Galápagos

Kurt Vonnegut's 11th novel and as so often before challenges his reader.

A global financial disaster has ruined the world. One million years later the ghost of Leon Trout, son of recurring Vonnegut character Kilgore, narrates the story of a boat cruise for the rich and famous, Mick Jagger was to be one of the famous voyagers, that is off to the Galápagos Islands to see the wild life, a voyage of a lifetime. The celebrities don't make it as a financial collapse, a useless war between Ecuador and Peru breaks out and the entire world suffers an apocalypse. No one survives the worldwide catastrophe except those on the boat. It eventually makes its way to the Galápagos Islands and from there all life on earth is descended from the survivors.

The thematic points are that human species is a blend of greed, evil, and good. It is generally Humanist if it likes it or not, at times technophobic and just maybe Darwinist survivors. Vonnegut has always claimed that man is essentially a good creature. FWIW, I wonder if I agree with him on that point, though. On the other hand, he survived Dresden and I pontificate from the safety of a place that has never seen war in its existence.

Vonnegut was as usual, and strangely in my opinion, able to make Sci Fi tropes among the satire, comedy and social commentary very prescient. There was a machine called Mandarax, that was a voice translator and able to suggest quotations from literature and historical figures. I have to admit that I was scurrying down the internet wormhole just to read where a lot of these quotes used came from, and what a joy that journey was. Strangely I said? Sci Fi can fail the vast majority of the time in an attempt to use future tropes that work but for many of Vonneguts futuristic ideas he has had in his books, he has senibly used them as thematic tools. Mandrax was the invention of a Japanese man who was going on the cruise at the behest of a US millionaire who had profitable plans to its use. Google now offers on our phones an app that translates text with one's camera. Mandrax future demise in the book may have been a comment on older generational thought not enjoying new technology. This was sad for the survivors of the apocalypse, really. No longer would they have the joys of (as per wiki and in order of their appearance in the book) Anne Frank, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, William Cullen Bryant, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Byron, Noble Claggett, John Greenleaf Whittier, Benjamin Franklin, John Heywood, Cesare Bonesana Beccaria, Bertolt Brecht, Saint John, Charles Dickens, Isaac Watts, William Shakespeare, Plato, Robert Browning, Jean de La Fontaine, François Rabelais, Patrick R. Chalmers, Michel de Montaigne, Joseph Conrad, George William Curtis, Samuel Butler, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, Oscar Hammerstein II, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles E. Carryl, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Lear, Henry David Thoreau, Sophocles, Robert Frost, and Charles Darwin.


Again, one for the Vonnegut reader in my opinion and recommended as such.

My review of number 1 Player Piano.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6205354368
My review of number 2 The Sirens Of Titan. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6267103559
My review of number 3 Mother Night.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6287961968
My review of number 4 Cats Cradle.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371451
My review of number 5 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371734
My review of number 6 Slaughter House Five
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231370983
My review of number 7 Breakfast Of Champions.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/231371515
My review of number 8 Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6478713647
My review of number 9 Jailbird.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1815571880
My review of number 10 Deadeye Dick.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6904714753