Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 for Free Online

you.”
     
“Please tell me.”
     
“You know what’s happened.”
     
“Tell me.”
     
“I died.”
     
    This is not a light-hearted or thrilling entertainment of a novel. But it is a necessary one, still.

6
    Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Galápagos (1985)

     
    SENTIMENTAL , cynical, clear-eyed, spiritual, godless, often very funny, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was more than a cult favorite in the 1960s and ’70s but has fallen from popular favor. His early novel The Sirens of Titan was unabashed paperback sf, but of a kind rarely seen until then, and Cat’s Cradle was almost as explicitly science fictional. Many of his subsequent novels contain an uncanny quality, verging on sf without ever quite going there. Galápagos tells the cautionary and scathing tale of humanity’s future evolution into mindlessness, narrated by a ghost still lingering a million years hence. That ghost, as it happens, is Leon Trotsky Trout, son of the prolific Kilgore Trout whose terrible sf is quoted through most of Vonnegut’s fiction after his appearance in Breakfast of Champions (1973). It’s obvious that Trout is a fond if mocking mask for sf master Theodore Sturgeon, but really he is, of course, Vonnegut himself. As, too, is Leon, who recalls humankind’s ruined world, brought down (he asserts) by the excesses of our huge, intelligent, obsessive and endlessly tricked and tricky three-pound brain.
    Perhaps the oddest aspect of this bittersweet fable, told by an apparent anti-intellectual misanthrope hanging onto hope by the skin of his teeth, is how startlingly accurate his near-future predictions were. Global financial collapse is due to “a sudden revision of human opinions as to the value of money and stocks and bonds and mortgages and so on, bits of paper,” wealth “wholly imaginary… weightless and impalpable,” just as it nearly did a quarter century later.
    A Japanese genius invents the Mandarax, a handheld device in “high-impact black plastic, twelve centimeters high, eight wide, and two thick,” with a screen the size of a playing card, that can translate a thousand languages, diagnose illnesses, bring up any kind of information or literary quote. At a time when “portable” or luggable computers were known as boat anchors and linked by phone lines, Vonnegut had foreseen Google and the iPhone (which, to draw on the kind of absurdist detail he peppers his pages with, is 11.6 by 6.2 by 1.2 cm). All of this information is useless after the Fall, Trout claims, and dubs the Mandarax “the Apple of Knowledge.” A nod to Genesis, but a startling and amusing intimation of the Apple iPhone…
    The Galápagos islands, described with distaste in 1832 by Charles Darwin as a “broken field of black basaltic lava, thrown into the most rugged waves, and crossed by great fissures, is everywhere covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood, which shows little signs of life,” become the home of the last traditional humans, one man and nine women.From this remnant, marooned on Santa Rosalia, home of the vampire finch, springs the non-sapient Homo sapiens of the next million years. Eventually our descendants are aquatic fish-eaters with a head sleek and narrow, jaws adapted to snatching their marine prey, skull too cramped for intelligent thought. To Trout, this is a satisfactory consummation; the fittest have survived, even if their initial “fitness” was sheer dumb accident in a world smashed by human ingenuity and an infertility virus (perhaps inspired by AIDS) spread through the machineries of world-girdling technology. The Galápagos are spared precisely by their isolation. The new humans are inbred, furred because of a mutation engendered in a Japanese child by her mother’s exposure to the Hiroshima bombing, but at least spared the heritable Huntington’s chorea (ironically, a mind-destroying illness) that their ship’s Captain fears he carries. It is a future of “utter hopelessness.”
    Vonnegut being the kind of Mark Twain