede foud something to say which made me cry like a baby-at last, at last. He was as surprised as I was when I cried and cried.

Here is what he said: 'I notice your name is Trout. Is there any chance you are related to the wonderful science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout?'

[krazy4katz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What should I say? Not my favorite Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors. A fascinating premise -- that we are not finished evolving and that we may be in for a redo in the next millennium due to the inability of our big brains to protect our bodies from killing ourselves off. In fact, our big brains may be the biggest problem for the entire earth. Darwinian to the core but taking a longer view. Humorous, ironic, twisted, as always.

[rolyat-2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

i read this book in 1985 and loved it than. after rereading it now, i still love it. def. one of my top 5 fave books.

[browner56 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I suppose that I should start by saying that this is among the saddest reviews that I have ever written. Throughout my high school and college years, Kurt Vonnegut was one of my literary heroes. I voraciously consumed everything he wrote and spent countless hours discussing his clever wordplay and the intricacies of his ideas (or at least my perceptions of those ideas) with all of my friends who were similarly smitten. However, like most love affairs from that time in one’s life, the ardor soon cooled and I had stopped reading the author’s work altogether before he published Galapagos. Indeed, it was only when I was on the verge of my own trip to the Galapagos Islands some 25 years later that I decided to read the novel. Whether driven by nostalgia for the past or a simple attempt to pair my passions for travel and literature, it was a decision that did not end as well as I had hoped.

I suspect that Vonnegut intended this to be work of meta-fiction: a straightforward science fiction story wrapped inside of an Important Message about the foibles of human nature. However, Galapagos fails badly in both respects. The plot involves a ghost from a million years in the future—the son of Kilgore Trout, for fans of the author—who observes the ill-fated outcome of a much-ballyhooed “Nature Cruise of the Century” from the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil to the Galapagos Islands where Charles Darwin first began his ruminations on what would become the theory of Natural Selection. This is truly thin stuff that is simply uninteresting and, worse, poorly conceived. In fact, the only purpose the narrative seems to serve is to promote the author’s main argument that the “big brains” humans possessed in the late-20th century were the source of all of the world’s problems and that mankind could not survive until it evolved into a simpler life form. However, such a tired argument holds little substance, which does not stop the author from repeating it scores of times throughout the book.

I wish that I had read this novel when it was first published in 1985 for two reasons. First, reading it more than a quarter-century later, the book felt hopelessly dated with its integral references to celebrities such as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Johnny Carson whose stars have long since faded. Of course, as Jane Austen and Gustave Flaubert have proven, it is possible to write stories that still seem fresh today despite the words on the page being centuries old; unfortunately, Vonnegut’s work does not stand the test of time in that way. Second, I really wonder if I would have found Galapagos to be compelling—or even liked it at all—if I had read it back when it may have seemed new and insightful. Sadly, given its simplistic, heavy-handed message and repetitive use of foreshadowing, I suspect that the answer to that question is “no”. Reading this novel, then, was ultimately just a reminder that the ship of fiction that Vonnegut guided sailed away for me a long time ago.

[5hrdrive · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut at the top of his game. All the humor, satire and scathing social commentary that we've come to expect is here - along with a great story. And the narrator is a ghost from one million years in the future... who else could come up with an idea like that?

[emscape · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In this cautionary tale, Kurt Vonnegut tries to point out that a lot of mankind's problems would be solved if we didn't have such excessively large brains. Apparently, animals have the right idea, just eating and screwing and surviving their way through life. I disagree with this premise, because my large brain is essentially what allows me to read books by Kurt Vonnegut.
In order to hammer home his theory, Vonnegut has the ghost of Kilgore Trout's son Leon tell us about "The Nature Cruise of the Century" upon which many celebrities are supposed to travel to the Galapagos Islands. He does not tell the tale in a linear format, rather mentioning extremely important bits of information (what one might call spoilers if I were to mention them in this review) right at the very beginning, and then sort of filling in the details as we go along. His narrator is also very conversational in his first-person account of the events. He frequently divulges things in an aside that one might think are completely irrelevant, but turn out to be quite germane later on. Vonnegut is the inventor of the puzzle-book format, paving the way for those like Danielewski and Eichner, and he proves it with this work.

[jimnightshade · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

i feel like its just a lesser version of Breakfast Of Champions, but i loved B.O.C., so i can still give this one a 3.5

[booksfordinner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

KV at his best. All the world infertile, a fictional island in the Galapagos one million years in the past (1986 of course), and the ghost of the son of Kilgore Trout.

[weeksj10 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In this wondrously funny and enlightening book Vonnegut gives a simple explanation for all the troubles of humanity: our brains are too big to be practical. The solution? Evolve smaller, more "streamline" brains.
Read this book; it is one of the best books of one of the best authors that this overcrowded, sick, dying planet has to offer. I would also like to note that although Vonnegut does have a sense of dark humor and his satirical novels often poke fun at the direction of humanity, he also gives us a hopeful message for the future of human kind, although these messages are often delivered in a backhanded, disguised manner.
Simply wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspiring.

[dirtpriest_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoy the sarcasm of Vonnegut. Maybe others don't, but If you like it it's the best stuff. In Galapagos, Vonnegut narrates as a ghost recapping events in 1986 AD from the vantage point of one million years in the future. Of course, there is a World War III and the only remnants of humanity are the descendants of a small group of survivors of an ill-fated 'Nature Cruise of the Century' to the Galapagos. Vonnegut cuts to the core of human frailty and that of his institutions as the world finances fall apart, leading to food riots and war. Those damn big brains humans used to have! So easy to be befuddled by mysteries... Evolution theory plays a minor role here as humankind has become more streamlined and smaller brained, the better for catching fish, with nothing for tools but teeth and flippers after a million years on the Galapagos Islands, but the bulk of the story is about 1986 AD, one million years ago, and it is told in the author's classic time-is-irrelevant-to-the-narrative style, doing things like putting an asterisk before names of people who will not survive the day, moving way ahead of the story-time by jumping ahead and inserting lines like, 'She would live to the ripe old age of 85, when she was eaten by a great white shark', while describing a scene when the character is in her 40's. If you've read Vonnegut then you know what I mean.

[sean191 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut is well known for his wit and humor. I think I didn't agree with that fame until I read Galapagos. Vonnegut's habit of giving away the story before he actually gets around to telling parts of it actually was brilliant in this case. Overall, very funny and a bit of a trip.

[mesalamb · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this right after Cat's Cradle, and I think I liked Galapagos better. Vonnegut has a very strange sense of chronology. He tells the end in the beginning and waits until the end to tell the beginning. It was good though for someone like me who is always rushing through to find out what happens in the end. There was no need to rush because I already knew who would die and what would become of the survivors. I could just enjoy the story. I thought the last few pages were kind of odd and the story could have been complete without them. Its like he has to throw a Vietnam reference in every book to prove a point or something, but I thought it took attention away from the story at hand.