OTTER-PEOPLE

I do not remember any specifics about Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, but I will not let fact-checkers dictate my blog, dammit.^[1] Let's do this thing.

Galapagos was good, but I didn't like it as much as the other Vonnegut books I've read; there wasn't anything wrong with it, but after Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan, it was kind of a disappointment. It was worlds better than anything I've ever produced but, like, meh.

The book is about a cruise ship that sets sail right before a war of some kind in the Pacific^[2] and it unfolds that the voyagers are the last surviving people. They get marooned on an island and every other human dies. I don't know how that comes to pass, actually; is there some sort of nuclear bomb? Does everyone else on Earth die in the war? I think I remember something about food.^[3] Oh, fuck, there's some epidemic that makes people infertile but they aren't exposed to it. That's it. ANYWAY.

So these people^[4] sign up for the Nature Cruise Of The Century, set to go to the Galapagos Islands. Jackie Onassis is supposed to go on this cruise but she doesn't on account of a financial crisis^[5] and then there's the war thing and people get marooned and weird shit goes down. It's like Gilligan's Island mixed with science-fiction.

The story isn't told chronologically, but it sort of is. It's framed, kind of. Like, the narrator is a (SPOLERS) ghost on the ship that runs aground. He was a worker during its construction and something fell and decapitated him, so he died, but he now hangs out as a ghost. He studies humankind and remarks on their "big dumb brains" and things of that ilk. About that, actually: A theme of the book is that our brains are not an evolutionary advantage, but rather an impediment; all our thinking only gets us in trouble.

So the narrator-spectre keeps talking about how this story takes place a million years in the past, in 1986. So he's in the future in some sort of advanced society. In a way, nothing in the story happens in the present; humanity's transformation into otter-people isn't actually described, but rather explained as, "Now, of course, we are much better swimmers." Given enough of those little asides, you piece together exactly what happens, but there isn't any part of the book that goes, "And so this happens right now." It is neat.

Somehow or another, one of the women on the cruise ship is pregnant^[6] but she gives birth to a furry baby. Was it radiation? Might've just been a random mutation.^[7] Anyhoo, this baby's born all furry and shit and people are like, "Oh my god furry baby why is this baby covered in fur." It's intense.

Then there's only one man left on the island and he's sleeping with one of the women, and the woman (GROSS) scoops some of his semen out of her vagina and impregnates a few of the younger girls.^[8] By this time, Furry Baby (whose name is Akiko, I think) has grown up a bit. She gets prodded with the finger-sperm^[9] and gets pregnant, giving birth to a furry baby herself. This kid grows up and has a ton of kids, each one also furry.

Eventually, the only thing to eat on the island is fish, and so the better swimmers get to eat more and they live longer and have more children, etc., etc. This turns into children being born who bear more and more resemblance to otters. Their heads are streamlined to better catch fish hiding between rocks, they swim faster and faster, and each generation continues this trend. Otter-people. I've always liked otters; they eat on their tummies!

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[1] As an aside: The Vice Presidential debate is tomorrow night and I am very, very excited. It's always fun when they let Crazy Joe out of his cage. It's gonna be all, "The Vice President has --" "YOU SHUT YOUR TRAP, YOUNG MAN. I'LL SKIN YOU ALIVE!"↩

[2] Or maybe South America, I honestly have no idea and I'm not going to look it up. This also betrays my fundamental issues with geography, as the answer should be obvious. I do not know where anything is.↩

[3] "These people think they're entitled to food!"↩

[4] I remember literally none of their names, so you will have to excuse my vague wordings.↩

[5] Vonnegut has a pretty neat take on the whole financial crisis thing: It's all a human construction. Money isn't real. We made the whole idea up. Our "big stupid brains" -- this is a larger theme -- can just decide the money is worth more things and then there won't be a crisis. He also says something like, "In our time, we have eradicated financial crises because we don't use money; how can we barter when everyone has his share of fish?"↩

[6] I suppose the "how" of this is not exactly a mystery. It involves doing it. (Sex.)↩

[7] Please never show this book to an evolution-denier. "If evolution is real, how come we don't have fur?"↩

[8] Vonnegut does all of this in a cheeky way. The narrator's dad was a writer, and he (the narrator) says something like, "My father used to write some pretty base, vulgar things in his stories, and so I will something similar to it in mine when I tell you about all this (all things considered, pretty fucking metal) semen transportation."↩

[9] Icky, right?↩