The Sirens of Titan

The Sirens of Titan is a comic science fiction novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., first published in 1959. It is his second novel and deals with free will, omniscience and the purpose of human history.

The book follows Malachi Constant, the wealthiest man in the United States, whose life is set in motion by a message from a phenomenon in space that rearranges its content. Constant is recruited into a war between Earth and Mars, transported to the red planet, and made part of an army whose real purpose is not what its soldiers believe. The narrative ranges across the solar system, from a Mars organised along military lines to the moons of Saturn, and it eventually explains human history in terms of a signal being carried between two points by a traveller from another species. Vonnegut keeps the joke running, and much of the novel is about the gap between what the characters think they are choosing and what is actually happening to them.

The novel follows Player Piano in Vonnegut's own work, and the preoccupations it sets up, including the idea that people are the instruments of a larger arrangement, run through the rest of his books.