The Sirens of Titan
Review
The Sirens of Titan, by , is a satirical science fiction novel about the richest man in America, Malachi Constant. It follows his unwilling and absurd journey from Earth to Mars, Mercury, and finally Titan, exploring questions about free will, the purpose of human history, and the nature of religion along the way.
Ultimately, The Sirens of Titan is a shaggy dog story. After 319 pages, we learn that humanity—our entire history—was just a giant, Rube Goldberg-style process designed to deliver a small replacement part for a spaceship stranded on Titan. There’s no deeper meaning to life, only the meaning you make and the love you share with others. I agree with that message! But I didn’t like the framing story around it, and I didn’t like the characters. Reading it felt like slogging through just to reach the end.
The theme is the same one explores again and again, first in Consider Phlebas, then Look to Windward, and finally The Hydrogen Sonata. The difference is that I (mostly) enjoyed the characters and the pointless stories they were caught up in. Here, I never did.
The Sirens of Titan clearly influenced ’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.1 Both books follow a character bumbling unwillingly through absurd, ultimately pointless adventures. Marvin the depressed android is very similar to the depressed robot Salo. In The Sirens of Titan, all of humanity exists just to help deliver a simple message, while in Hitchhiker’s Guide it’s the computation of the meaningless meaning of life. The difference is I found Hitchhiker’s Guide to be hilarious, and I didn’t laugh once at The Sirens of Titan.
I think ’s writing is just too straightforward for my tastes. I have a weakness for books that are a bit of a puzzle. I love Echopraxia, where the narrator has no idea what’s going on; Absalom, Absalom!, with its page-long sentences and a story that reshapes itself each time you hear it; The Sound and the Fury, with its nonlinear timeline and Benji’s fractured narration; and Disco Elysium, where you have to piece together your identity and the world around you from fragments of memory and unreliable thoughts. And I had a lot of fun recently with Hyperion, chasing down examples of recurring themes and motifs. By contrast, lays out the whole story and his thesis from the start—and then you still have to read through it. This was similar to the issue I had with Flowers for Algernon, where the clever narrative device couldn’t save a plot I found too predictable.
There were other works it reminded me of as well. The high-class breeding program echoed the Bene Gesserit in Dune. The tasteless nouveau riche reminded me of The Great Gatsby. The blend of mid-century religion and sci-fi is similar to Stranger in a Strange Land. The writing style was a bit like Stand on Zanzibar, and so was the unintentional absurdity where any time an economic number was mentioned it was orders of magnitude too small. Constant’s writing letters to himself to remember things after his memory is wiped felt like Memento. Rumfoord’s plan to unite Earth by invading it from Mars reminded me of Ozymandias’s plan in Watchmen. And reused the idea of physical handicaps to achieve equality in Harrison Bergeron.
For all that I didn’t like about The Sirens of Titan, ’s prose is wonderful: short and simple like ’s. And like , it’s full of quiet wisdom:
I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.
The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
I can see why people love , but this book wasn’t for me. He’s a key part of the American canon, though, so I won’t give up just yet. I’ll probably work my way through Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions next. I hope I like them more.
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said as much in an interview:
, who I think is absolutely superb. I’ve read The Sirens of Titan six times now, and it gets better every time. He is an influence, I must own up. The Sirens of Titan is just one of those books—you read it through the first time and you think it’s very loosely, casually written. You think the fact that everything suddenly makes such good sense at the end is almost accidental. And then you read it a few more times, simultaneously finding out more about writing yourself, and you realize what an absolute tour de force it was, making something as beautifully honed as that appear so casual.
— Shircore, Ian. “Douglas Adams: The First and Last Tapes” Darker Matter. no. 1. March 2007. Retrieved October 4, 2025. ↩