Product Description

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...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22690 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Kurt Vonnegut's second SF novel was published way back in 1959 but remains horribly timeless. For all the book's wild inventiveness, it's one of the most blackly nihilistic comedies ever published in the genre. The tragicomic godgame is presided over by Winston Niles Rumfoord, who has accidentally become a standing wave in space/time and knows the past and the future. Since the future is fixed, he can't change it even though it involves him arranging nasty fates for many people--in particular Malachi Constant, richest man in the world since his father's career of interpreting the Bible as a coded guide to the stockmarket. Despite his struggles, Constant is destined for a grimly comic pilgrimage around the Solar System to Titan, home since 203,117 BC of the visiting alien Salo whose presence has warped the whole of human history. Salo's far-off people manipulated us into building Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China and other vast constructions as reassuring signals to their stranded emissary--who himself is carrying a message of truly cosmic unimportance. Small wonder that Rumfoord tries to cheer up humanity by founding the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Vonnegut scatters crazed ideas in all directions, forcing you into painful laughter at the grandiose futility of his cosmos. Another worthy Millennium SF Masterworks classic. --David Langford

About the Author
SALES POINTS * #18 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written * "A classic, ripe with wit and eloquence and a cascade of inventiveness" -- Brian Aldiss * "A work of great scope and staggering originality ... It's an experience not to be missed" -- Books and Bookmen * "A very funny novel about the meaningless Of It All" -- Science Fiction: 100 Best Novels

Customer Reviews

The Constant Messenger
There is a compelling argument for this to be considered Vonnegut's best book. Although the humour is more a sly ticklish undercurrent than a smack-in-the-face wake-up tidal wave, and there is none of the authorial intervention that Vonnegut has come to rely on in later work, some might say that these are no bad things.
"The Sirens of Titan" is an outlandish and imaginative fantasy that is also a serious consideration of mankind's need for meaning in life. Of course, seasoned Vonnegut readers will know that if you come to him knocking for meaning in life, the cupboard is bare. Nonetheless the investigation of why is as entertaining and thought-provoking a book as I've read all year.

Vonnegut, the arch-humanist who (in "Timequake") nonetheless acknowledges that faith is too important to lose, creates the tale of the pointlessness of everything that goes on in the "black velvet futility" of space, down to and including - especially - Earth. People search for meaning without knowing that their acts are all predestined: by a man determined to bring Earthlings together by wiping out the Martian invaders?; or by an ancient civilization from the other side of the universe trying to transport a spare part to their emissary on the moon of Saturn?; or by the seemingly arbitrary activities of an apathetic God? Well! How crazy would any of *that* be...

From the start both the cynical finesse and singleminded determination of Vonnegut's prose should have you in helpless thrall to his cause...

All these elements are present in this masterful early novel by one of the 20th century's greatest writers. Douglas Adams, author of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, accepted a debt of inspiration to Vonnegut and here's where it most clearly lies: the made-up books, the universal-omniscient author, the chrono-synclastic infundibulum... The difference is that Adams' work was really (in his own words) "just jokes," whereas Vonnegut's serious purpose gives his book steel. And range: even Salo, the depressed robot precursor to Marvin the Paranoid Android, is profoundly moving, as are the deaths of the main protagonists, however stupid and selfish and careless they have been. Why: they're almost like you and me.

"God Does Not Care About You"
Kurt Vonnegut careens from crazed premise to crazed premise like a narrative pinball. A TARDIS in book form, the novel contains more ideas than it seems possible to cram into its 224 pages, with Vonnegut's imagination almost being a chronosynclastic infundibulum of its own, "a place where all truths fit together". And holding it all together is the idea that there is nothing or nobody holding it all together.

Like most of Vonnegut's novels, the humour is fast, sharp and pitch black. In many ways, the story is similar to Voltaire's "Candide", although perhaps more sympathetic. In "Candide", Voltaire's characters are little more than archetypes off which to bounce ideas off, or even collide them headfirst into them. Vonnegut clearly invites us to feel for his characters, despite how repellent and awful they may at first appear.

The new Gollancz edition has much to recommend for itself, being published in a knowingly pulpy format, complete with eyecatching book design and a cheerfully informative foreword by Jasper Fforde.

A one-off
Well, if you're looking for science fiction adventure with alien contact, space battles and the like, The Sirens of Titan is not going to be your cup of tea I'm afraid. In fact, it is debatable whether it's science fiction at all. Rather, this is a barmy, barking, Brobdignagian romp across a solar system which is definitely not our own! Top-heavy with satire, dripping wit and inventive with knobs on, not to mention an ending sad enough to make Pickaxe Charlie break down and sob. Simply great. Read and enjoy, but be warned - this book is to science fiction what the Official Monster Raving Looney Party is to British Politics!!