The Sirens of Titan

Likely the highest regard you can give a work of science fiction is to say it was ahead of it’s time. I finished “The Sirens of Titan” this weekend and it was amazing to see how much Vonnegut managed to nail a loathsome billionaire like Elon Musk in the character Malachi Constant. Sending him to Mars seems almost spooky, but really it’s just a great read of how a billionaire would behave entangled with an interplanetary plot line.

The following passage jumped out to me in our increasingly AI’d future:

Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.

And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”

I will always recommend any of Vonnegut’s books to anyone, but I was surprised to find that of all of his books that I have read so far, this one might have the most enduring story.

Assuming we humans endure at all.