Galapagos will not go down as my favourite Kurt Vonnegut book. Vonnegut’s quirks, of which he has many, increasingly overwhelm the story of an errant group of eco-tourists re-populating the human race throught an accumulation of mistakes and misunderstandings. The main concept is solid enough, but Vonnegut complicates it with a narrator who’s a ghost from the distant future who keeps observing the differences of how things are different between now (which was then 1985) and a million years from now. At some point, it begins to read less like a Kurt Vonnegut novel and more like a Kilgore Trout story from one of those beaver magazines.
It’s on the the short list of Vonnegut books I couldn’t even bring myself to finish, alongside Slapstick, which was by far one of the most annoying things he has ever written.
(One of the things you will learn when reading about people’s opinions on Vonnegut is that every Vonnegut book is someone’s favourite Vonnegut book, so I apologize for offending the 5 fans of Slapstick, if you should stumble across this post)
But even bad Vonnegut books often contain brilliant Vonnegut, and Galapagos is no exception. It has a few passages that read as though they were an attempt to summarize the state of affairs in 2026. Of course, as Vonnegut reminds us, the human condition is not a new development:
There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. Then is when they forget to keep a sharp lookout for sharks and whales. This was a particularly tragic flaw … since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet, like *Andrew MacIntosh, for example, and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed. So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.
In totally unrelated news, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have written a book about how billionaires are approaching the end of the world.