"I Would Appreciate Your Telephoning Me At Home": Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan at Fifty

What does the term "science fiction" signify? A technologically-based storytelling or a warning-shot across civilization's bow? A fantasy of what-might-be or what-is-unlikely-but-mighty-fun-to-dream? Sci-fi is a label encompassing varied styles, but unlike any genre outside of ghost stories, it is the fiction most akin to poetry. Eerie sensations wend their way towards cracks in the brain. Sci-fi is psychedelia without the narcotics, and the oddness of its calling allows even uninspired prose to tingle the mind. Prognostications often miss their mark (Martians anyone? A manned trip to Jupiter in 2001? And was 1984 really such a bad year if you weren't Walter Mondale?). The fantasy happily lingers long after the science has trumped the fiction.

Perhaps the terms "Science Fiction" and "Fantasy" have a non-literary purpose and are designed simply to assist retail book shoppers. A quick scan this morning of a local bookstore's shelves reveals their presumed biases. Robert Heinlein is sci-fi. J.G. Ballard is fiction. Isaac Asimov, sci-fi. Karel Capek is fiction. Philip K. Dick has been transported to the fiction section although competing retailers may disagree. Jules Verne: fiction. Ray Bradbury: sci-fi, or really, fantasy. H. G. Wells: unquestionably fiction (but why?). Orwell and Huxley are "literary classics." Anthony Burgess is decidedly erudite, up in the fiction stacks. Brian Aldiss is inexplicably and sadly absent from all categories. John Collier is happily remembered in fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs rests in sci-fi, even though Modern Library has honored him. Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett are labeled science fiction, which is blatant theft from the humor section. Pierre Boule is not on the shelves today, but presumably The Bridge on the River Kwai is fiction and Planet of the Apes is sci-fi. Lord Dunsany and Arthur C. Clarke make cameo appearances in sci-fi and fantasy, the former being the preeminent fantasist, the latter an advocate of harder science fiction but a noble booster of the former's reputation (Clarke's prose is often as arid as moon dust, but my-oh-my, what he found on the moon).

One author is never absent from the fiction section. His sci-fi/fantasy fictions sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year (each), and no amount of labeling has toppled him from this perch for decades, although fifty years ago his first editions sometimes appeared as paperbacks with tawdry futuristic covers, purchasable not in bookstores but bus depots. Today, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. remains a staple of youthful literary diets, as stalwart a presence as The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises.

In 1975, aged sixteen, I was assigned Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan for summer reading. It was one of a handful of requirements, yet the only one I recall today. The others might have been a finer weave of words, maybe Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but for some reason Sirens velcroed itself to the walls of my brain. Actually, that's not completely true. By the beginning of 2008, I didn't recall the names of characters or the specifics of the plot, although, yes, someone was lured to Titan, one of Saturn's moons. What was cemented in my memory was the Twilight Zone-like finale, which I then interpreted as "the moral of the story." Recently I reread Sirens, and like Mark Twain with his father, I was surprised how much Kurt Vonnegut had learned over the past 33 years. The novel's denouement was not what I remembered after all, and how relieved I was to discover that Vonnegut's intentions were less cynical and more generous than those comprehended by an unhappy sixteen-year-old. As the last page flipped over, a new question arose: does the definition—and impact—of science fiction change for the reader as the years go by?

The Sirens of Titan and I share a birth...