Once again Vonnegut throws up his hands at the human race,
condemning it for its overweening technology, war-making, greed and
other perversities. And yet, underneath, he still seems to like
people, so his solution in this quasi-science-fiction novel is to
"evolve" humanity for another million years until it becomes unift
for mischief - in fact, fit for little else but catching fish. In
this prickly and only occasionally funny ramble, that represents
progress. The narrator is a ghost in this death-haunted tale, a
disillusioned Vietnam vet who happens to be the son of Vonnegut's
Kilgore Trout. He watches as an odd lot of damaged people assemble
in 1986 in an Ecuadorean port to join "the nature cruise of the
century" to Galapagos, volcanic islands made famous by Darwin's
visit. The world is in the throes of an economic crisis,
Ecuadoreans are starving, war and all hell break out - and the
little band of misfits, reduced in number but augmented by some
cannibal girls, set out to sea for refuge. It is they who become
the ancestors of the future human race because the rest of the
world becomes sterile and dies out. Vonnegut has his followers who
like big issues treated in so jaunty a fashion. His voice is good,
clear middle. American, and he doesn't beat about the bush. One of
his devices is to put an asterisk by the name of a character who is
about to die. There is a subtext to this story: an attempt to deal
with disease and death by mocking them. Vonnegut is whistling in
the dark, and it's a thin, jumpy little tune despite his feats of
imagination. But his dark is real enough. (Kirkus Reviews)
From the author of Slaughterhouse 5. The human survivors of the
nature cruise of the century, are quietly evolving into sleek,
furry creatures with flippers and small brains. All other forms of
humankind have ceased to exist, made redundant by their prized big
brains.
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