Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

One of the reasons I went to Brown for college was so I didn't have to take a set of required courses. Like, say, um, Biology. But every year, I remember seeing legions of freshman dutifully taking introductory biology and the first course assignment was to read Vonnegut's Galapagos. And every year, I remember thinking, "well gosh, I like books, maybe I'd like Vonnegut, maybe I'd LIKE biology." But I never tried it. So this year, when August rolled around, I decided to symbolically start a school year by reading Galapagos.

Awesome. This book was absolutely awesome. It made me want to read more Vonnegut and go to the Galapagos. Maybe go to the Galapagos and read Vonnegut. Anyway, I'm clearly on a sci-fi kick and this fit right in. A great story, cleverly told, with plenty of commentary on evolution and ethics.

At its simplest, it's about the story of several people on a cruise through the Galapagos Islands (home to many interesting species - particularly evolutionarily). Of course, there is a world-wide armageddon that begins when the cruise begins, and it's narrated several millenia in the future, but hey, it's Vonnegut.

The book is equal parts science and poetry. The science deals a lot with genetics and evolution. Writing about dental care, the narrator (millenia in the future) remarks, "It would be nice to say that the Law of Natural Selection, which has done people so many favors in such a short time, had taken care of the tooth problem, too. In a way it has, but its solution has been draconian. It hasn't made teeth more durable. It has simply cut the average human life span down to about thirty years."

Vonnegut wrote the story using many techniques that ensured the reader could not focus on the plot. He often interrupts his own descriptions or stories to tell you ahead of time what the resolution of a particular situation will be. It puts the reader in a position of analysis, like the narrator who knows the ending, rather than one of following plot. For example, he writes, "He was unmarried and had never reproduced, and so was insignificant from an evolutionary point of view. He might also have been considered as a marriage possibility for Mary Hepburn. But he, too, was doomed. *Siegfriend von Kleist would survive the sunset, but three hours after that he would be drowned by a tidal wave."

As someone who doesn't read the New York Times Book Review because of how much plot they give away in their reviews, I was incredibly frustrated by this aspect of the book. But it also challenged me to understand what was going on through different eyes, which is not something just any author can accomplish. Another example: "It just might have been fatal that the colonists killed off all the land iguanas almost immediately--but it turned out not to have been a disaster. It could have mattered a lot. It just happened that it didn't matter much at all." The narrator says this, hundreds of thousands of years later, and the reader is forced to understand that the action in this story is reasonably insignificant and that plot is not the narrator's point.

Like all good science fiction, Vonnegut is ultimately making a socio-political point. This one, I believe not just about technology and environmental damage (although he is commenting on that, albeit deterministically), but about people's treatment of each other.

"It pains me now," his narrator writes, "even a million years later, to write about such human misbehavior. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That's all I can say."

If you like Vonnegut, or science fiction, or evolution, or even a challenge, this is a great book. If you're more comfortable in the Oprah range (don't be ashamed), then skip this one.