The Sirens of Titan

By: Kurt Vonnegut

Narrated by: Jay Snyder

Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's summary

The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.

©1959 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (P)2008 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

“Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr. Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer . . . a zany but moral mad scientist.” ( Time)

“His best book . . . He dares not only ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it.” ( Esquire)

“Reading Vonnegut is addictive!” ( Commonweal)

"A truth--but, oh God, what a punctual truth"

If Mark Twain wrote science fiction, it might resemble Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan (1959). The novel is narrated by someone living nearly a century after our own time of "gimcrack religions" and exploration of outer space at the expense of inner truth, an exploration that yields only "empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death." To illustrate what people were like before becoming able to find the meaning of life within themselves, the narrator tells a "true" story "from the Nightmare Ages," which took place between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.

In the story, Winston Miles Rumfoord is a Newport, Rhode Island millionaire who, nine years ago in an act of upper class "gallantry and style," accompanied only by his dog Kazak ("the Hound of Space") flew his private spaceship into a "chrono-synclastic infundibulum" near Mars. As a result, master and dog became scattered through space and time as wave phenomena, pulsing from the Sun to Betelgeuse in a spiral that overlaps the earth for a few minutes every fifty-nine days. In addition to no longer being "punctual" (that is, no longer existing moment to moment like normal life in the universe), Rumfoord has become able to read minds and see the future (because for someone like him everything that has ever happened, will happen, and vice versa). During one of his "materializations" on earth, Rumfoord gives some unpleasant news to the richest man in America, Malachai Constant: in the future he will mate with Rumfoord's wife Beatrice on Mars, producing a son called Chrono, and will end up living on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. Needless to say, neither Beatrice (a woman who strives to remain cleanly aloof from life) nor Malachai (a hedonistic womanizer who because his name means messenger expects to bear a message from God to someone equally distinguished) want to make a baby together on Mars! But will they be able to do anything to avoid Rumfoord's future? And could Rumfoord be masterminding a "series of accidents" to bring about that future? And if so, to what end? For that matter, what is the purpose, if any, of life?

The Sirens of Titan is a strange novel: comic, tragic, horrible, beautiful, silly, philosophical. . . Although probably the meaning of life comes down to "some people are lucky and some are not," although probably we are just victims of a series of accidents as we go through our lives, although, who knows, perhaps an ultra-advanced civilization of machines 150,000 lightyears away from earth has been warping every human action in history, although surely the universe is "not schemed in mercy," and although, generally speaking, humanity "is a scummy thing" (people being superstitious, selfish, violent, and ignorant), Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel does offer some truths to cling to: it's better to be used by somebody than not to be used by somebody, and human life has a purpose: "to love whoever is around to be loved." Despite its mockery of humankind (particularly its religious, martial, and business aspects), Vonnegut Jr.'s novel is also infused with his love of "lucky" losers (like Malachai, Beatrice, Boaz, Salo, and even Rumfoord), with his fertile imagination (like the machines of Tralfamadore, the harmoniums of Mercury, and the bluebirds of Titan) and with his knack for witty, vivid description, like the following:

"Bobby Denton spitted his audience on a bright and loving gaze, and proceeded to roast it whole over the coals of its own iniquity."

"There was no sign in the face of any intermediate stages in the aging process, no hint of the man of thirty or forty or fifty who had been left behind. Only adolescence and the age of sixty were represented. It was as though a seventeen-year-old had been withered and bleached by a blast of heat."

"The Wilburhampton Hotel was a frumpish, three-story Tudor structure across the street from the Magnum Opus Building, standing in relation to that building like an ummade bed at the feet of the Archangel Gabriel."

"The child's hair was jet black, bristly--and the black bristles grew in a violently counter-clockwise swirl. . . . And his eyes were luminous under their black-thatched eaves. They glowed with an unshared rage."

Jay Snyder reads the audiobook well, especially Rumfoord's "genial and yodeling" voice and that of Salo, the machine from Tralfamadore.

The Sirens of Titan is science fiction, but, despite the "appallingly beautiful" rings of Saturn ("dazzling bands . . . forty thousand miles across and scarcely thicker than a razor blade"), the Tralfamadorians, the harmoniums, an interplanetary war, and a 36-million-year space voyage mission, it is about exploring the human mind more than about exploring outer space. As Constant puts it (in reference to the shrines of Saturn and its moons made by his son Chrono), "It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too."

Synclastic and Iconoclastic

Ahead of its time in 1959, Kurt Vonnegut's second novel is a timebender and a mindbender that remains a timeless classic of mindless manipulation. Shockingly relevant even today, The Sirens of Titan imagines, some time between the second world war and third great depression, a billionaire who recruits the disenfranchised masses and brainwashes them into launching an invasion against the world as we know it. Yikes!

Class warfare was one of Vonnegut's recurring themes -- powerful, durable, influential. That it spoke to the 1960s counterculture is well documented. That it still rings true speaks to how futile it may be to ever expect this clash to ever end. From the more specific perspective of recommending a novel that is more than half a century old, The Sirens of Titan is unstuck in time, an enduring masterwork of social commentary masked as pulp sci-fi.

You'll find other familiar Vonnegut memes here that made their way into his more widely read novels. A cult religion, as in Cat's Cradle, crazy rich people as in Mr. Rosewater, the question of free will as in Breakfast of Champions, a time warp as in Slaughterhouse-Five, and the planet Tralfamadore, which appears in several other works, most prominently in S-5. And if you're a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide, you'll find many of Douglas Adams's influences here.

What ultimately makes it work, in my opinion (by contrast, for example, to the tiresome dated Breakfast of Champions), is that Vonnegut wrote this as a straightforward science fiction story in the pulp style of the 1950s. It has well-articulated characters and a straight-ahead narrative about space travel, time travel, interplanetary wars, etc., into which the author can plant all of his iconoclastic ideas.

I hadn't read this since I was a teenager in the early 70s, an era when Vonnegut's books, especially this one, shaped the ideology adopted by me and all my friends. I am happy to have rediscovered it in audio format, and to be reminded how prescient Kurt Vonnegut was.

Very Nice

Well read. Love his work. Interview at the end was ok. Should put more things like that on the end of these. Good idea.

Sharp and crisp as a pepper

I liked the narrators use of different tones per character.

A pleasure to listen on my daily commute.

Not my favorite but worth listening to.

It's a long story to get to the real point. It's kind of like reading a really long fable.

I wanted to love Sirens of Titan, but...

I wanted to love Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, but I didn’t. In light of the book’s million glowing reviews, I accept that it’s probably me, not Kurt.

So it goes...

Sirens of Titan was Vonnegut’s 2nd book, published in 1959, so maybe he just hadn’t hit his stride yet, at least not to the level he would achieve later in his career. I loved Breakfast of Champions (1973) and Hocus Pocus (1990). So maybe it was just the era...

Here’s what didn’t work for me:

The characters in Sirens are cartoonish. No one is real or deep, and characters behave like cardboard cutouts of pat philosophical concepts and social critiques. It's preachy. The story has the feel of a parable (not a novel).

As parable, the moral of this “comic” morality tale is that life is a series of mostly-cruel accidents with no purpose. Bummer.

What was great:

I listened to the Audible audiobook edition of Sirens of Titan, narrated by Jay Snyder. Snyder is a highly-talented voice actor. Without his spot-on narration (spot-on for a cynical cartoon, but that’s the book Vonnegut wrote), I would have probably given up in the middle of Chapter 4, where we meet the army of Mars. Snyder’s performance carried the book for me.

5 stars for Jay, 3 stars for Kurt, so 4 stars overall.

My first KV

Couldn't stop listening. Brilliant writer; might've cracked my top 5 author list. Wow.
Reminds me of Bradbury, Hemingway, O'Connor.

Great as usual

Another great story by Kurt Vo
The reading was well done too. Eleven more words? I loved this story very much.

Not SF, barely a novel...

This book has the wonderful prose, satire, and social messaging Vonnegut is famous for.
Unfortunately, this seemed more than a bit preachy to me. Vonnegut is usually making sociological points in his fiction, but usually the story and characters are developed enough to make the message interesting and enjoyable. Even when I agree with a message, I don't want it delivered in a fire hose. This felt like more message than story, and the SF aspects seemed completely artificial.

The narration and sound quality were excellent.

Somebody Up There Likes Me ...

Where does The Sirens of Titan rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I think the quality for most of the Audible Books I listened to are very high. I would rate this behind Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse 5 in the Vonnegut series. Those 2 were spectacular (Tony Roberts and Ethan Hawke). This was great, but the competition is pretty tough. Vonnegut himself rated this an A while the other two were an A+, I tend to agree.

Who was your favorite character and why?

The Harmoniums. Not only were they intriguing in the plot line but served as Vonnegut's touchstone for how societies can work together, while at the same time are used like the rest of us. Brillant.

Have you listened to any of Dennis Boutsikaris’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No but he was great. Terrific job, and he did several voices from time to time that added to the overall production value. No complaints and I would gladly listen to him again.

If you could take any character from The Sirens of Titan out to dinner, who would it be and why?

Rumsford...I mean his character is a classic in the Vonnegut cannon. A bon vivant with style who changes the course of the universe. Not only is he memorable but he delivered the overall philosophy in in the book in a way that is clever and subtle.

Any additional comments?

The Vonnegut series is fantastic. I would put this at the top but not the very top. But a must read for any Vonnegut fan, classic stuff from a writer who has yet to be replaced in literature. Fantastic stuff and well done by Audible.