Rewritten after rereading in July 2012.This darkly humorous satire starts with a world financial crisis in 1986 (hopefully that’s where the similarity with current times ends), leading to WW3 – though it’s not really about either: it’s fundamentally about adaptation. A million years in the future, the only “humans” left on Earth are the descendants of a small but diverse group of survivors of a Galapagos islands cruise, and they are more like seals than 20th century humans. Most of the story is set between the run up to the cruise and the passengers’ first few years on the island, but it is certainly not a Robinson Crusoe type story; it is far more provocative than that, raising issues of fate/independence, the meaning and importance of intelligence and ultimately, what makes us human.Like all good dystopias (if that's not an oxymoron), the individual steps to it don't really stretch credulity (few of them are very original), but the final destination is more startling - and even somewhat positive.NARRATIVE STYLEThe story arc is fundamentally chronological, but with an enormous number of tiny jumps ahead: right from the start, Vonnegut sprinkles the story with so many snippets about what will happen to everyone, why and how, that you don’t know if there will be anything left by the time the main narrative catches up. He even prefixes the names of those about to die with an asterisk, at which point I went with the flow and stopped worrying about "spoilers" (on rereading, this aspect became pure comedy). The final chapter, which I would have deleted, fills in a few random gaps that didn’t really need filling.The narrator is Leon Trout, a long-dead man who helped build the cruise ship. He reminded me a little of Snowman in "Oryx and Crake" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), so if you liked that, consider this. (Kilgore Trout, the father of Leon, is a recurring character in Vonnegut: a prolific but not very successful writer of sci fi. This book mentions his “The Era of Hopeful Monsters”, with a plot that echoes this.)The book also has random quotes from Mandarax, a hand-held computer and translator that is a little like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They are either bizarrely obscure, like the Oracle at Delphi, or comically inappropriate.THEMESThe main premise is that humans have evolved badly, though the reasons for this are never explained, which is odd, given how much weight is given to subsequent natural selection in the story. Most significantly, our “big brains” are the cause of all our troubles: they lie (so we don’t trust them or other people), we can’t switch them off, they confuse us with too much information, distract us from the important matters of life and death (though often causing death, e.g. by fighting or suicide), and ultimately cause global financial collapse because the value of so many assets is only maintained by belief in virtual money whizzing around. Accepting the idea that our big brains are a handicap is a bit of a challenge, which Vonnegut backs up with typical bathos by suggesting alcohol is just a way to relax with a (temporarily) smaller brain. Our long, protected childhoods accustom us to the idea of an omniscient carer and hence account for belief in god, whilst wealth makes us blasé about our doom. Full stomachs are part of the problem, too: a full belly puts people off-guard and all the powerful people are well-fed, so don’t worry about impending disaster.Outsourcing our skills and knowledge by developing machines to take over many brain tasks reduces the need for big brains, and indeed, for people. No wonder humans, in their twenty-first century form, are doomed – even at a comical level: a million years hence, “evolution hasn’t made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human lifespan down to about thirty years”!By contrast, animals are happy to survive, feed and reproduce, and once stranded on an island, natural selection leads to humanity being reduced and enhanced to such basics, “everybody is exactly what he or she seems to be” and “everyone is so innocent and relaxed now". No more lies or deceit, and no hands to use for evil – it sounds positively Utopian. In addition to the above, it also touches on the nature of intelligence, eugenics (voluntary and not), consent, disability, incest, contraception, mate selection, truth, marriage and alternatives to it, and all sorts of other things. You could make a whole PSHE curriculum from this!HUMAN-NESSAmongst all the big issues and ideas the book explicitly raises, there is one that is always assumed, but never questioned or defended: in what sense are the "humans" on Santa Rosalia in a million years’ time actually human (and by extension, what does it mean to BE human)? And if they are human, then surely we should call ourselves apes, or even fish. And fish and fishing, literal and metaphorical, are recurring themes: many of the characters are "fishers of men", albeit not in a good way, and we’re reminded that “so much depends on fish”; even the narrator’s surname is Trout.I would hesitate to impose a New Testament analogy on a secular novel by a secular writer, but there are many Biblical allusions: creation, flood, an ark, Adam and Eve, the danger of knowledge, the power of belief, the existence of God, David and Goliath, souls, redemption, and… fish.Vonnegut toys with why we are as we are and clearly doesn't think it's brain size or capacity that makes us human (which is surely good, as otherwise, what would be the implication for those with learning difficulties and brain damage etc?), but he leaves the reader to decide what “human” means. FATE AND PURPOSEThroughout the book, Vonnegut keeps reminding us of the significance of random and apparently trivial events, whilst at the same time implying the apparent opposite: the inevitability of the outcome for humanity (the butterfly effect versus fate). There is a clear message that most people are irrelevant; we can't know who the few important ones are, but they're probably the ones we least expect. Trout admits his prolonged observation was pointless: he was addicted to the soap opera qualities of the story, but accumulated knowledge rather than understanding. MAIN MESSAGE?The world ends up a happier place, because of the power of natural selection, echoing the very upbeat quote from Anne Frank on the title page, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.”Yet, given his ideas about fate, is Vonnegut suggesting the book is pointless too (not that I would agree with that), is he actually trying to make a point (if so, what?) or just entertaining us? Mostly the latter, I thinkIf Leon Trout is reading this, or any other discussion of the book, he is doubtless chuckling at how seriously people are taking it. Mind you, as a pretentious late teen/early twentysomething, I would have had a field day of profundity!Overall, not a long book, but one to savour, ponder, chuckle over and reread.OTHER QUOTATIONS•t“Mere opinions… were as likely to govern people’s actions as hard evidence, and were subject to sudden reversals as hard evidence could never be.”•t“It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth.”•tBig brains make marriage hard because “That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions” and switch between them so quickly “that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up light a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates”.•t“Typical of the management of so many organisations one million years ago, with the nominal leader specialising in social balderdash, and with the supposed second in command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked.”
Galapagos: Our biggest problem is our oversized brainsOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureThis year I read or reread my favorite Kurt Vonnegut books after a two-decade gap: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Mother Night (1961), Cat’s Cradle (1963), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). In these works, his trademark cynicism and resignation towards humanity’s recurrent vanity and folly was mitigated by his gallows humor and simple, unadorned prose. It’s a formula that really transcends any period and keeps his books popular among successive generations of readers, particularly younger people who connect with his consistent debunking of societies’ pretensions and hypocrisies.I debated whether to add Galápagos (1985) to the list, since it comes much later in his career and some of his later books seemed to lack the energy and focus of his early works. In the end, it’s such a short book and the audiobook is narrated by the excellent Jonathan Davis, so I gave it a go. As it turns out, Galápagos served as a concise summation of the ideas that infuse his earlier books.Galápagos is the story of the “Nature Cruise of the Century” aboard the Bahía de Darwin, a cruise set to depart Ecuador for the Galapagos Islands with a roster of wealthy and prominent passengers including Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, Mick Jagger, and other celebs. However, right before the cruise embarks, a global financial crisis destroys the value of emerging currencies, rendering the value of the Ecuadorian currency “less than a banana peel” and scuppering the trip. However, a number of passengers are already in Ecuador, and amid growing unrest and hunger in the local population, the captain still hopes to depart with hundreds of gourmet meals still onboard. As you can imagine, things don’t go well, and the boat finally runs aground on the island of Santa Rosalia in the Galapagos.The novel is narrated by an omniscient voice that does not identify itself for most of the book, but does indicate it is viewing the events of 1985 from a million years in the future. The narrator tells us that in this far future, humankind has completely evolved (or devolved) into streamlined, beaked creatures living in the Galapagos Islands that live mainly on fish, iguanas, Blue-footed Boobies, etc. Their key development is that they have evolved much smaller brains to adapt to a simple existence, free of all the miseries and neuroses that afflicted mankind a million years ago. In fact, humans’ hands have become flippers designed for swimming, so they no longer can use tools and recreate civilization. It turns out that civilization was wiped out by a virus that consumed human eggs in the uterus, and the only survivors are descended from the passengers (and a few others) of the Bahía de Darwin.Throughout the story, the narrator dryly describes the various dramas that each passenger has gone through in their lives, and how this random gathering of people unwittingly becomes the start of a new human race. As always, the selection of people is utterly random due to the absence of a divine being controlling events, so everyone is flawed in various ways, with no heroes or villains. In fact, the only villain in the story is the oversized brains of people that created such an absurd and unsustainable global society in the first place.This theme is very much in keeping with what Vonnegut has written before, and he has always had great pathos and empathy for the plight of the poor, deluded, and neurotic human race, but I think in Galápagos he pulls the focus even farther back (a million years, in fact) to observe humans from a great distance, and his conclusion is that the self-inflicted misery of the human race can only be solved by shrinking and simplifying those oversized, useless brains of ours that prevent us from being satisfied with a simple, unencumbered existence.In other words, after several decades of writing about the stupidity of modern society, Vonnegut has essentially said, “you know what, it’s pretty obvious that we are hopeless basket cases and would be better off as simple-minded creatures that live a peaceful existence fishing and fornicating and otherwise thinking about nothing at all.” That suggests to me that the balance of his cynicism and humanism finally had tipped towards fatalism and that humanity is incapable of fixing its own problems. How we as readers take this message is entirely up to us, but it’s certainly not a comforting thought.
What do You think about Galápagos (1999)?
Oh how I love this book. Parts of it do come off as a bit dated now, but the overall theme about all that we, the human race, and our oversized brains are doing to make ourselves extinct is still very resonant.This is a tale of "The Nature Cruise of the Century" to Darwin's Galapagos islands in 1986 and how the small group of people beached on one of the islands ends up becoming the future all of humankind.The detached narrator looks back on the pivotal moments leading up to and including that doomed cruise and how Natural Selection caused humans to survive and evolve - to a much simpler, survival based existence - with smaller brains leading to a future one million years strong and counting.I absolutely hate spoilers. I don't even care to be reminded in the slightest about the plot before I read something. So it is very funny that I enjoy this book so much since throughout Vonnegut does nothing but spoil things and tell us what is going to happen point blank rather than via foreshadowing - that seems to be for sissies. As he himself said, "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."Vonnegut pokes fun at society and the problems we create for ourselves. His wry humor weaves around his more serious statements about such things as the atrocities of war.This book was devilishly fun. Read it if you want a satirical laugh about yourself and human nature. After all, in a million years you won't be able to read the book with just your flippers and your mouth.
—Molly
Kurt Vonnegut explains that the greatest achievement of The Origin of Species is that it has done "more to stabilize people’s volatile opinions of how to identify success or failure than any other tome." The thinking is that so long as we continue to survive challenges, we will have improved over those that came before.We often associate survival with success, merit and quality, and Vonnegut goes out of his way to undermine this notion in one of his less appreciated novels, Galapagos.Leon Trotsky Trout is a ghost speaking from a million years in the future. Natural selection has continued throughout that time so humanity is better than ever. Perhaps surprisingly, the evolution of the human race reveals that the villain of history is the "oversize human brain." After all, the humans of the future don't have big brains anymore.A million years from now, people will have evolved to be, more or less, seals. The skull of the average human will not be as big as it is now, which makes swimming for fish easier, which in turn makes survival a cakewalk. So who needs an oversize brain?Certainly the world is a better place without those villainous brains. The rainforest, the atmosphere, and the icecaps of today would think so -- as would any human seal that thinks survival is a rubber stamp of success.We spend a great deal of time holding 1984 and Brave New World as models for all dystopian writers. After a while, unfortunately, government and corporate control starts to feel all too familiar. Galapagos may be my favorite dystopian story simply because Vonnegut takes such an unconventional route to his dystopian future.
—Ryan
Labai keista knyga. Ji nėra bloga, priešingai, kaip satyra tikrai gera, kaip sci-fi, na, gal šiek tiek prastesnė (iš tos pusės, kad sci-fi čia iš esmės neegzistuoja). O bet tačiau, jos trūkumas tas, kad joje praktiškai nieko nevyksta. 280 puslapių trypčiojimo vietoje ir dar pastoviai autoriaus mintims šokinėjant no vieno prie kito, tada vėl grįžtant atgal, tada peršokant kaži kiek į priekį, tada nusukant prie šalutinė minties, tada peršokant atgal, tada vėl prie šalutinės, tada pirmyn, atgal ir t.t. ir t.t. Mane tai šiek tiek vargino. Ne, vargino ne tas žodis, erzino būtų tikslesnis. Kita vertus, viskas, kas išjuokta, išjuokta labai tiksliai, subtiliai, dailiai ir stilingai. O tai tikrai nėra taip lengva, kaip gali pasirodyti iš pirmo žvilgsnio. Apibendrinant - neblogai. Ne šedevras, bet tikrai neblogai. Gal šiek tiek trūko kai kurių veikėjų išplėtojimo, na ir pasikartosiu, bet veiksmo tikrai galėjo būti daugiau. Bet tuo pačiu suprantu, kodėl Vonnegut'as laikomas kultiniu rašytoju - jis visiškai kitoks, visiškai išskirtinis, lyginant su kitais. Panašiai kaip visi Tarantino filmai turi tą svotišką braižą, savotiškus požymius, taip ir vonnegut'o knygos yra tiesiog kitokios. Ir tai labai žavu.
—Efka
