Books Acquired:
A Few Fiends to Tea, Virginia Coffman
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

Progress Made:
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut

Books Finished:
The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick
The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

I already owned The Sirens of Titan of course, but was compelled to pick up a copy of the original paperback, which looks like this:

And on the back offers this completely inaccurate description of the contents:

I have to wonder if the person who wrote that even read the book? Though to be fair, this was probably my fifth time through Sirens, and you’d think I would know what was going to happen next. And sometimes I did… but something about it resists implantation in the memory, which is funny, as memory loss plays a key part in the plot (maybe that’s what the blurb is referring to?).

Sadly when I was about halfway through this copy began to fall apart, so I switched over to the boring trade paperback. Lesson learned.

Sirens might be KV’s best book. Certainly it is up there in the top tier with Slaughterhouse and Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions and your personal favorite. From Charles Shields’ biography I learned that it was written in a headlong rush after Kurt, whose career had been in the doldrums for years, successfully pitched the idea to a publisher at a cocktail party. “Every mother’s favorite child is the one that’s delivered by natural childbirth,” he said later. “Sirens of Titan was that kind of book.”

I don’t want to get into a lengthy recap of all the brilliant things about Sirens, but I will share this passage I flagged, which offers a chilling vision of an AI apocalypse. This was written in 1958, remember.

Once upon a time in Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others.

These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame.

And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough.

So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too.

And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be.

The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all.

The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else.

And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, “Tralfamadore.”

From Sirens I jumped right into Mother Night, which Cecil and I are reading in tandem (more on that next month). That in turn led me to finally crack open The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which had been sitting there on the desk looking ominous with that giant swastika on the cover. In a few days got through the frontmatter and part of Hitler’s childhood (did you know his parents were second cousins?). I hope to make more progress before Election Day; I also hope that Orange Adolf will be put out to pasture and 1930s Germany will no longer seem so damn relevant; and that we will all live happily ever after etc. etc.

Finally, at the end of the month, I circled back to knock off the last few chapters of The Divine Invasion. This was PKD’s second-to-last book, and like everything he wrote after his epiphany/breakdown in 1974, it is religiously obsessed, multilayered, visionary, and sometimes aggravating. There’s a lot there but let’s maybe not get into it just now. I’m off to Wisconsin in a minute to save democracy; see you on the other side.