Imagine a million years ago, before humans had fur, or flippers, or spent most of their time underwater hunting fish, back in 1986, when they still had these big brains that seemed to cause nothing but big-brain problems like world war, global hunger, economic collapse and nuclear devastation, and the only thing that kept them from absolute and total extinction was absolute and total happenstance as the last few random passengers of the "Nature Cruise of the Century" became the last carriers of the human genome, stranded on Darwin's famous islands of evolutionary opportunity with nothing else left to do on Earth but finally evolve. In 1986, economic collapse will lead to World War 3, and a strange disease will render humans infertile. The only survivors will be a random collection of oddballs who don't get the memo that their "Nature Cruise of the Century" to the Galápagos is canceled, and when they get stranded there on one of it's islands, Santa Rosalia, they will inevitably adapt in some of the same ways other animals stranded on Darwin's famous islands have also adapted over the centuries. When a pregnant Japanese tourist gives birth to a baby with fur (a byproduct of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima) it provides humans with the new genetic traits necessary to thrive and the first steps toward flippers and snouts and finally there isn't enough room left in those aquiline heads for those big brains anymore which caused all this mess in the first place. But that's just what happens, as told by a ghost who haunted the ship a million years ago before finally moving on to the afterlife. That's not what the story is about. Vonnegut manages to write about almost everything but the characters, the setting, or the story itself as he indulges every possibly backstory, frivolous coincidence or distraction that occurs to him, letting us piece the actual narrative together ourselves like a thousand piece puzzle, upside-down, until in the climax, it all comes into very brief focus only to zoom out again and give us the aftermath. It's a study in implication, as we just sort of absorb the story indirectly rather than read it. We find out how these characters got to Ecuador and the Hotel El Dorado where they are deprived of all outside news of global catastrophe until being whisked aboard a state of the art cruise ship able to operate with only one Captain and no crew. There is the Captain, the swindler and the bereaved widow. There's the American businessman with his blind daughter, and the Japanese businessman with his pregnant wife and there's a half dozen native girls as well, who become Eves to the new human race. But... They aren't what the story is about either. The story is about Absurdity. This should be no surprise for fans of the author, who tends to make even the most serious ideas, like the bombing of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five, seem like the trashiest, bonkers sci-fi schlock novel by inserting time travel and aliens and questionable sanity. In this particular case, what is absurd, according to Vonnegut (or rather his narrator, Leon Trout, son of his recurring schlocky sci-fi author Kilgore Trout, from Breakfast of Champions and others) is the unnecessarily big human brain. "Can it be doubted that three-kilogram brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race? What source was there back then, save for our overelaborate nervous circuitry, for the evils we were seeing or hearing about simply everywhere? My Answer: There was no other source. This was a very innocent planet except for those great big brains." Sure, we get to know the blue-footed boobies, and their odd but inevitable mating dance. The tortoises, who with no fear of man can live for months on their backs, without food, to provide fresh meat to sailors throughout their journey. Or the vampire finches which have adapted so perfectly on an island otherwise deprived of vampire bats. We get to know about ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangements or diseases like Huntington's chorea. And we briefly learn what it feels like for a radar-guided missile when it comes alive after being activated by a Peruvian fighter pilot only to inevitably fall in love with it's target, a radar dish, and their beautiful and tragic consummation between the two which signals the beginning of a new World War. But the most absurd thing on the planet is in fact the human brain, because it does not apparently contribute to our survival, as Darwin's laws would dictate. In fact, quite the opposite, it mostly leads to our own destruction. "The brain is much to big to be practical." For all our solutions to problems and general achievements in the modern age, Vonnegut argues that "...those people wouldn't have had to behave so resourcefully, wouldn't have been in such complicated difficulties, if the planet hadn't been made virtually uninhabitable by the creations and activities of other people's great big brains." Our big brains cause all the problems we solve, and more. And our full stomachs are complicit, because those with the fullest stomachs make the most destructive decisions with their big brains for everyone else, but rarely care, because as their full stomachs tell them, all is well. Without too great a logical leap, we see how Big Brains lead one character near to suicide, another toward insanity, another to con those around him, and on and on. Gradually we see how they caused us to value some paper as money and then later deem it worthless leading to the actual economic crisis of the 80's. We see how it caused Hiroshima, Vietnam and later World War 3. We see how it made the "Nature Cruise of the Century" popular enough to get Jackie Onassis and Mick Jagger on the passenger list and then strand the only people who actually ended up on the ship on a deserted island with very few resources. And finally we see how natural selection screened out those with big brains over the next million years, because everyone without them had a better chance of catching fish. A better chance of survival. “Thanks to their decreased brainpower, people aren't diverted from the main business of life by the hobgoblins of opinion anymore.” Evolution is a metaphor. A friend asked me if I thought a Christian would dislike the book because of it's many references to Evolution. As a Christian, the thought hadn't even occurred to me. All my other literature-reading friends are also Christians of one variety or another (they're hit or miss on Vonnegut for other reasons, though. To each his own!) and I can't picture them batting an eye on the issue, either. For one, many Christians no longer care one way or the other on Evolution anymore. It's an out of date debate better suited to our parents. And for two, the book, for all it's exposition on Darwin and his visit to Galápagos, is not pushing an evolutionary agenda anyway. It's pushing a post-modern critique of human selfishness and indulgence, and evolution is simply the metaphorical vernacular he uses to explain how we may one day get -- and deserve -- our comeuppance. Like much of Vonnegut's work, he is observing the horrors we have committed against each other in and out of war, from personal experience, in the name of human pride and "intelligence". I get the impression he was a fan of Godzilla movies and understood their social subtext better than most (for those who don't get the reference, Godzilla is a product of nuclear testing in the Pacific and bombing in Japan; we literally created a monster out of our nuclear proliferation). Our greatest achievements, like nuclear physics, have also been the closest we've come to global self-extinction. Conclusion: 4.5 out of 5 Stars. For a fan of Vonnegut, it's just another strong entry, utilizing all his most familiar and well-tested techniques and jokes with a smooth confidence that comes from competence. It doesn't feel as groundbreaking though, or innovative, as some others, and it's layers are more amusing than genuinely challenging, but that's okay. Vonnegut puts all his cards on the table, and he's never shy that the Big Human Brain is the villain of the story, and nature will (or at least should) weed it out through natural selection if we expect to live much longer the way we're acting. He ties the metaphor to relationships, politics, health, economics, science, sex, drinking, schooling, celebrity culture and even religion. For a secularist, the story is packed full of unexpected religious iconography like the Ark, Adam and Eve, Paradise, fisher's of men, an afterlife, and on an on. For a cynic, it's also unexpectedly optimistic. The seal-like creatures we become over the next million years, for lack of big brains, are still playful, still happy, and still have our teeth, and have come to live in harmony with the rest of nature, which has essentially remained unchanged in that time frame (after all, they didn't have big brains getting them into trouble.). He doesn't call them creatures, he calls them humans, which is to say the core of our humanity is not at all tied to all these modern advancements we're so proud of, or our big thoughts, but the opposite. Our humanity can still be saved from that most monstrous product of our arrogant Big Brains we know as "human" civilization. “Just in the nick of time they realized that it was their own habitat they were wrecking -- that they weren't merely visitors.” Don't Forget to Like and Retweet!
More by Kurt Vonnegut: Player Piano Breakfast of Champions Ernest Hemingway Islands in the Stream To Have and Have Not
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