“Galapagos” tells the story of the end of civilization and the evolution (or devolution) of humanity into a form more in keeping with the environment.  The general premise is that it is humans and their big brains that are the root cause of what’s wrong with the world.

The plot of this novel is fairly scant. There is a fancy cruise called ‘The Nature Cruise of the Century’ that is leaving from Ecuador and going to the Galapagos Islands. It has been touted widely and there are many of the rich and famous booked to go on the cruise. Due to a set of circumstances involving the outbreak of war, famine and financial collapse, the rich and famous do not turn up, and in the end a small amount of not famous people end up on the ship, and then marooned on one of the islands, through circumstances beyond their control. The devolved humans of one million years in the future are descended from these people, while the rest of humanity dies out.

The plot is not really the point to this book. It is merely a hook on which the author can hang his various opinions about humanity and how ridiculous we are. The narrator (who turns out to be a ghost) puts the blame for the situation squarely on the big brains of human beings:

Just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn’t imagine and execute.

For example, the collapse of various currencies around the world, the narrator states, is entirely imaginary:

It was all in people’s heads. People had simply changed their opinion of paper wealth.

Vonnegut takes aim at so many aspects of life. He blames ‘big brains’ for marriage problems:

 That cumbersome computer could hold so many contradictory opinions that a discussion between a husband and wife under stress could end up like a fight between blindfolded people wearing roller skates.

The captain of the ship is an example of the incompetence of senior management. Admiral Von Kleist is the senior officer of the ship. However, he has no idea about how to run a ship or anything about naval matters at all. His job is to be charming and funny, and it is his second in command who actually does the work. This becomes a problem when the second in command, seeing the collapse of his country, abandons ship (along with the rest of the crew) and returns to his family. So when the people from the hotel come on board and bombs start falling, Von Kleist may know how to start the engines but has no idea about navigation.

Typical of the management of so many organisations one million years ago, with the nominal leader specialising in social balderdash, and with the supposed second in command burdened with the responsibility of understanding how things really worked.

The millionaire Andrew MacIntosh is another example of very powerful people with too much money. He manipulates those around him and thinks only of his own needs. He is quite happy to use the current collapse in Ecuador to make money for himself. The Hiroguchis, people he had lied to and manipulated, believed him to be insane. Macintosh is not crazy (as the narrator tells us), but typical for so many in power he does whatever he likes as he is used to having money to insulate him from real world problems.

Like so many other pathological personalities in positions of power a million years ago, he might do almost anything on impulse, feeling nothing much. The logical explanations for his actions, invented at leisure, always came afterwards.

These characters, so familiar to today’s readers, reflect Vonnegut’s message that survival of the fittest is in reality survival of the powerful and greedy. In the end Darwin and evolution win, as power and money do not save these people. Nature takes a hand, winnowing out the bulk of humanity and devolving the descendants of a tiny group in order to be a better fit for the world as it is (one link on the food chain.)

Vonnegut, of course, did not really think humans should devolve into seals and should not be taken too seriously. He relished in the absurd as much as the satirical.  He uses the idea that devolution is the answer  to illustrate how foolish people are. Our brains are supposed to make us superior, but we do so many dumb things that it can be hard to believe. He has a character saying of others ‘they’re never going to write Beethoven’s ninth symphony’, indicating that the big brains of the majority of the population aren’t being used very much. It reminds me of ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Jonathan Swift, which suggests selling children of the poor in Ireland to the elite for food as a way of helping the economy. This is satire against the British elite for their dehumanizing attitude to Ireland’s poor. “Galapagos” is satirizing the unwillingness of the majority of people to use their brains rationally and objectively. Both solutions are technically logical but not real solutions.

“Galapagos” is not, in my opinion. Vonnegut’s best book, but it is entertaining and as always, has some very interesting points. It’s quite a short book (237 pages) so does not take long to read. I would recommend it for Vonnegut fans or anyone who is interested in ‘what if’ scenarios for the future.