Kurt Vonnegut

The Sirens of Titan

“[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

A Novel

Erin O’Donnell

"Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." 

The sermon of the panorama was that even a man without a friend in the Universe could still find his home planet mysteriously, heartbreakingly beautiful.

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."

Edward Steel

Originally published: New York: Delacorte Press, c1959.

An Original Novel

里森

First time I’ve read Vonnegut and it reminded me of Douglas Adams or even Roal Dahl. Started to lose me a little in the middle as tricky to balance the tone of sci-fi and satire but I loved the ending. 

Luke Pearce

Naveen Sheik

When Winston Niles Rumfoord flies his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum he is converted into pure energy and only materializes when his waveforms intercept Earth or some other planet. As a result, he only gets home to Newport, Rhode Island, once every fifty-nine days and then only for an hour. But at least, as a consolation, he now knows everything that has ever happened and everything that ever will be. He knows, for instance, that his wife is going to Mars to mate with Malachi Constant, the richest man in the world. He also knows that on Titan -- one of Saturn's moons -- is an alien from the planet Tralfamadore, who has been waiting 200,000 years for a spare part for his grounded spacecraft...

i enjoyed the concept and quirky characters — though it’s not quite as engaging or moving as his other work

petrina

Didn't really get anything out of this book, it wasn't bad it just lacked interesting ideas and characters.

Joe Cloute

Frederik De Bosschere

This second novel by Kurt Vonnegut tells a story that is both incredibly silly and tremendously dark, thus establishing his signature humoristic absurdism. The author portrays our universal search for life's grand purpose, and leaves it up to us readers to determine if true meaning can indeed be found.

The sirens of Titan

Pavonini

America's wealthiest man succumbs to the irresistible charms of a lunar siren.

Aske Dørge

This is such a weird, quirky, early piece of sci-fi. I thought a lot about Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan, but it’s deeper and more philosophical. It’s like a Greek play where the gods torment some poor mortals, that desperately want to be in control of their own destiny, while in fact they are just pawns for the gods/author.

The Sirens Of Titan

Gabriel H

Not my favorite Vonnegut book but we still love him and his ridiculous humor

Daryl Houston

Some nice moments, but on the whole kind of tedious -- heavier on wacky plot and machinations than I usually go for.

Overall, it was great. This is my first Vonnegut book, and I was pleased to see dry, dark humor and satirical situations similar to Douglas Adams.

The downside for me was that some of the situations don't seem to be explained enough. For instance, I don't understand some reasoning behind the Martian bit. It seems like a lot of action just to make a delivery.

I don't really want to delve into spoilers, but I will say that it seemed to unravel at them end, and ended both abruptly and in a disappointing fashion.

Vonnegut is a prophetic proto-economist, among many other things. A character in this book picks stocks by using the first letters of bible verses and mapping them to tickers. He builds a spectacularly performing portfolio that becomes the basis for his corporate empire. The idea that stock selection rarely works because prices are indistinguishable from random walks implies that a randomly chosen portfolio will be as good as a more deliberately constructed one, on average. The idea is commonplace today. But this book was written long before the idea had any credibility. There wasn’t any theory or reliable empirical evidence backing it up. Finance as a discipline was arguably born with Harry Markowitz' UChicago dissertation in 1952—Vonnegut, too, went to UChicago, where he failed his MA in Anthropology, only to later be awarded the degree retroactively for Cat's Cradle, but I digress.—Academic finance was exactly 7 years old when Vonnegut wrote the book in 1959. Burton Malkiel would later, in the '70s illustrate the same idea about randomly constructed portfolios with his dart-throwing monkey allegory. This was news in the '70s; to think that Vonnegut came up with it in the '50s is just cool. This is just one tiny circumstantial motif that appears in this book along with, for example, paper-thin cave-dwelling kite-shaped aliens that can communicate single bits of information telepathically, live on Mercury and get their energy from mechanical vibrations.—Only Vonnegut can write something like this.

The Sirens of Titan

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