The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan is one of the masterpieces of Kurt Vonnegut, his first classic although only second novel, which would already immortalize him as one of the most significant Authors of the 20th century, along with the better known Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's cradle. There, a chief trait of the Author, who now fully found his style, works at its best: the story appears to be a random fantasy, with grotesque elements apparently made up at the same time that they were being written, going along with a linear plot more or less following a thread, but that is replete with irrelevant, absurd bits, all seemingly going nowhere and distracting from the main story line, itself also looking nonsensical.

It is only at the end that everything unties, and deep meaning is given to even the most trifle details, which have been made grotesque to imprint a mark in your memory, and come back later at the time of the big revelations. That not only turns the main plot from an entertaining story to a parable of existence, it also shows that nothing is irrelevant, nothing is meaningless. This brings, to literature, an almost religious experience: finding meaning in one's seemingly absurd and empty personal story. Everything is there for a reason—not even a reason—for a purpose.

An illustration of this Nobel-prize winning breakthrough in literature, is Salo, the duck-looking alien who makes embarrassing noises as he walks.

The Sirens of Titan is as Sci-Fi as you can make it. You could rightly say it is too-much Sci-Fi, it is pushing the style too far, which earned Vonnegut the reputation of being a "humorous" writer. There is nothing comedic about it. Vonnegut can indeed make you laugh out loud. But not with jokes. He can make you laugh with the same knob in your soul that brings you to cry, to fear and to despair, and that can be tuned to laugh, to understand and to accept. People focused on the laughers, because that is the most primitive and most easily captured feeling. But are you laughing now: