The Alien Indoctrination in The Sirens of Titan
I am a huge
Vonnegut fan. Kurt Vonnegut is easily my favorite author, and I’m a couple
short stories shy of reading his entire collection. When I saw Ransom go to
Malacandra, I immediately thought about Vonnegut, as his science fiction
involved aliens in many of their texts. One race specifically, the
Tralfamadorians, recurs in various Vonnegut novels. These creatures, primarily
living on Tralfamadore, have long tubes with suction cups as legs. Each suction
cup holds an eye underneath, and these limbs are both the creature’s manner of
seeing and walking. However, the Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions,
instead of three. They do not feel as if time moves, as they can see the past,
present and future. They do not place emphasis on death, as they still feel as
if everybody is still alive at every point in their life. My favorite aspect of
their theory is that, because time is infinite, they see the sky as strands of
spaghetti, rather than single stars. The protagonist of The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant, meets up with a
Tralfamadorian and has a series of broken conversations with him.
I thought
that this relationship correlated with Ransom’s meeting and interaction with
the hrossa. The planet’s creatures,
by nature, are different from humans. The eldila’s
omnipresence reminded me of the Tralfamadorian’s travel through time.
Similarly, the first exchange between Malachi and the Tralfamadorian has the
same choppy tone as the one between Ransom and the hrossa, as there is an inherent language barrier that Ransom must
overcome. While Ransom is a philologist, and naturally picked up the language,
the Tralfamadorians are so advanced that they simply have the ability to
interject thoughts straight into the heads of and individual. Personally I feel
like this is a copout and both ends of the authorial spectrum….but that is for
another journal posting. In the end, and I won’t spoil the ending for Sirens of Titan if you hadn’t read it,
but both books’ alien groups share information with the human that explains the
history of Earth. Now, only we can reanimate Vonnegut and get him to write two
sequels…
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