All persons, places, and events in this book are real.
Certain speeches and thoughts are necessarily
constructions by the author. No names have been changed
to protect the innocent, since God Almighty protects the
innocent as a matter of Heavenly routine.
The fun begins even before the story begins. The cheeky satirical tone of the text is immediately situated before a single word of fiction arrives. Today, of course, anyone picking up this novel would already be aware of the idiosyncratic nature of author Kurt Vonnegut. The Sirens of Titan was just the second novel Vonnegut published so his reputation was unknown. Add in the fact that it was published in 1959 before science fiction had become ripe for satire and irony and it becomes clear what the author is attempting to do here: warn nerds—the only people who read SF in 1959—that this was not a book to be taken quite as seriously as those by established masters in the field such as Asimov, Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
Everyone 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.
The actual opening lines of the novel are not immediately apparent as satire on the face of it. At least, they wouldn’t have been in the world before the Age of Irony made everything’s sincerity open to question. Religion and the investment of non-scientific belief in spiritual matters was not exactly absent from mid-century science fiction, but for the most part faith was treated respectfully even if the primary message was disdainful. With these opening lines, Vonnegut doesn’t just take off the gloves, but burns sets them on fire using holy water as the accelerant. Mankind’s search for meaning over the previous two or three or four millennia had led to religion with such inevitability that it was the de facto destination. Vonnegut’s reply to this is firmly situated in the modern concept of religion as just another transactional commodity.
"…an Earthling year ago. It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
Malachi, richest man in the world and messianic deliverer of very significant news, is the novel’s protagonist. In this role, he also becomes the author’s mouthpiece for developing a philosophical alternative to religion as a means of explaining ethics and morality. Not even faith in a supreme being can cause a person to behave ethically and with a moral soundness that comes with trying hard to live up to the complicated conventions and expectations rooted in the quirky mysteries of love.
"Everything that every Earthling has ever done has been warped by creatures on a planet one-hundred-and-fifty thousand light years away. The name of the planet is Tralfamador.”
The important message that Malachi (a name meaning “messenger) is to deliver is a confirmation of space traveler Rumfoord’s horrific assertion. The entire history of human beings for the last hundred thousand years or so has been the result of distant alien engineering conducted for the sole purpose of ensuring delivery of a spaceship replacement part.
“Greetings.”
The manipulation of events over the course of time unimagined within human experience is directed toward the delivery of that important message. The manipulation behind that delivery has been paid for in wasted energy and the wasted lives of billions of earthlings. The prosaic quality of the mundane purpose of such waste is perfectly encapsulated in the revelation of the one-word message.
