A few pages before the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, in an epilogue following some characters through to their deaths, the omniscient narrator reflects: “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”
It’s a simple sentiment. Even banal. But the entire book has built up to it. Everything that’s come before has worked to justify that line, to give it depth and emotional power.
You believe it, and the line makes it clear that the narration’s inspired by an overwhelming empathy. At the start of the book you notice how terse the language is, and how distant the perspective is from events; it’s as though the characters are butterflies pinned to a board, seen from 100 feet up. By the end, with that line, you realize that the distance exists because if the perspective was any closer to those poor stuck-through characters helplessly flapping their wings and getting nowhere, the writer would be weeping too hard to finish the book.
Published in 1959, Sirens was Vonnegut’s second novel, and stylistically more refined and powerful than his first. It was conceived in an impromptu pitch session at a party where Vonnegut ran into an editor friend, and the writing came quickly and smoothly. But the book has an intricate plot, with layers of schemes and hidden manipulators, in service of a theme that questions the idea of freedom.
It takes place in “the Nightmare Ages… between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.” Wealthy playboy Malachi Constant is summoned to a meeting with Winston Niles Rumfoord, another wealthy man who went into space and fell afoul of a “chrono-synclastic infundibulum” that turned him and his dog into “wave phenomena,” with the upshot that Rumfoord came to know the future but could only manifest on Earth for limited periods of time.
Rumfoord tells Constant some details of the future in a loose, oracular way, describing a trip that’ll take Constant to Mars and Mercury and back to Earth before ending on Saturn’s moon of Titan. Constant, who up to this point has lived a life of spectacular good fortune, decides he wants none of it. But the future can’t be so easily denied.
He’s launched on a strange journey in which we learn the source and meaning of his good fortune, and what’s happening on Mars, and the true purpose of human civilization. Terrible things happen, and Constant stumbles through a series of disasters to the end of the book.
It’s almost picaresque, but too tightly-plotted, and Constant’s not a rogue so much a feckless and privileged youth who tries not to grow up and fails. He serves other ends than he knows, as do the other characters. The whole cast careens through the solar system seeking some meaning or freedom, and rarely finding either.
Rumfoord’s a major manipulator of events, but he’s also largely helpless. He doesn’t really get what he wants. Nor do most people in the book. We see their struggles, and we’re sometimes aware as events unfold how futile those struggles are, and sometimes have the futility explained after the fact. By the end we’ve come to understand that all of human history has been, if not futile, at least directed to ends nobody knew—and ends of no great importance, either.
It’s an ironic story, as characters strive without knowing it to do the impossible. But the irony of the book never becomes overwhelming because it doesn’t seem Vonnegut has his thumb on the scale. And so it’s very sad.
But also beautiful: characters use each other for their plans, but the book argues that humans have a need to be used. That is what love is, Sirens claims, and there’s a human need for love. I’m not convinced this is universally true, but it gives the interplanetary flailing of the characters a common theme that sustains the book.
Defining love as a need to be used is dark but convincing. The characters—Rumfoord, Constant, Rumfoord’s wife Bee, who suffers at both their hands—all have a fragility to them that isn’t obvious, and the dramatic structure ruthlessly homes in on those weaknesses and brings them to the fore. You’re reading to see if the characters can help each other instead of being hurtful. And the book lingers in the mind because there’s real ambiguity about exactly that point.
The science fictional concepts that shape the setting, plot, and imagery are fun bits of chrome, but this is a book about human nature and not about human nature shaped by technology. It’s a literary tall tale that uses Space Age concepts to push reality. It’s internally consistent in its setting and logic, but develops in ways unlike most science fiction of the time.
Within a few years, though, science fiction would become more experimental, as the New Wave of writers like Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, and Joanna Russ pushed the genre into new shapes. Looking back, Sirens of Titan is a sign of what was coming, a writer using a genre form in new ways.
Vonnegut would write an essay about science fiction a few years later that’s an odd mix of praise and exasperation, viewing SF as less a literary form than a social grouping of specific writers and readers. Vonnegut wasn’t a part of that group, though Sirens was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. But in 1959 Vonnegut wasn’t really a part of the American literary scene either. Sirens may be easier to understand now than it was when it was published.