The Sirens of Titan: An elaborate plan to make everyone just be nice to each other

The Sirens of Titan is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel, and it is very obvious from the start (at least to me) how much his writing style changed throughout his career. I’ve read Timequake and Breakfast of Champions though, so I know what ends up happening to his writing style. The Vonnegut style that I’m used to is short paragraphs that all seem to be about nothing, but tell a complete story over two to three hundred pages. They are full of random thoughts (especially in Breakfast of Champions) that are funny because they are usually not something you think about. Sirens is different in that Vonnegut was still a young author who probably felt he had to write like all the other authors. I had a hard time believing this actually was a Kurt Vonnegut book, but there were a few elements that convinced me it was. One of those elements was the character Winston Niles Rumfoord, who is a character I’m sure I’ve read about in another Vonnegut book (I don’t recall exactly where now, it just sounds really familiar), and the presence of the Tralfamadorians, our favorite aliens that were also featured in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Now that we know it’s an actual Vonnegut book, we can start looking beyond the story to see what it is all about. Rumfoord is one of the main characters, and he doesn’t seem like a protagonist or an antagonist in the book. He’s just the guy that makes everything happen. He travels around the solar system by materializing in regular intervals on different planets. He does this because he (and his dog Kazak) flew into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum, and it turned them into some kind of wave. Whenever the Rumfood/Kazak wave intersects a planet, they materialize there. Somehow Rumfoord also gains the ability to see the future. So what does Rumfoord do with these cool powers? He stages an elaborate attack on Earth by Mars. There were no aliens on Mars, instead he has people kidnapped and taken to Mars to form an army to attack Earth later. The purpose of the attack is to unite everyone on Earth in a new religion called “The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.” The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent teaches that God created everything, and then stopped interfering altogether. Everyone is a victim of a series of accidents, and there isn’t much they can do about it.
The purpose Rumfoord has in creating this new religion is to take away any claims that God wants this or that. It asks the questions “Why would God single you out? Why does God like you more?” Obviously then this takes away all claims to leadership by divine right. Another implication of having a totally indifferent God is that there would never be any reason to pray. If God doesn’t care anyway, why bother asking him for things, or thanking him? He didn’t do anything for you besides creating you, so your thanks is wasted on him. The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent goes another step further in trying to eliminate random good luck by making people compensate for their strengths in negative ways: an attractive woman wears frumpy clothes, the local priest carries around 48-pound weights, the most attractive man marries a woman who is nauseated by sex. The purpose of that is to try and bring everyone to the same level and eliminate jealousy. It makes everyone easier to love I guess, which is the central point of the religion: just love each other, even though no one Up There really cares.
The book is very well written. Unlike Arthur C. Clarke, Vonnegut wastes no space on pointless exposition. The other two main characters life stories are very important to the conclusion of the book, Mars’ attack on Earth is the turning point of the book, and Unk’s time on Mercury is also important. At one point, it seems that the two main characters are forgotten, but they are not. I promise. This is a very linear story with a pretty important message, and even though it wasn’t as easy to read as other Kurt Vonnegut books, I still enjoyed it. I also have a new favorite quote from it:

“it took us that long to realize that a purpose of a human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

The Sirens of Titan on Amazon.com
ISBN#: 0-440-17948-3

Free Will! Free Will! The Rerun is over!

Those are the words of the old, out-of-print science fiction author Kilgore Trout, right at the end of the ten year rerun that is the basis for the book Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.
The premise of Timequake is that the Universe got bored with expanding all the time. “What is the point?” It asked itself. So it stopped expanding, and contracted for a while. On Earth, everyone is flashed back to a point 10 years earlier, and are forced to relive the previous 10 years of their lives. They make the same bad decisions, they do all the exact same things, and can’t help it. They have all their memories of the last 10 years, so they know what is coming. This results in everyone going on what Trout calls “autopilot,” since everyone knows what is coming next, they don’t have to think about it.
For me, this would be a combination of a great time and torture. Like everyone else (I’m sure), I’ve done a lot of things that I’m embarrassed about, but the last 10 years for me include college, high school and seventh and eighth grade. Some good times and some bad; I won’t get into it here.
Early on in the book, Vonnegut writes a little bit about his opinion on TV. He says that it was ok a long time ago, when there were very few shows and people would get out and discuss them, but it expanded to the point where nobody is watching the same thing and nobody talks to other people.
I didn’t catch this while reading the book, but after I read it (and the more I thought about it), Vonnegut uses the timequake as an allegory for TV. The previous 10 years of everyone’s life is like a bad TV show they are re-watching. People realize that they can’t do anything about it, so they all just stop thinking. Studies have shown that there is less brain activity in someone who is watching TV than someone who is sleeping, and Vonnegut shows people forgot how to think during the timequake. As soon as the rerun ends (the Universe expands back to where it was), everyone who was standing on one leg when the timequake hit falls over. This is pretty common because many people were mid-stride while walking around. He even gives an example of a man who was driving a truck, and when the rerun ended, he crashed into a building because he didn’t realize he had to think about what he was doing.
This book gives me chills because of how reflective of our society it actually is. I have a pretty extreme example, but I think it’s exactly what Vonnegut was getting at. I lived with a guy whose drivers license said he weighed 290 pounds, but he had to have weighed closer to 350 or maybe even more than that. The reason for his weight was that he sat on the couch for thirteen (I wrote it out so you’d know it’s not a typo) thirteen hours every day. He set his alarm for 9:30 AM, so he could waddle over to the living room and channel surf all day long. He did leave the apartment to go to class, work, and broomball; but those are the only reasons he left. Occasionally, my other roommates and I would use the living room while he was in class, and when he got back and found the TV in use, he had no idea what to do with himself. He had become dependent on TV.
This of course is an extreme example, but it is not uncommon for people not to know what to do without TV’s or computers. When I went to my grandparent’s cabin last weekend, I brought a few good books to read in case it rained, and I spent the entire time outside exploring the woods, swimming, or having a fire; not being anti-social in front of a screen the entire time.
This book is similar to Fahrenheit 451 in that it is heavily critical of TV, and it shows how people are thinking less because the TV is doing it for them. People don't know how to entertain themselves, they don't know how to interact, because there's no need: We have TV instead.
Timequake on Amazon.com
ISBN # 0425164349

Five out of Five for Slaughterhouse-Five

I have a harsh grading scale for books that I read. I give every book a number between one and five, where one means the book was stupid, unenjoyable and I can’t believe I wasted a weekend reading it. Five means it was life-changing because it was so good and thought provoking. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut easily earned the five that I gave it.
This was the first Kurt Vonnegut book I read, and it was the springboard from which I jumped when I started my reading binge (that I am currently on). Since reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I have been addicted to Vonnegut, reading everything I can about his life and reading several more of his books (after SH5 I read Timequake,Jailbird,Cat’s Cradle and plan on reading the rest of his works).
One of the opening lines of chapter two sets up the premise of the book: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The rest of the book is written non-sequentially, to reflect the Billy Pilgrims random shifts through time. What I loved about the constant time shifts was that it made the whole book seem like a compare/contrast essay. Pilgrim shifts the most between his time in World War II and his life shortly after, however it is clear that he shifts all over his life and sometimes sees parts of his life several times. With a little help from the Tralfamadorans (aliens from the planet Tralfamadore), Pilgrim learns to just accept what is happening to him and essentially enjoy it. The Tralfamadorans view time differently than humans do. Humans see time as linear: you are born, you live your life, and you die. The Tralfamadorans can move back and forth in time and live all the different parts whenever they want to. They have seen the end of the universe many times, and they never attempt to change it; it always happens the same way. By being able to see what comes next and having hindsight, Pilgrim learns that life isn’t so bad after all.
Several Vonnegut motifs are in this book: it has something to do with World War II, and Kilgore Trout makes an appearance. Pilgrim spends some time in a hospital in the book, and meets a fan of Kilgore Trout. Trout is an old, out of print science fiction writer, and Pilgrim looks him up and meets him later on. One thing that really struck me was a Kilgore Trout story that was in the book called The Gospel From Outer Space. It is printed in its entirety, probably because Vonnegut thought it was pretty important. I’ll reprint it here for you:

"The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh boy – they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!"

It doesn’t exactly tie in with the rest of the story in the book, but I thought it was really profound. In the real Gospels, Jesus always asks people not to tell others about the miracles he performs, and I never understood why. That is, until I read this, and this reasoning makes sense. Since Jesus taught about loving our neighbors and turning the other cheek (and all the other lovely and puzzling things he said), Christianity has done a lot of terrible things to people who were “the right person to lynch.” Christianity has done many, many good things, too, but Jesus probably saw what overzealous religious people were capable of (he is the son of the most powerful being in the universe, after all). The Purpose of this quote is probably to describe Vonnegut’s view of what Christianity was trying to get at but in his opinion failed to do. He saw Jesus’ teachings as centered on “punishing horribly anybody who torments the bum with no connections” instead of “punishing the bum with no connections.”
The back cover of SH5 describes it as an anti-war book, but I really didn’t see that as the focus of the story. If you want a good Kurt Vonnegut anti-war book, go read Cat’s Cradle (which I will also be reviewing). I see this more as a description of a new philosophy of time book. You need not fear death or mourn for the people who have died, because they are always alive at different times. They are just in a bad state at the moment, but if you were able to go back in time, there they would be: alive and well.
Overall, Slaughterhouse-Five is an amazing piece of literature, with many new and interesting ideas. I found it to be very profound and just awesome. It inspired what could be a lifetime love not just of this author but also of reading in general.

Slaughterhouse-Five on Amazon.com
ISBN# 0-440-18029-5