Trying to summarize a book by Vonnegut is a very hard task to perform without sounding crazy but I will do my best. One guy, Winston Niles Rumfoord, sets to travel to Mars together with his dog where he falls into a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum which makes him to repeatedly and periodically materialize in different places. He materializes at his mansion every 50 days or so. During one of his appearances Rumfoord meets with Malachi Constant, the richest man on Earth, and predicts that the latter will travel to Mars, Earth and Titan. He also tells Constant that he will have a child with Rumfoord’s wife. Malachi refuses to believe the prophecy and does anything in his power to disprove it, even selling his stakes in the only company which was producing a ship capable to fly into space. From here, the novel follows a series of extraordinary and absurd events that will lead to the fulfilment of Rumfoors’s words. For people who read Slaughterhouse-five, Tralfamadore makes an appearance here as well. In sum, a truly exceptional work by a truly exceptional author expressing some exceptionally powerful ideas that made my exceptionally tiny brain scream for an exceptionally long time until I downed an exceptionally large glass of some exceptionally good stuff and suddenly felt exceptionally well….and exceptionally wobbly. The aforementioned approaches have in common that they see Sirens as some form of criticism (of whatever) and going about it in some roundabout way, i.e. it might have been done more directly (apart from the SF parody). But perhaps one should take the novel more seriously and accept its form as necessary for its contents.

Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction in 1961 rated The Sirens of Titan 4.5 stars out of five, stating that "The plot is tangled, intricate and tortuous" but "the book, though exasperating, is a joy of inventiveness". [4] It was a finalist for the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Novel. [5] Mayo, Clark (1977): Kurt Vonnegut. The Gospel from Outer Space. San Bernardino: R. Reginald/Borgo Press.Creator Career Self-Deprecation: The doctors in the Martian army will erase a person's memories if they're deemed to be unfit for duty. They don't erase everything, though, because when they first did that the patients "[C]ouldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything. The only thing anybody could think of to do with them was to housebreak them, teach them a basic vocabulary of a thousand words, and give them jobs in military or industrial public relations." Before he decided to write for a living, Vonnegut was a public relations man for General Electric. Always prophetic. Always relevant. In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, we accompany Malachi Constant on adventures through time and space. He is unlike any other hero you're likely to read about; Malachi "was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." The plot, which seems ridiculous and completely random (like those series of accidents), takes on visionary proportions in Vonnegut's hands. Especially in this novel, I thought about how much Vonnegut had influenced Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. During the visitation, Rumfoord tells Malachi all about his future (and the future of his wife Beatrice) and explains that Malachi will go on a series of journeys and will eventually end up, with Beatrice, on one of the moons of Saturn called Titan (hence the title). Malachi, not liking the idea that his path is set goes about doing everything he can to prevent the events Rumfoord has ordained. You go beyond the story. See Unk staring at you pointedly with a hazy gaze. Figure out if he thinks whether you are in control of the story or is he the real commander. Go beyond the cliché, beyond the at-times stupendously obvious humour. Look at the blanketed irony. Then either sleep in the warmth of ignorance or throw away the cover and dive deep in the chills of reality. The Sirens of Titan is essential, fundamental Vonnegut, as entertaining as it is questing in search of answers to the mysteries of life. As a work of fiction, it is a sure leap, in terms of craft, over his first novel, Player Piano. His writing here is pared down, more concentrated and graceful, richly in the service of his remarkable ideas. Vonnegut summons greatness for the first time in The Sirens of Titan, where the search for the meaning of existence looks and sounds like a kaleidoscopic dream but leaves the reader with a clear and challenging answer.

Winston Niles Rumfoord vanished slowly, beginning with the ends of his fingers, and ending with his grin. The grin remained some time after the rest of him had gone. there’s also a bit of an obsession with the only prominent female character starting to look more and more like an indian (and / or ‘gypsy queen’) as the book goes along, brown skin included. this in direct contrast to when she was young and happy, which is explicitly referenced multiple times through a painting of her dressed in all white with pale skin. Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.” Player Piano was an excellent story, a fine work of science fiction literature written by a man with much world experience and wisdom. But … for the body of work that would come, that great canon of literature that would inspire and entertain and provoke thought from generations of readers, the vanguard was Sirens of Titan.Westbrook, Perry D. "Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: Overview." Contemporary Novelists. Susan Windisch Brown. 6th ed. New York: St. James Press, 1996. Literature Resource Center His life changes irrevocably when he encounters Winston Niles Rumfoord, a playboy millionaire turned space explorer turned omniscient being after he pilots his spaceship into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. (Chrono-synclastic is Latin/Greek for "time bent equally in all directions", and infundibulum is Latin for "funnel".) Rumfoord is effectively "smeared across time" and becomes aware of all events, past, present and future. Armed with this knowledge, Rumfoord begins to direct Constant on a quest of self-knowledge and instruction, along the way setting up the "Church of God the Utterly Indifferent".

Consequently, to improve humankind and to better its destiny omnipresent and omniscient Rumfoord decided to become a universal do-gooder and began to commit a hellish lot of preposterous deeds and even fashioned a new religion…

Wikipedia citation

There have been many attempts to define what science fiction is or should be. The older ones by famous practitioners in the field like John W. Campbell and Isaac Asimov agree that science fiction should show how man gains deeper knowledge of the universe through the use of science and technology and how he may use that knowledge to control his destiny. 7 Evidently, this may easily take the form of wish-fulfilment and escapism, as indeed is the case in many inferior productions of the genre. One might therefore prefer a more cautious and neutral definition like the one by Kingsley Amis, which is roughly contemporaneous with The Sirens of Titan: His best book," Esquire wrote of Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, adding, "he dares not only to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it." This novel fits into that aspect of the Vonnegut canon that might be classified as science fiction, a quality that once led Time to describe Vonnegut as "George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer ... a zany but moral mad scientist." Legal Information Random House v. RosettaBooks ten years later from rosettabooks.com. Retrieved 2012-05-22 Not only are the details of Vonnegut's science fiction inventive and highly improbable, they seem gratuitous. Vonnegut is not apparently using alien life-forms to throw into relief peculiarities or inadequacies of humans, nor does he seem to be using Tralfamadorian technology to say something about ours. While The Sirens of Titan abounds in science fictional ingredients, they are not combined to produce the effects readers have come to expect of science fiction. 6 Here is a brief rundown of the plot (for what it’s worth). The story is told by an unnamed far future historian and takes place over a 40+ year period during the “Nightmare Ages”…“sometime between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.” The story revolves around 3 main characters are Malachi Constant, the aforementioned Winston Niles Rumfoord and Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice.

Rumfoord is “commander-in-chief of everything Martian.” He tells Unk about how Chrono was conceived on a spaceship between Earth and Mars (it is implied that this may have been a result of Unk raping Beatrice). The war between Mars and Earth leads to the utter slaughter of the Martian Army and the total destruction of Martian civilization. The war was designed by Rumfoord but technologically engineered by Salo, an alien messenger from the planet Tralfamadore who has been stranded on Titan for 200,000 years after his spaceship broke down. Kurt Vonnegut was a brilliantly insightful GENIUS whose brain waves were ever so slightly out of phase with our universe making complete comprehension of his work by the rest of us impossible;Salo is a foreign emissary from a risibly-remote planet. He's travelled trillions of light years to deliver a loony-toons message.