The wealthiest Hollywood playboy in America, Malachi Constant, is invited to the home of Beatrice Rumfoord to witness the manifestation of her husband, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak. Nine years before, Rumfoord had piloted his spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum near Mars. Kazak was his only companion aboard ship. Since then, man and dog exist as energy but materialize on a regular schedule in his mansion on Earth. Word of Winston’s materializations have spread over time and now draw a crowd outside the mansion’s walls. His wife, however, permits no audience to Winston’s appearances—until he specifically requests the presence of Malachi Constant.
What follows is a mind-bending journey, entirely predicted and orchestrated by Rumfoord, that takes Malachi and Beatrice to various points in the solar system, all memories and identities from their Earthly lives erased. In the meantime, Rumfoord creates a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent in which the Almighty exists but cares not for the affairs of mankind. Oh, and then there’s Salo, an alien from the planet Tralfamadore who crash landed on Saturn’s moon Titan eons ago on his way to deliver a message from his people to parts unknown. Also on Titan is where Rumfoord and Kazak reside in a palatial estate when they’re not beaming across the solar system.
But what is the purpose of Winston Niles Rumfoord’s machinations? Why has he chosen Malachi Constant and his own wife Beatrice as his pawns and how does the Tralfamadorian Salo fit into the picture?
In The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut’s dry humor sinks its claws into religion, morality, destiny, and the purpose of life in a tale that is sometimes hilarious, other times disturbing, but at all times original.
A writer named Jonah (or possibly John) looks back on his adventures, and his conversion to a religion known as Bokononism, while conducting research for a book about the late Frank Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. The first leg of our hero’s journey takes him to Hoenikker’s hometown of Ilium, NY where he meets two of Hoenikker’s three adult children. There, Jonah learns that each of the children possesses a piece of Ice-Nine, a dangerous substance their father developed for the military.
