The Sirens of Titan   by Kurt Vonnegut

Strange book, not quite the MasterWork I was expecting. It starts incredibly clever and inventive--so much so that it comes across as quite psychedelic--, then gets naïve, then gets quite a bit silly and outrageous, and finally becomes miserably sad; a book which throws lots of ideas around quite haphazardly, and runs through a gamut of emotions without really feeling them.

The science fiction is really not very convincing (it is an old book!) There are some predictions about humanity which come across as accidentally telling, for example, “Whenever data... was fed into it, the machine grew tremendously excited, and no one could figure out why. The machine was obviously trying to tell its operators something. It did everything it could to express itself, and finally managed to get its operators to ask the right questions,” (remember the book came out in 1959).

The timeline parallels the stages of life: regimented, forced education and mind control on Mars, mundane, trapped existence on Mercury, reckoning on Earth followed by long, lonely retirement on Titan.

The plot is that the worldʼs richest man comes in contact with a man who has entered a temporal nexus and who now sees everything in the past and future and is omnipresent in the Solar system. The rich man, and the time-travelerʼs former wife, are forced to live mind-controlled lives on Mars, then he spends time (some years) trapped in some caves on Mercury, then the two are reunited, with their son, on Earth, and vilified as obnoxious people, hence their exodus to Titan, a moon of Saturn. The family lives out their lives there alone, except for an android that has travelled across the galaxy and needs to get back home, and the time traveller.

After the time-traveller dies, followed by the woman, the android takes the last man back to Earth where he dies immediately of hypothermia, and the son lives out his existence as a feral animal in cahoots with the birds on Titan. It is a poor and very miserable ending.