Never Be Bored
25 January 2020
And So On
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak; 17776 by Jon Bois; Poorly Drawn Lines by Reza Farazmand.
Some of the recommendation posts on this blog feature four things which all kind of go together, where any one of them could have been the main rec. This post is not like that.
Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut is a book (1) told by a very unusual narrator, very different from the rest of the characters, (2) told in a time very far into the future, so that human society is quite different from today, and (3) full of stories about the weird things people will do because their big brains are full of dreams, or strange ideas, or anxiety, and so on. It's excellent.
More specifically, it's about the ghost of a Vietnam War veteran a million years from now, thinking about the events in 1986 which eventually led to natural selection finally fixing the problem of humanity, namely, that their brains were too goddamn big for their own good. Humans have since evolved into furry sea mammals, and now there's no more lying, or science fiction novels, or capitalism, and so on.
Kurt Vonnegut also wrote Slaughterhouse Five, featured in Nonlinearity.
The Book Thief is told by a very unusual narrator, very different from the rest of the characters. The Book Thief is narrated by Death. One thing Galápagos and this book have in common, that I love, is that the narrator already knows how the story ends, and you know they know by the way they tell the story—talking directly to reader about how they've decided to tell it, eluding to things that haven't happened yet. Subject-matter-wise, however, they couldn't be more different—The Book Thief is set in Nazi Germany and follows a young girl who once stole a copy of The Grave Digger's Handbook.
17776 is, according to Wikipedia, a "serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative," set far in the future, when human society is quite different from today. Also known as What Football Will Look Like in the Future, this wild experience of a thing is set in the year 17776, and humans are still playing football. Both Galápagos and 17776 have such a vast sense of time—so many sci fi works are either set only a few hundred years away, so parts of society still feel recognizable, or in an ambiguous timeframe so it's hard to tell when it's happening. But these works are very clear about just how much time has passed since the reader's present day, which is really fun to read. Plus, I've never felt so much existential dread while reading about sports, and I love it.
The introduction of Comics for a Strange World, a compilation of strips from the webcomic Poorly Drawn Lines, could (aside from the bit about talking animals) almost serve just as well as an introduction to Galápagos. It's an absolutely hilarious comic about the weird things people (and talking animals) will do because their brains are full of dreams, or strange ideas, or anxiety, and so on. If you like Vonnegut's sense of humor, you might like this, too.