Product Description

The richest and most depraved man on Earth takes a wild space journey to distant worlds, learning about the purpose of human life along the way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5978 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-08
• Released on: 1998-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Publisher
8 1-hour cassettes

About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as "a true artist" with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, "one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Between Timid and Timbuktu

"I guess somebody up there likes me."—Malachi Constant


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.

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 empthatically 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's 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 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:...

Customer Reviews

Vonnegut NAILS it
Kurt Vonnegut Jr's The Sirens of Titan begins with Malachi Constant, the richest man in a 22nd-century America, remaining stagnant in regards to his life. He possesses extraordinary luck, which he has used to build upon his father's fortune, but he hadn't really done anything with his life. However, that changes when he becomes the center point of a journey that takes him from Earth to Mars in preparation for an interplanetary war, to Mercury with another Martian survivor of that war, back to Earth to be pilloried as a sign of God's displeasure, and finally to Saturn's moon Titan to meet the man responsible for his respective good or bad fortunes, Winston Rumfoord. Winston Niles Rumfoord, a wealthy New England businessman with a Napoleonic complex, serves both the causes of the protagonist and the antagonist at time. He also serves as the sense of satire in the story, even creating his own religion, The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, to feed into his own ego.

Ruumfoord and his radical philosophies would eventually cause war between Earth and Mars and the conflict in the story. The novel treats religion by Marxist description, as an opiate of the people, which drives its followers to commit often insane acts. Malachi's banishment from Earth by the Church as a result of Rumfoord's teachings as well as his instigation of the Earth-Mars war leading to the Church's formation. Rumfoord's fortune is so large that he is able to fund the construction of a personal space craft, and he became a space explorer. Traveling between Earth and Mars, Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak--entered a phenomenon known as a `chrono-synclastic infundibulum'. The chrono-synclastcic infundibula are places where these ways to be right co-exist. When they enter the infundibulum, Rumfoord and Kazak become "wave phenoma" somewhat akin to the probability waves encountered in quantum mechanics. They rest along a spiral stretching from the Sun to the star Betelgeuse.

Winston Rumfoord is often the driving force behind the story's plot, in both negative and positive connotations. Whilst it seems sometimes in the story that he's helping Malachi, other times he is hurting Malachi as well as plenty others, making him an unconventional character. With Winston and Malachi, another unconventional character who drives the plot Salo, an explorer from the planet of Tralfamador with a mysterious past. He has a spacecraft powered by the Universal Will to Become, or UWTB, which makes matter and organization wish to appear out of nothingness. Salo's great journey is halted when his spacecraft breaks, stalling him in the Solar System. It isn't until near the end of the book that Salo, Malachi, and Winston's fate, purpose, and history are revealed in full context.

Vonnegut does well building these characters in which makes any reader want to find out more about them. Though it does get confusing at times, differentiating the characters from each other, as with Malachi and his alter-ego Unk, the way he builds the characters, as well as the way he continues the story, was very unconventional for typical literature. Science fiction, at the time, was on the brink of rising, with space exploration coming to light globally, and its writers were beginning to revolutionize their styles. The Sirens of Titan serves as an example of such a revolutionary style of writing. The characters are introduced through dialogue and built slowly but strongly. Vonnegut plays into the archetypal characters in terms of satire. Satire has a strong presence in the book, particularly with the often ridiculous conventions of society, particularly with religion and those who try to abuse it for their own gain.

As outlandish at it may seem at sometimes, the elements of The Sirens of Titan does harbor philosophical and sociological theories that parallel real life. Blindly following a cause, as members of Rumfoord's church do, the thirst for adventure and control of life, as Malachi and Rumfoord want, the fight of freedom versus destiny, as the whole story illustrates and alludes to: all themes that are prevalent in this fine piece of literature. Vonnegut has created a complex story filled with satire, unconventional characters and plots, subtle philosophical theories, and a writing style that will keep any mature reader from setting this piece of great science fiction down.

A Trip to the Meaning of Life
Abandon all native ways of thought processing. Kurt Vonnegut strips his readers' idea of reality apart and replaces it with a new one. Whether it is dark or beautiful it is the reader's choice depending on how it is perceived.
Vonnegut's, Sirens of Titan, exploits tremendous amounts of black comedy, satire, irony, and contradictory ideas. This may leave the reader overwhelmed but, he does this with grace and a complete unexpected turn of events. Even though that these ideas are blatant throughout the novel it is laced with underlying messages and philosophies.
Malachi Constant is told his destiny by Winston Niles Rumfoord and it foreshadows the novel (21). Rumfoord is a man who is "Chrono-synclastic infundibulated" (8-9). He is a man that can tell the future because he says, "...everything that ever has been always will be, and everything that ever will be always has been" (20). Constant is to marry Rumfoord's wife, Beatrice and he will travel to Mars, to Mercury, back to Earth, then to Titan (24). The theme of free will and destiny is expressed throughout the novel. He also demonstrates just how society is easily manipulated. Constant being a very dynamic character goes through a series of drastic changes from the luckiest man on Earth, to a man on Mars named Unk, then to the title of The Space Wanderer. Throughout these changes his ultimate destiny is unfolded.
Sirens of Titan has strong science fiction overtones. Vonnegut utilizes the forces of the universe to express the meaning of life. It contains space ships, aliens, and traveling to other planets which are able to sustain life.
The ideas in Sirens of Titan are very compelling and appealing to just about anyone who pursues the novel. Vonnegut has a way of creating unusual thought patterns which forces the reader to review the ideas. He tickles the idea of reality with philosophies such as infinite moments where time does not exist (301). The reader is taken on a trip to discover the purpose of humankind. Just because human beings see things the way they do from day to day, Vonnegut takes on the meaning of truly seeing things from another perspective. He has quite a way of explaining things and using descriptive imagery to really put the reader into another world. His creatures are uniquely described especially the harmoniums on the planet Mercury. These creatures are nourished by the song of Mercury, its vibrations (188). The novel is only 326 pages long, but it is able to express many of the ideas by getting to the point. Inasmuch it keeps the reader addicted to the events and always asking for more. His style is original and sometimes odd such as the run on sentences which may overwhelm the reader. It is a challenging text but it is also rewarding. His writing may seem far out there, but the reader should remember just how strange the universe really is, how much is unknown to humankind, and anything is possible.
The reader should definitely remember to always keep an open mind. Absorb the ideas and themes before making a final judgment on this novel. Prepare to be spiraling in a new wave of thought patterns, watching the universe put itself back together, and remember that the universe is stranger than it seems. Vonnegut takes his reader on a truly brilliant trip.

Critical review for The Sirens of Titan
The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut tells about a journey through space and time while encompassing a bewildering riddle about life. Malachi Constant, the richest American, visits Winston Niles Rumford at the Rumford Estate. Winston, who is the first person to own his own space shuttle, tells Malachi to travel to Mars, Mercury, Earth, and Titan. Rumford strangely went on further by revealing portions of Malachi's future. The story then opens up several years later in Mars where a militia plans and organizes attacks on Earth. On Mars, the army requires the cleaning of people's memory before they go on duty except those of higher power. In the midst of the army, the story follows an ex-officer, Unk, who frequently visits the hospital for several cleanings against his will. Though at first he is vulnerable for others to control him, he fights to uncover his past after reading an inspirational letter and dedicates himself to find his family and retreat to a distant location. Little did Unk know, he becomes part of a shallow scheme set-up by an advance alien race. Upon arriving at Titan, he meets Salo, a machine from Tralfamadore whom contains a highly guarded message in its reticule. Salo's government back in Tralfamadore, under strict rule, tells it not to reveal the message, but only to deliver it to a destination in a galaxy eighteen million light-years beyond Titan. It is the arrival of Unk and his family, guided by Winston Niles that could fulfill this prophecy. Unfortunately, there is a desire by Winston to expose the message before it reaches its end.

Those who read other Vonnegut works will find a number of recurring themes such as his satiric voice, dark humor, and even mentions some of the same terms found in his other novels. It was a Tralfamadorian that kidnap Billy Pilgrim in Slaughter House Five and a Tralfamadorian in The Sirens of Titan who guards a secret message. Vonnegut, though never wanted to be known as a science-fiction writer, captures his audience in The Sirens of Titan in a world of uncertainty and bizarre subjects like time traveling and space exploration. However, Vonnegut attempts to organize the novel so the layout of the story is given to a reader at the beginning of the book.

Kurt Vonnegut does a fine job organizing the novel by dividing the book into chapters and subchapters. Each chapter and subchapter either switches settings or subjects. For example, in the begging of every chapter, Vonnegut reveals an essential quote to help focus central ideas. In chapter one, Vonnegut writes "I guess somebody up there likes me" in which Malachi speaks throughout the book. In chapter nine, Vonnegut writes "In the beginning, God became the Heaven and the Earth...And God said "Let me be Light," and He was light". This is an excerpt from Winston's Revised Bible. It is vital to understand this quote in order to trail the direction of the book. In each subchapter, indicated by three dots in its own separate line, is Vonnegut's way of transitioning from one setting to another. The protagonist could be crouching behind a boulder in one part of the story and another subchapter transitions the setting to space. These transitions are to Vonnegut's advantage for it is a clever technique to purposely leave out information for his readers, only to reveal it in detail later in novel. In fact, Vonnegut uses this technique so effectively, nearly every paragraph is purposeful. For example, the mentioning of Malaci's son metallic good-luck piece back in chapter six, describes it as "He believed firmly that all his powers came from the good-luck piece, and so did his schoolmates, and so, secretly, did Miss Fenstermaker". In chapter nine, after being confronted by a Gumbo Tribesman, the tribesman "...had recognizes the piece of metal as an object of tremendous power. Their respect for it had led them to initiate rather than eats it owner". It wasn't until towards the end of the book, Vonnegut mentions the specific purpose of Chrono's good-luck piece.

Among other things, The Sirens of Titan can become overwhelming to read. No matter how often Vonnegut attempts to sort out his book, the hints he gives to foreshadow the plot are very settle and can easily be overlook. For example, While Malachi was speaking to Winston prior to his launch to Mars, Winston heavily adds emphasis that Malachi should visit Titan for excellent climate and beautiful women. There is only one line of dialogue from Winston however, that says in addition to climate and women, there are art objects worth seeing on Titan. Winston says to Malachi, "oh-art objects, if you like art". Towards the end of the book, there are large handcrafted statues that can be seen on Titan. Vonnegut also changes the characters' names that can cause confusion to some readers. This is also mention very briefly earlier in the book.

The Sirens of Titan is a complex novel by Kurt Vonnegut that can be enjoyable for those interested in the supernatural yet, is authentic enough to bring in modernists ideas. That is to say, the book questions reality. This book has been praised by a series of critics and deservingly so.