The Sirens of Titan: A Novel

By Kurt Vonnegut

“[Kurt Vonnegut’s] best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.”—Esquire

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’ s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

“Reading Vonnegut is addictive!”—Commonweal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9780307423375

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

1

BETWEEN TIMID AND TIMBUKTU

I guess somebody up there likes me.

—MALACHI CONSTANT

EVERY ONE NOW KNOWS how to find the meaning of life within himself.

But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

They could not name even one of the fifty-three portals to the soul.

Gimcrack religions were big business.

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward—pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.

These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.

Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.

Only inwardness remained to be explored.

Only the human soul remained terra incognita.

This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.

What were people like in olden times, with their souls as yet unexplored?

The following is a true story from the Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.

There was a crowd.

The crowd had gathered because there was to be a materialization. A man and his dog were going to materialize, were going to appear out of thin air—wispily at first, becoming, finally, as substantial as any man and dog alive.

The crowd wasn’t going to get to see the materialization. The materialization was strictly a private affair on private property, and the crowd was emphatically not invited to feast its eyes.

The materialization was going to take place, like a modern, civilized hanging, within high, blank, guarded walls. And the crowd outside the walls was very much like a crowd outside the walls at a hanging.

The crowd knew it wasn’t going to see anything, yet its members found pleasure in being near, in staring at the blank walls and imagining what was happening inside. The mysteries of the materialization, like the mysteries of a hanging, were enhanced by the wall; were made pornographic by the magic lantern slides of morbid imaginations—magic lantern slides projected by the crowd on the blank stone walls.

The town was Newport, Rhode Island, U.S.A., Earth, Solar System, Milky Way. The walls were those of the Rumfoord estate.

Ten minutes before the materialization was to take place, agents of the police spread the rumor that the materialization had happened prematurely, had happened outside the walls, and that the man and his dog could be seen plain as day two blocks away. The crowd galloped away to see the miracle at the intersection.

The crowd was crazy about miracles.

At the tail end of the crowd was a woman who weighed three hundred pounds. She had a goiter, a caramel apple, and a gray little six-year-old girl. She had the little girl by the hand and was jerking her this way and that, like a ball on the end of a rubber band. Wanda June, she said, if you don’t start acting right, I’m never going to take you to a materialization again.

The materializations had been happening for nine years, once every fifty-nine days. The most learned and trustworthy men in the world had begged heartbrokenly for the privilege of seeing a materialization. No matter how the great men worded their requests, they were turned down cold. The refusal was always the same, handwritten by Mrs. Rumfoord’s social secretary.

Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord asks me to inform you that she is unable to extend the invitation you request. She is sure you will understand her feeling in the matter: that the phenomenon you wish to observe is a tragic family affair, hardly a fit subject for the scrutiny of outsiders, no matter how nobly motivated their curiosities.

Mrs. Rumfoord and her staff answered none of the tens of thousands of questions that were put to them about the materializations. Mrs. Rumfoord felt that she owed the world very little indeed in the way of information. She discharged that incalculably small obligation by issuing a report twenty-four hours after each materialization. Her report never exceeded one hundred words. It was posted by her butler in a glass case bolted to the wall next to the one entrance to the estate.

The one entrance to the estate was an Alice-in-Wonderland door in the west wall. The door was only four-and-a-half feet high. It was made of iron and held shut by a great Yale lock.

The wide gates of the estate were bricked in.

The reports that appeared in the glass case by the iron door were uniformly bleak and peevish. They contained information that only served to sadden anyone with a shred of curiosity. They told the exact time at which Mrs. Rumfoord’s husband Winston and his dog Kazak materialized, and the exact time at which they dematerialized. The states of health of the man and his dog were invariably appraised as good. The reports implied that Mrs. Rumfoord’s husband could see the past and the future clearly, but they neglected to give examples of sights in either direction.

Now the crowd had been decoyed away from the estate to permit the untroubled arrival of a rented limousine at the small iron door in the west wall. A slender man in the clothes of an Edwardian dandy got out of the limousine and showed a paper to the policeman guarding the door. He was disguised by dark glasses and a false beard.

The policeman nodded, and the man unlocked the door himself with a key from his pocket. He ducked inside, and slammed the door behind himself with a clang.

The limousine drew away.

Beware of the dog! said a sign over the small iron door. The fires of the summer sunset flickered among the razors and needles of broken glass set in concrete on the top of the wall.

The man who had let himself in was the first person ever invited by Mrs. Rumfoord to a materialization. He was not a great scientist. He was not even well-educated. He had been thrown out of the University of Virginia in the middle of his freshman year. He was Malachi Constant of Hollywood, California, the richest American-and a notorious rakehell.

Beware of the dog! the sign outside the small iron door had said. But inside the wall there was only a dog’s skeleton. It wore a cruelly spiked collar that was chained to the wall. It was the skeleton of a very large dog—a mastiff. Its long teeth meshed. Its skull and jaws formed a cunningly articulated, harmless working model of a flesh-ripping machine. The jaws closed so—clack. Here had been the bright eyes, there the keen ears, there the suspicious nostrils, there the carnivore’s brain. Ropes of muscle had hooked here and here, had brought the teeth together in flesh so—clack.

The skeleton was symbolic—a prop, a conversation piece installed by a woman who spoke to almost no one. No dog had died at its post there by the wall. Mrs. Rumfoord had bought the bones from a veterinarian, had had them bleached and varnished and wired together. The skeleton was one of Mrs. Rumfoord’ many bitter and obscure comments on the nasty tricks time and her husband had played on her.

Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord had seventeen million dollars. Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord had the highest social position attainable in the United States of America. Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord was healthy and handsome, and talented, too.

Her talent was as a poetess. She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received.

The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time.

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog’s skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal gardens turn into New England jungle.

The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.

Malachi Constant, the richest American, locked the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind him. He hung his dark glasses and false beard on the ivy of the wall. He passed the dog’s skeleton briskly, looking at his solar-powered watch as he did so. In seven minutes, a live mastiff named Kazak would materialize and roam the grounds.

Kazak bites, Mrs. Rumfoord had said in her invitation, so please be punctual.

Constant smiled at that—the warning to be punctual. To be punctual meant to exist as a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point—could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.

That was one of the things he was going to find out—what it was like to exist in any other way. Mrs. Rumfoord’s husband existed in another way.

Winston Niles Rumfoord had run his private space ship right into the heart of an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum two days out of Mars. Only his dog had been along. Now Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog Kazak existed as wave phenomena—apparently pulsing in a distorted spiral with its origin in the Sun and its terminal in Betelgeuse.

The earth was about to intercept that spiral.

Almost any brief explanation of chrono-synclastic infundibula is certain to be offensive to specialists in the field. Be that as it may, the best brief explanation is probably that of Dr. Cyril Hall, which appears in the fourteenth edition of A Child’s Cyclopedia of Wonders and Things to Do. The article is here reproduced in full, with gracious permission from the publishers:

CHRONO-SYNCLASTIC INFUNDIBULA—Just imagine that your Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on Earth, and he knows everything there is to find out, and he is exactly right about everything, and he can prove he is right about everything. Now imagine another little child on some nice world a million light years away, and that little child’s Daddy is the smartest man who ever lived on that nice world so far away. And he is just as smart and just as right as your Daddy is. Both Daddies are smart, and both Daddies are right.

Only if they ever met each other they would get into a terrible argument, because they wouldn’t agree on anything. Now, you can say that your Daddy is right and the other little child’s Daddy is wrong, but the Universe is an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be right about things and still not agree.

The reason both Daddies can be right and still get into terrible fights is because there are so many different ways of being right. There are places in the Universe, though, where each Daddy could finally catch on to what the other Daddy was talking about. These places are where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch. We call these places chrono-synclastic infundibula.

The Solar System seems to be full of chrono-synclastic infundibula. There is one great big one we are sure of that likes to stay between Earth and Mars. We know about that one because an Earth man and his Earth dog ran right into it.

You might think it would be nice to go to a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and see all the different ways to be absolutely right, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. The poor man and his poor dog are scattered far and wide, not just through space, but through time, too.

Chrono (kroh-no) means time. Synclastic (sin-classtick) means curved toward the same side in all directions, like the skin of an orange. Infundibulum (in-fun-dib-u-lum) is what the ancient Romans like Julius Caesar and Nero called a funnel. If you don’t know what a funnel is, get Mommy to show you one.

The key to the Alice-in-Wonderland door had come with the invitation. Malachi Constant slipped the key into his fur-lined trouser pocket and followed the one path that opened before him. He walked in deep shadow, but the flat rays of the sunset filled the treetops with a Maxfield Parrish light.

Constant made small motions with his invitation as he proceeded, expecting to be challenged at every turn. The invitation’s ink was violet. Mrs. Rumfoord was only thirty-four, but she wrote like an old woman—in a kinky, barbed hand. She plainly detested Constant, whom she had never met. The spirit of the invitation was reluctant, to say the least, as though written on a soiled handkerchief.

During my husband’s last materialization, she had said in the invitation, he insisted that you be present for the next. I was unable to dissuade him from this, despite the many obvious drawbacks. He insists that he knows you well, having met you on Titan, which, I am given to understand, is a moon of the planet Saturn.

There was hardly a sentence in the invitation that did not contain the verb insist. Mrs. Rumfoord’s husband had insisted on her doing something very much against her own judgment, and she in turn was insisting that Malachi Constant behave, as best he could, like the gentleman he was not.

Malachi Constant had never been to Titan. He had never, so far as he knew, been outside the gaseous envelope of his native planet, the Earth. Apparently he was about to learn otherwise.

The turns in the path were many, and the visibility was short. Constant was following a damp green path the width of a lawn mower—what was in fact the swath of a lawn mower. Rising on both sides of the path were the green walls of the jungle the gardens had become.

The mower’s swath skirted a dry fountain. The man who ran the mower had become creative at this point, had made the path fork. Constant could choose the side of the fountain on which he preferred to pass. Constant stopped at the fork, looked up. The fountain itself was marvelously creative. It was a cone described by many stone bowls of decreasing diameters. The bowls were collars on a cylindrical shaft forty feet high.

Impulsively, Constant chose neither one fork nor the other, but climbed the fountain itself. He climbed from bowl to bowl, intending when he got to the top to see whence he had come and whither he was bound.

Standing now in the topmost, in the smallest of the baroque fountain’s bowls, standing with his feet in the ruins of birds’ nests, Malachi Constant looked out over the estate, and over a large part of Newport and Narragansett Bay. He held up his watch to sunlight, letting it drink in the wherewithal that was to solar watches what money was to Earth men.

The freshening sea breeze ruffled Constant’s blue-black hair. He was a well-made man—a light heavyweight, dark-skinned, with poet’s lips, with soft brown eyes in the shaded caves of a Cro-Magnon brow-ridge. He was thirty-one.

He was worth three billion dollars, much of it inherited.

His name meant faithful messenger.

He was a speculator, mostly in corporate securities.

In the depressions that always followed his taking of alcohol, narcotics, and women, Constant pined for just one thing—a single message that was sufficiently dignified and important to merit his carrying it humbly between two points.

The motto under the coat of arms that Constant had designed for himself said simply, The Messenger Awaits.

What Constant had in mind, presumably, was a first-class message from God to someone equally distinguished.

Constant looked at his solar watch again. He had two minutes in which to climb down and reach the house—two minutes before Kazak would materialize and look for strangers to bite. Constant laughed to himself, thinking how delighted Mrs. Rumfoord would be were the vulgar, parvenu Mr. Constant of Hollywood to spend his entire visit treed on the fountain by a thoroughbred dog. Mrs. Rumfoord might even have the fountain turned on.

It was possible that she was watching Constant. The mansion was a minute’s walk from the fountain—set off from the jungle by a mowed swath three times the width of the path.

The Rumfoord mansion was marble, an extended reproduction of the banqueting hall of Whitehall Palace in London. The mansion, like most of the really grand ones in Newport, was a collateral relative of post offices and Federal court buildings throughout the land.

The Rumfoord mansion was an hilariously impressive expression of the concept: People of substance. It was surely one of the greatest essays on density since the Great Pyramid of Khufu. In a way it was a better essay on permanence than the Great Pyramid, since the Great Pyramid tapered to nothingness as it approached heaven. Nothing about the Rumfoord mansion diminished as it approached heaven. Turned upside down, it would have looked exactly the same.

The density and permanence of the mansion were, of course, at ironic variance with the fact that the quondam master of the house, except for one hour in every fifty-nine days, was no more substantial than a moon-beam.

Constant climbed down from the fountain, stepping onto the rims of bowls of ever-increasing sizes. When he got to the bottom, he was filled with a strong wish to see the fountain go. He thought of the crowd outside, thought of how they, too, would enjoy seeing the fountain go. They would be enthralled—watching the teenyweeny bowl at the tippy-tippy top brimming over into the next little bowl ... and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next little bowl ... and the next little bowl’s brimming over into the next bowl ... and on and on and on, a rhapsody of brimming, each bowl singing its own merry water song. And yawning under all those bowls was the upturned mouth of the biggest bowl of them all ... a regular Beelzebub of a bowl, bone dry and insatiable ... waiting, waiting, waiting for that first sweet drop.

Constant was rapt, imagining that the fountain was running. The fountain was very much like an hallucination—and hallucinations, usually drug-induced, were almost all that could surprise and entertain Constant any more.

Time passed quickly. Constant did not move.

Somewhere on the estate a mastiff bayed. The baying sounded like the blows of a maul on a great bronze gong.

Constant awoke from his contemplation of the fountain. The baying could only be that of Kazak, the hound of space. Kazak had materialized. Kazak smelled the blood of a parvenu.

Constant sprinted the remainder of the distance to the house.

An ancient butler in knee breeches opened the door for Malachi Constant of Hollywood. The butler was weeping for joy. He was pointing into a room that Constant could not see. The butler was trying to describe the thing that made him so happy and full of tears. He could not speak. His jaw was palsied, and all he could say to Constant was, Putt putt—putt putt putt.

The floor of the foyer was a mosaic, showing the signs of the zodiac encircling a golden sun.

Winston Niles Rumfoord, who had materialized only a minute before, came into the foyer and stood on the sun. He was much taller and heavier than Malachi Constant—and he was the first person who had ever made Constant think that there might actually be a person superior to himself. Winston Niles Rumfoord extended his soft hand, greeted Constant familiarly, almost singing his greeting in a glottal Groton tenor.

Delighted, delighted, delighted, Mr. Constant, said Rumfoord. How nice of you to commmmmmmmme.

My pleasure, said Constant.

They tell me you are possibly the luckiest man who ever lived.

That might be putting it a little too strong, said Constant.

You won’t deny you’ve had fantastically good luck financially, said Rumfoord.

Constant shook his head. No. That would be hard to deny, he said.

And to what do you attribute this wonderful luck of yours? said Rumfoord.

Constant shrugged. Who knows? he said. I guess somebody up there likes me, he said.

Rumfoord looked up at the ceiling. What a charming concept—someone’s liking you up there.

Constant, who had been shaking hands with Rumfoord during the conversation, thought of his own hand, suddenly, as small and clawlike.

Rumfoord’s palm was callused, but not horny like the palm of a man doomed to a single trade for all of his days. The calluses were perfectly even, made by the thousand happy labors of an active leisure class.

For a moment, Constant forgot that the man whose hand he shook was simply one aspect, one node of a wave phenomenon extending all the way from the Sun to Betelgeuse. The handshake reminded Constant what it was that he was touching—for his hand tingled with a small but unmistakable electrical flow.

Constant had not been bullied into feeling inferior by the tone of Mrs. Rumfoord’s invitation to the materialization. Constant was a male and Mrs. Rumfoord was a female, and Constant imagined that he had the means of demonstrating, if given the opportunity, his unquestionable superiority.

Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again—morally, spatially, socially, sexually, and electrically. Winston Niles Rumfoord’s smile and handshake dismantled Constant’s high opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.

Constant, who had offered his services to God as a messenger, now panicked before the very moderate greatness of Rumfoord. Constant ransacked his memory for past proofs of his own greatness. He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man’s billfold. Constant found his memory stuffed with rumpled, overexposed snapshots of all the women he had had, with preposterous credentials testifying to his ownership of even more preposterous enterprises, with testimonials that attributed to him virtues and strengths that only three billion dollars could have. There was even a silver medal with a red ribbon—awarded to Constant for placing second in the hop, skip, and jump in an intramural track meet at the University of Virginia.

Rumfoord’s smile went on and on.

To follow the analogy of the thief who is going through another man’s billfold: Constant ripped open the seams of his memory, hoping to find a secret compartment with something of value in it. There was no secret compartment—nothing of value. All

Reviews for The Sirens of Titan

[jpalfrey-459036 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I bought a copy of this book in 1975, having already read it some years earlier, but it’s not a book that I reread often.

Reading it now (in 2022), I find that it’s fluently written, easy to read, and inventively bizarre, all of which I appreciate. However, I don’t like any of the characters, what happens to them is unpleasant, and overall the story is depressing. I have seen it described as a comedy, which goes to show how different people have very different senses of humour.

It seems to be a lengthy sermon on the futility and pointlessness of life. I don’t know of any particular point to life myself; but Vonnegut seemed unaware that life can still be pleasant, interesting, and enjoyable, without needing to have any overall purpose to it.

I could give the book two or three stars; I’ll give it three for now, rather reluctantly, because after all I have read it at least three or four times in the course of my life, and I think of a two-star book as one I probably won’t bother to read more than once. I find it depressing, and I don’t enjoy being depressed; and yet its bizarre inventiveness gives it a classic quality, it contains memorable scenes and images.

It reminds me vaguely of Douglas Adams, although it was first published when Adams was about 7 years old. Perhaps it was one of many influences on his fictional style, although Adams would have had to be in a particularly bleak mood to write this kind of story.

In 1975, Al Stewart released his Modern Times album, containing the song “Sirens of Titan”, inspired by the book. I can listen to the song quite happily: it’s more pleasant than the book.

[datrappert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"I was a victim of series of accidents, as are we all." The adventures of Malachi Constant are a huge improvement over Vonnegut's debut novel, Player Piano, which seems dated. If you want to get a quick summary of the plot of the Sires of Titan, just listen to Al Stewart's song of the same name. This is a real epic and, frankly, quite moving, as well as being a great science fiction novel. It's also the first appearance, I believe, of the Tralfamadorians.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky." is the first line of the novel. The book itself is rich in ideas about free will (It turns out that humans don't really have it, having been evolved by Interstellar travellers to produce a small replacement part for a star ship, that is carrying a greeting card message to another interstellar group. Our hero, after discovering this truth, is droppedoff on earth, and freezes to death in Indianapolis while trying to get to his grandparents' home. A large number of other ideas get dealt out as teasers, setting up a large number of Vonnegut fans for future novels. It is both tender and funny.

[chip1o1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful work of fiction that really makes you think about the value of your possessions, your views on militaristic societies, and has some of the wildest plot twists ever.

[drardavis · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The unrelenting sarcasm is stylistically overwhelming. It wipes out any possible delight in the scattered oddities like his “uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum” that Vonnegut throws into the story to make it interesting. None of the characters are sympathetic, and by the end I did not care if Unk went to Paradise.

[david.maness · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A light romp through time and space with shades of similarity to Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there’ s a catch to the invitation–and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

My Review: I read this book when I was a teenager in the 1970s. I missed a lot of assumptions, like the one where it's okay for a man to discuss his own wife "being bred" by another man; the one where black people all speak in dialect, obviating the need to mention their skin color; the one about homosexual sex being offensive; I'm at a loss, as a 695-month-old reader with literally thousands more books under my expansive mental belt, how this 1950s prejudice whipped past my allegedly enlightened 1970s sensibilities.

Two stars off.

The Tralfamadorian Salo, tangerine-colored mechanical man whose millions of years of lightspeed travel get interrupted by an unexpected landing on the balmy, verdant shores of Titan, also gets the stink-eye from my increasingly myopic baby greens. Winston Niles Rumfoord, the chrono-synclastically infundibulated spacetime sprinter, becomes his buddy? Salo spends inordinate amounts of energy, for a Tralfamadorian, setting WNR (a note to come on these initials) up and making his life on Titan extraordinarily pleasant. That has more than a faint whiff of colonial privilege, Salo being the first inhabitant of Titan though not native to it, who expends all his energies to improve the lot of an ungrateful, entitled newcomer.

Another star off.

Malachi Constant, reasonably dim, phenomenally lucky, is summoned to Rumfoord's famous reappearance after he's been chrono-synclastically infundibulated (seriously, if you're ever in a foul humor or just draggy, say or better yet type, "chrono-synclastic infundibulum." Your smile muscles will automatically activate and your crow's-feet will dance) in order to converse with the great man, though why he's so great really isn't much discussed. And what happens? Constant is turned into an unlucky pauper and press-ganged to Mars to fight a fake war with real casualties designed to unite the people of earth. In service of this goal, Malachi Constant has his identity stripped from him, mechanical thought-control devices implanted in him, and he's specifically made subject to a black man's total control to symbolize his utter dehumanization.

More racism, fewer stars. What are we down to, one? I'll snatch that one back for black-man-as-nature-gawd-of-Mercury, Boaz using his natural rhythm (urp) to feed the harmoniums off his superiorly rhythmic pulse in preference to Unk/Malachi's more, what? bland? attenuated?, white man's pulse.

No stars for you, Vonnegut. Zip. Zero. Rien. Nada.

So whence cometh the three-and-a-half stars above? The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. The mass religion of billions who know with the simple certainty of faith that God couldn't pick you out in a police line-up and couldn't possibly care less about you, your prayers, your troubles, and your existence or non-existence. You don't matter to God.

That is the single best take-away from reading this book. The assurance with which Vonnegut adduces the non-existence of God's interest in humanity is worth all three and a half stars I've rated the book. This isn't the reason I suspect people want to read a novel. It isn't my first thought on picking up a novel. But it damn sure makes for a great end! Though I have to say the ending of this novel, as opposed to its end in the sense of purpose, is...it's...on the bland side. Things rather stop than end. After a long, long time passes, the show rings down the curtain and you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

I remembered this novel as a Big Deal, a game-changer for me, and so it might have been in my teens. I think encountering a created world in which the Indifference of the Divine was simply accepted as fact, and the attitude towards the accumulation of money was sneeringly superior to those who merely grub after gold in the mud resonated strongly with my noblesse oblige sense of wealth as responsibility not opportunity.

Another entry in the "re-read at your own risk" files. I might have liked it better left un-re-read.

[pgiunta_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The wealthiest Hollywood playboy in America, Malachi Constant, is invited to the home of Beatrice Rumfoord to witness the manifestation of her husband, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak. Nine years before, Rumfoord had piloted his spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum near Mars. Kazak was his only companion aboard ship. Since then, man and dog exist as energy but materialize on a regular schedule in his mansion on Earth. Word of Winston’s materializations have spread over time and now draw a crowd outside the mansion’s walls. His wife, however, permits no audience to Winston’s appearances—until he specifically requests the presence of Malachi Constant.

What follows is a mind-bending journey, entirely predicted and orchestrated by Rumfoord, that takes Malachi and Beatrice to various points in the solar system, all memories and identities from their Earthly lives erased. In the meantime, Rumfoord creates a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent in which the Almighty exists but cares not for the affairs of mankind. Oh, and then there’s Salo, an alien from the planet Tralfamadore who crash landed on Saturn’s moon Titan eons ago on his way to deliver a message from his people to parts unknown. Also on Titan is where Rumfoord and Kazak reside in a palatial estate when they’re not beaming across the solar system.

But what is the purpose of Winston Niles Rumfoord’s machinations? Why has he chosen Malachi Constant and his own wife Beatrice as his pawns and how does the Tralfamadorian Salo fit into the picture?

In Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s dry humor sinks its claws into religion, morality, destiny, and the purpose of life in a tale that is sometimes hilarious, other times disturbing, but at all times original.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hadn't read any Vonnegut for decades. I liked it, but not quite as much as I used to.

[baswood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Sirens of Titan was Kurt Vonnegut's second novel and is included in the science fiction Masterwork series. Published in 1959 it was the novel that won the first of the many awards that Vonnegut won in the genre, although his first novel Player Piano had created a stir. I have previously read Slaughterhouse-five, his most well known book, a couple of times and neither time was I overly impressed. I think it is because I am not in tune with his style of writing. I think because he is such a well known author in the genre and [Slaughterhouse-five] crossed over into the mainstream, it is perhaps the sort of style that would be off putting for many readers, who were dipping their toe into science fiction for the first time. Certainly I think that would be true back in the 1960's, well before [A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy].

There is not much science in The Sirens of Titan, really it is more of a fantasy novel and one that reads like it was cobbled together after a drunken nights storytelling, which I think it was. The writing style has all the elements of an oral story; the sentences are short, the language is simple and it has a conversational style. The organisation feels a bit haphazard and the structure is one you might find in a good story made up as the teller went along. However after saying all this, it kind of works, the reader gets carried along with the story rush, not stopping to think about holes in the plot or the sheer craziness of the story: that is if you have not already tossed the book aside, thinking I am not going to read any more of this rubbish. It works in the genre where a sense of wonder and dare I say it: ideas; bordering on the fantastic; which are more important than literary style.

Of course there are flashes of brilliance in this crazy mess of a book and it is open to all kinds of interpretation; it is a bit like [Alice in Wonderland] and like Lewis Carroll's book it is funny and genuinely satiric. However in my opinion it has not stood the test of time, although the style has been imitated and I am thinking of Philip K Dick, who managed to run with it taking it to another level. If my thoughts are confused then I can only put this down to having just finished The Siren's of Titan. The story, the plot you don't really need to know. It deserves to be in the masterwork series because of what it is, but I just didn't like it and so 3 stars.

[kevn57-163679 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sadder then HGTTG but I'm sure that this was an inspiration to Adams when he begun the script to the radio show. Combat Respiratory Rations or CRR's or goofballs were — had to tell him to take one every six hours or suffocate. These were oxygen pills that made up for the fact that there wasn't any oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. like Robinson Crusoe on Mars. I just saw an interview of novelist Andy Weir and when asked if the movie was an inspiration he laughed talking about the oxygen pills, now as I read this pills again, but a few of the links to HGTTG would be Winston Niles Rumfoord's Pocket History of Mars and revised bible and the ship was powered, by a phenomenon known as UWTB, or the Universal Will to Become. UWTB is what makes universes out of nothingness — that makes nothingness insist on becoming somethingness compare to HGTTG infinite improbability drive "Not believing it was the thing that saved them from panic." "Don't Panic"

[gbill_7 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An impressive book for 1959, and for a debut. Vonnegut uses science fiction to satirize the wealthy, the military, religion, and mankind’s role in the universe, and manages to tell an entertaining tale on top of it. While fantastical, it’s brilliantly creative. There is a chrono-synclastic infundibula which spreads one of the characters and his dog out across space in a wave, such that they appear on Earth when its orbit regularly intersects it. There are translucent, diamond-shaped creatures in deep caves of Mercury with only one sense, touch, that cooperate with one another. There are creatures on the planet Tralfamadore who can’t find any purpose to existence and wage war against each other, ultimately turning the job over to machines ala the Terminator.

The satire of the ultra-wealthy, who believe they are that way because of their consummate business skill or because “someone up there likes me,” implying a God who actually pays attention to our little lives and favors them, is not only effective but well ahead of its time, and highly relevant today. We see overpaid CEO’s who don’t understand how much sheer luck played a role in their success. We see the immorality of their excesses, war profiteering, and the “philanthropy” of buying art and lending it out to museums in reality being PR and good investments. We see the creation of shell corporations that are “a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.” We see generational wealth maintained via marrying within the set, even if it means with cousins. It’s just remarkable stuff, and one can only imagine what Vonnegut would think of the elite today.

Relative to the military, in some of his best and most chilling writing, Vonnegut describes a Martian army controlled by antenna implants into the brain and regular memory scrubbing, so that they strictly follow orders, even if it means cold-blooded killing. A military commander wears the uniform of an elite tactical group which caught his fancy, “regardless of how much hell anybody else had to go through for the privilege.” The Earthling military response is out of all proportion to the danger, with thermonuclear devices rendering the moon “unfit for human occupation for at least ten million years.”

As for religion and the delusion that there is a God looking down upon us, the story alludes to how this is weaponized, and how one of the characters creates a new church, that of the “God of the Utterly Indifferent” to combat this. Vonnegut writes: “No longer can a fool like Malachi Constant point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, ‘Somebody up there like me.’ And no longer can a tyrant say, ‘God wants this or that to happen, and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!”

As for mankind, the story plays with meaninglessness in a vast universe and free will (or lack thereof) in fanciful ways. It also alludes to our violence, creatively captured in a statue of Neanderthals roasting a human foot on a crude spit, and one of a scientist with an erection for having discovered atomic power – there being little that is pure or cooperative about the species. Bonus points for the protagonist wanting to be let down in Indianapolis near the end because it was “the first place in the United States of America where a white man was hanged for the murder of an Indian,” referring to the Fall Creek Massacre of 1824 and subsequent hanging of three of the perpetrators the following year.

Great stuff here, full of meaning, but written in a light, engaging way. One to seek out.

[petricor-635385 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

[read as an audio-book]

A man, learning (from a man who is stuck in a magical spacetime loop with his dog) he's to travel in space to ultimately pro-create with a woman he doesn't like, does everything in his power to prevent this from happening.

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.”

Liked:
- the clever satirical tone which is consistently held and highly entertaining
- how Vonnegut makes the characters simultaneously unlikeable and likeable
- how Vonnegut answers the meaning of life

Disliked:
- the third act features a character not earlier expanded on, although briefly mentioned, making some parts of the plot feel a bit deus ex machina
- would have loved a bit more exploration of Beatrice's character, especially her reaction to [redacted] but I suppose the plot covers itself through memory loss
- the third act itself, on Titan, ends fairly abruptly (translation: I need more of Malachi and Beatrice on Titan, thanks)

Final Thoughts:
A visceral gut-punch to the stomach of a satire, which starts off so absurdly comical that it seems confusing how it can pack such a punch. Vonnegut masterfully navigates the human existence and explores the concept of free will, religion, and purpose. Easily one of my favorite sci-fi books and books in general.

[jrthebutler · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Malachi Constant, "the richest man in America," gives up his indulgent lifestyle to follow an urgent calling to probe the depths of space. He participates in a Martian invasion of Earth, mates with the wife of an astronaut adrift on the tides of time, and follows the lure of the "Sirens of Titan."

[Jotunheimer · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Vonnegut's quality as a writer is well known. That is why "The Sirens of Titan" is a great book, but it suffers from being too similar to "Slaughterhouse-Five." Just like in his great success, time is something relative and non-linear, which leads to a non-sequential narrative. What does change is that this novel has a greater number of characters and delves deeper into their stories. A good work, but not the most advisable to start with the author. (Translated from Spanish)

[blueguitar-238106 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The purpose of human civilisation is to construct a replacement part for an stranded alien's broken spacecraft.

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

Unpopular opinion, but this is not my favorite Vonnegut. Not even in my top five. But before you start throwing stones at me, I still enjoyed it. A lot. I can't pinpoint exactly why I didn't like this as much as his others, but it was still a good read. It's zany, filled with classic Vonnegut-isms, zany characters, tributes to Indianapolis, weird space opera vibes, and jabs about human faith, politics, and economy. The Sirens of Titan tell the story of the space wanderer. Once, the richest playboy on earth, now a man lost in the cosmos forgetful of his past. It's a story about the wonders of space, the folly of organized religion, and morality. It's over the top as always and filled with characters only Vonnegut could create. Even though it's not my favorite, I want to come back to this one and read it in a few years instead of listening to the audio.

[delta351 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this intending to donate the book when I was done. Just can't do that yet. There is a lot of things I don't understand about this book, such as what is the significance of the sirens?

[bness2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reading this story reminded me a little of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The same warped sense of deadpan humor is found throughout this book. If you like a story where you are never completely sure what you are supposed to believe or not, this one will keep you going.

[dlmorrese · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not all fiction ages well, especially science fiction. This one did. There are few obvious tells that it was first published almost 60 years ago. It also has the rare and wonderful combination of absurdity and intelligence that I personally like in speculative fiction, the kind Douglas Adams achieved so well in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sirens of Titan doesn't provide quite that level of laugh-out-loud absurdity, but the wit is there, along with some pause-to-think moments about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I highly recommend this one.

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

Really enjoyable read. My understanding is that this is the first of the recognisable Vonnegut novels.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A long time ago, when I was just a lowly Teen - I read this book. And totally missed the point. So, when I found a copy, I thought I would give it another try. First - this is not a bright book. Almost all the characters are unlikable (except for the Dog) and annoying. But that is the point. Its a story of randomness and why it means to be lucky. At times - the story is funny - very very funny for example, on the random writings of the harmoniums "The messages were written, of course, by.... He peeled off harmoniums here, slapped others up there, making the block letters".

This book is quite tragic. All the characters are being used by someone. The ending kind of a slap in the face. The big question of the book is "is life better if life is random, or is life better if it was in service to a more advanced being?"

Yeah - its dark, satirical, Full of sad people in sad situations. But, it has merit. If you like the author, and books that are dark and takes a view of pointlessness, you should probably read it.

[scottcholstad · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Aside from perhaps some of the existential novels I read in college which I really enjoyed as I felt as I could really relate to them, Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan has to be one of the saddest novels I have ever read. I came close to crying several times while reading through it. It’s very, very bleak. Of course, there’s the satire and usual black humor and of course there’s the layers of meaning one can extract from a Vonnegut novel, but just reading it at its base layer, it’s damned cold.

The book is about two main characters -- Winston Niles Rumsfoord and Malachi Constant. Rumsfoord and his dog took a spaceship out to explore the galaxy and became “chrono-synclastic-infundibulated,” which means they became scattered in time and space and materialize throughout both at various points in time, witnessing the past and future. He’s viewed as a type of prophet by the masses and his materializations are looked forward to by all. Constant is the world’s richest man, having inherited a good bit of his billions from his father and having earned the rest through an odd investment scheme his father invented. He is lazy and decadent and a bit of a Hollywood playboy. This book is about their lives and how they intertwine, as well as Rumsfoord’s wife, Beatrice.

In my opinion, Rumsfoord takes on the role of Satan in this novel. He uses and abuses, tortures and slaughters, destroys and deceives. He’s a ruthless bastard and I grew to hate his guts. Constant comes to be known as Unk while living on Mars as Unk. He loses everything. He can be viewed as the Biblical Job, but without the happy ending. He and Beatrice, who Rumsfoord also attempts to destroy, wind up together ultimately on Titan with a son who is psychotic. There are also aliens, one of whom is pretty cool – Salo, the Tralfamadorian. Turns out the Tralfamadorians have been manipulating humanity for all of our history.

While Vonnegut skewers the military and organized religion, he sets his sights on the notion of God, or a kind, benevolent god. In his view, if there is any god, if he’s not totally cruel, he’s at best a being who doesn’t give a shit about humanity. Ruumsfoord drives that idea home when he creates a world religion he calls The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. The “luckiest” people in the church have to wear heavy weights on their bodies or do something to make themselves suffer in some way.

When Ruumsfoord and Constant first meet, Ruumsfoord tells him that he’s going to go to Mars, Mercury, back to Earth, and ultimately to Titan, and he’s also going to marry Beatrice and have a son with her and he’ll be very, very happy. He’s right about some of it and a lying bastard about some of it. The thing I never figured out was why he decided to pick Constant out to completely destroy. Was it simply because he was the “luckiest” man in the world and Ruumsfoord resented it? Was it really that simple? Is that good motivation? Cause Ruumsfoord went through a hell of a lot of trouble and killed tens of thousands of people just to destroy Constant and Beatrice. It doesn’t make much sense to me. What’s his motivation? Is he just jealous and, if so, why? He’s pretty damn lucky himself. He’s got a huge estate, has the only spaceship in the world, a lovely if cold wife, a good job, lots of money himself. So he decides to pick one man, the luckiest man in the world, to personally destroy just for the hell of it. Sounds like a royally evil bastard to me. This is probably a five star book because it’s so damned original and I did enjoy some of it, but I thought the section about Mars and the Army of Mars was somewhat weak and I really ended up not enjoying the book as much as I thought I would, so I’m giving it four stars. Still, recommended.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have read a ton of Vonnegut. In fact, there isn't much of his that I haven't read. I'm not sure why I was so late reading this one, but it immediately became one of my favorites. It has all of the whimsy and satire of Vonnegut along with the biting social commentary that makes him great. It even includes a Tralfamadorian, which harkens to Slaughterhouse Five, perhaps his best work. Unfortunately, Kilgore Trout doesn't make an appearance, but I can forgive Vonnegut for that. Overall, I loved it.

[braden_timss · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Need to think on this.

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

Not as enjoyable as the first time I read it many, many years ago but I still enjoy his views on the randomness of the universe and, of course, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent still gives me a chuckle. I like the simplicity of his work -- that is what will endure the tests of time.

[pife43-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very imaginative and direct, as Vonnegut is so often. Read this book too long ago to adequately review it now, but I did enjoy it marginally.

[rbeffa_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I decided a few years ago when I was cataloguing my books on LT that I didn't need to read or re-read any more Vonnegut. Been there, done that. I gave away several of my books of his only holding on to two. I read him in my late teens and twenties. He was one of those like/not-like authors. But even when I was not liking I was generally shocked or tweaked enough to feel that even though I was slapped all around I hadn't been abused too much.

After reading this I don't know quite what to say. Some people may call this science fiction because they don't know what else to call it. I wouldn't. It's a whack job and the reader is the one getting whacked. I like some a little, I dislike some a lot. What else is new? Vonnegut wasn't like anybody else. This is a smart book. I'm impressed. It is also absurd and ridiculous and rather insane. Like listening to an old drunk rail against the world. But Vonnegut wasn't an old drunk when he wrote this.

What is this story about? What is the point of this rage against the machine of life, of religion, of society? Some people say the whole point of the story is contained in a line very near the end of the book. Some people also look at a Mark Rothko painting and find the meaning of life or something. I don't think so. In general I rarely had a clue as to what was going on with this story.

I think I've had enough Vonnegut for quite a while longer.

[stige_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm torn between three and four stars on this. On one hand the book reads like the later books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series with ideas and observations being thrown at the reader in one big jumble. On the other hand the book reads like the later books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series with ideas and observations being thrown at the reader in one big jumble.

Parts of the book are absolutely fantastic (the martian invasion stood out in my mind), other parts are dull (the invented religion) whilst the casual way rape is handled and seemingly brushed off is just troubling. It's witty, intelligent, not very well put together, memorable, frustrating and callous. It's clearly art :-)

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

"'Look,' said Rumfoord, 'life for a punctual person is like a roller coaster.' He turned to shiver his hands in her face. 'All kinds of things are going to happen to you! Sure,' he said, 'I can see the whole roller coaster you're on. And sure—I could give you a piece of paper that would tell you about every dip and turn, warn you about every bogeyman that was going to pop out at you in the tunnels. But that wouldn't help you any.'
'I don't see why not,' said Beatrice.
'Because you'd still have to take the roller-coaster ride,' said Rumfoord. 'I didn't design the roller coaster, and I don't own it, and I don't say who rides and who doesn't. I just know what it's shaped like.'"

Kurt Vonnegut must have been an interesting guy, to come up with the themes and plots in his books. In the case of Sirens of Titan, we have a case of life in the future, a man who can see all that has & will happen, and people who wind up as pawns in a much larger game than they can imagine.

Douglas Adams was incredibly enamored with the story, and it served as a huge inspiration for his Hitchhiker series; but Vonnegut's original has a very different feel to it. Where Adams had a strong focus on humor mixed with scattered poignant bits, Vonnegut's story is far less laugh-out-loud funny and more the sort that drops almost startlingly penetrating "revelations" about life (as in the above quote) alongside scattered biting witticisms about various facets of life (as in the following quote).

"The only thing anybody could think of to do with them was to housebreak them, teach them basic vocabulary of a thousand words, and give them jobs in military or industrial public relations."

I enjoyed the story a lot, I think Vonnegut had some good insights and a clear if critical overlook of the world we live in. This particular work didn't bowl me over, though. I was more fond of Cat's Cradle. But I think this one demonstrates nicely both his stinging wit and his ability to paint a wonderful picture with words.

"He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered the hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. 'Beautiful,' he whispered."