The Sirens of Titan

Luck, and the joke of being chosen

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the novel a satire about, among other things, the mistake of taking good luck for the favor of God. Malachi Constant inherited most of his fortune and has had amazing luck with the rest. He explains it by saying somebody up there likes him.

Rumfoord uses what he knows of the future to found a new religion on Earth, the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. When Constant finally comes back from Mercury, he says exactly what Rumfoord predicted he would say. He calls himself the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all. The prediction coming true makes the new church stronger.

The last turn of the plot makes the joke bigger. Beings from the planet Tralfamadore have been steering human history all along, to get a spare part to a Tralfamadorian stranded on Titan. The man who wanted to carry a great message turns out to be a small part of a delivery.

Where the Tralfamadorians come from

Readers of Slaughterhouse-Five know Tralfamadore from Billy Pilgrim's alien zoo. The Tralfamadorians first appear here, ten years earlier. So does the idea of a place from which all moments of time can be seen at once, which Kurt Vonnegut used again in Slaughterhouse-Five.

The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library describes the novel as a space adventure Vonnegut wrote at his publisher's request. Its reader calls it the first novel by Vonnegut as people now know him, with war, Tralfamadorians and an invented religion. Small links to his other work run through it. A little girl in the first chapter is called Wanda June, the name of his later play Happy Birthday, Wanda June.

Mars, Mercury and memory

On Mars, Constant's memory is wiped again and again. Soldiers there have antennas under their skulls that make them obey, and pain is used to keep them in line. Constant becomes a private called Unk. After his seventh memory wipe he is made to strangle his best friend, Stony Stevenson, in front of ten thousand soldiers.

Before he dies, Stevenson tells Unk where to find a letter. Unk had written it himself before an earlier wipe, to tell his future self what the army was hiding. The letter names Boaz, a soldier with no antenna, as the man secretly controlling the squad.

Unk and Boaz end up stranded in the caves of Mercury, where the only life is small creatures called harmoniums that feed on vibrations. Boaz plays them music and lets them feed on his pulse. When a way out opens, Boaz chooses to stay. He has found a place where he can do good without doing harm.

How the novel was received

Dell first sold the novel as a paperback in 1959. The Sirens of Titan was one of five finalists for the Hugo Award for best novel in 1960. The prize went to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. Houghton Mifflin of Boston published a hardcover edition in 1961.

Floyd C. Gale reviewed the hardcover in Galaxy Science Fiction in December 1961. He called it a bitter satire, compared it to Bernard Wolfe's novel Limbo, and found the plot tangled. He still concluded that the book, though exasperating, is a joy of inventiveness. Decades later, the novel was nominated for PBS's The Great American Read, a list of the country's best-loved novels.

The Sirens of Titan in Paris

Paris had the novel in French by 1962. Denoël published Monique Thies's translation that year as Les Sirènes de Titan. Of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, it is the earliest French edition in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Denoël reissued the translation in 1977.