The Ink and Insight Book Circle: The Sirens of Titan
Learn the Secrets of Beautiful Prose and Good Citizenship by Reading Vonnegut
Editor’s Introduction from
In all our work with students, the most-ignored piece of advice is this: reading makes you a better writer, a better person, a better “planetary citizen,” to quote Kurt Vonnegut.
So welcome to the debut issue of Ink & Insight Book Circle—a reading community for teens who want their words to carry weight. If you're looking to write more effective college admissions essays, get higher SAT or ACT scores, or excel in the kind of writing that life in college and career all require, this book circle is for you!
At Ink & Insight, we’re moving past the “read‑so‑you‑can‑answer‑quiz‑questions” approach common to high school readers. Each title in our series is chosen because it shows how great writing works, and because our definition of great writing aligns with what makes writing effective: simplicity, humor, relatable themes, and vividness. Read with us and you’ll pick up tools that pay off everywhere: in college essays, timed tests, late‑night journal entries, and future cover letters.
Our first pick, Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, is a masterclass in clarity wrapped inside cosmic comedy (more on that below). As you read, we'd love you to explore how the topics and themes the book explores relate to your life, and the pressures and joys of being a teen.
A few thoughts about reading effectively:
Underline the lines that land. What does Vonnegut do (or avoid) that makes them stick?
Trace themes to your own life. Free will? Purpose? Pressure? Where have you felt it?
Share one takeaway. Post a thought, question, quote, or doodle—anything that shows how the book sparked you.
Drop your reflections in the comments or tag us on social with #InkAndInsight. The goal isn’t to agree; it’s to see how many angles a single story can offer.
Ready to dive in?
The Ink and Insight Book Circle is free, but our work takes research and writing, so please support us!
Citation
Vonnegut, Kurt. The Sirens of Titan. Dell Publishing, 1959.
Rent it from your local library using Libby, or buy it at your local independent bookstore!
The Future Foretold: the Moral Vacuum of 2025, as Told to Us From 1959
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan for the first time when I was 19. I had just dropped out of the first college I attended, where I realized I wanted to study English literature, and I had made an intention for myself to self-educate in between schools by reading American classics. This project bored me quickly (though I’ve now become the kind of reader who will eagerly read that sort of thing), and I turned to Vonnegut, whose Slapstick had changed my life earlier that year. I spent the rest of the year devouring as much Vonnegut as I could. In writing this column, I’ve been considering why Vonnegut was so compelling to me during that period of my life, and why I think he holds this place in our culture as every teenager’s first favorite writer.
I was confused, as many teenagers are, about who I was and what I was supposed to be doing with my life. At 19, dropping out of college, that confusion felt particularly painful—I had had a path, and then I changed it impulsively, without knowing where else to go. Vonnegut offered clear instructions on how to live, without being a cheap self-help writer who purported to solve all of my problems, forever. What I got, and continue to get, from his work is that the world is and probably always will be full of destruction and senselessness, and that bad things and good things will happen inexplicably, and that confusion about our purpose probably never goes away for most of us, and we must just find a way to live with it and do something decent with our time here. I realize that this sounds bleak; I hope that it doesn’t discourage you. Vonnegut’s work isn’t depressing or pessimistic, but it’s quite honest. I think it is only through that honesty that we can begin to contend with what it looks like to be better stewards of our world.
I probably could have chosen any Vonnegut novel to start this project. His writing style is consistent—concise, short sentences and paragraphs, straightforward descriptions, and a vindictive sense of humor. He’s an excellent writer to learn from. He can be snarky in a way that most adults won’t condone in polite society. He wrote against war of all kinds, which made him disappointingly, though unsurprisingly, controversial. His works often have sci-fi leanings. I picked Sirens, though, for its astounding congruence with our current circumstances.
Kurt Vonnegut tells us in the first pages of The Sirens of Titan exactly what will occur in the story we are about to read. The story takes place, we are told, during the “Nightmare Ages, falling roughly, give or take a few years, between the Second World War and the Third Great Depression.” The richest man in America, Malachi Constant, will travel to Mars and then Mercury, return to Earth, and then go on to Titan, a moon of the planet Saturn.
Perhaps this core plot—the journey to Mars of the richest man in North America during the “Nightmare Ages”—sounds uncannily familiar to you. Vonnegut’s 1959 prediction of our current circumstances is so bewildering that it made me itch. The story itself hinges on a man who can see the entirety of the future, which only makes this future-sight more arresting.
Constant’s fortune is imparted to him (and to us) by a man named Winston Niles Rumfoord, a wealthy man who has gained the ability to see the future and is straddled across the entirety of the universe through something called a “chronosynclastic infundibula,” a place “where all the different kinds of truths fit together as nicely as the parts in your Daddy’s solar watch.” Rumfoord also tells Constant that, along his journey through space, he will have a child with Rumfoord’s wife, Beatrice, and that that child will be named Chrono.
Despite his forwardness about what we can expect from the plot, Vonnegut doesn’t sabotage narrative excitement or curiosity. Characters have their memories wiped and their names changed, so that, for example, when we jump suddenly from the Rumfoords’ mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, to a Martian army base, we don’t realize immediately that a new character named “Unk” is someone we’ve met before. We are as clueless as Unk is about who he is, after his numerous memory wipes performed by “mental health experts.” Though at times the book’s omniscient third-person narrator will privy us to information that the characters don’t have, we generally have as much access to the truth as the main characters. We, alongside them, must piece together what is happening—though we have the benefit of full access to our memories.
Vonnegut is, in turns, perfectly clear and incredibly obscure about the moral purposes of his work. Across his work, he (or his narrators, or his characters) comes to clear moral conclusions. In the first pages of Sirens: “The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.” This kind of moral might seem plenty obvious, even tedious and boring to say, because it’s so cliché. But as we all know, the world is full of people who seem to have forgotten this, and at times, we may be among them. These kinds of sentences in Vonnegut’s work aren’t really meant to be profound lessons, but reminders: just in case you forgot, it’s shameful to be the kind of person who seeks superiority in “money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent” over all else. There is more important work to be done on this planet–in this universe!
Constant’s wealth comes from luck, we are told (and also the generational wealth accrued by his father), and by the time he goes to space, he’s lost it all. The speculative corporate structure that housed Constant’s wealth is as absurd as those speculative corporate structures in which wealth is hoarded in our world (as we rapidly approach or are already drowning in the “Third Great Depression”). His corporation is called Magnum Opus, which feels as grandiose and self-congratulatory as “X” or “Meta,” and the companies it houses have names like Fandango Petroleum, Fry-Kwik, Psychokinesis Unlimited, and the “Emblem Supreme Casualty and Life Assurance Company of California.” We are told that Constant’s father accrued his wealth by dividing the first sentence of Genesis into two-letter pairs, and then investing in companies that shared those initials. We are reminded that billionaires are not generally miraculous geniuses, that they do not possess an intellect beyond the average human, but are as irrational and clueless as anybody else, and that their inflated myths of self fall apart upon minor scrutiny. “The people who can’t understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.”
Where we must come to our own conclusions is in the novel’s questions of self-determination. Rumfoord, though able to see the entirety of the future, has no ability to control or change it. Early on, he tells Beatrice, who is desperate to escape the future he has laid out for her, “‘I didn’t design the roller coaster, I don’t own it, and I don’t say who rides and who doesn’t. I just know what it’s shaped like.’” Despite this clarity about his inability to alter anybody’s fortune, Rumfoord does seem throughout to exert a great power, both over individual characters and the greater universal society he is stretched across. By the end of the novel, he comes to the realization that he has, in fact, been deluded, or has deluded himself, about his ability to control. There is another, greater, force that has manipulated him, and his denial has overpowered his omniscience.
Vonnegut is one of those writers I love for their willingness to confront everything unlikable and disappointing about humanity without being nihilistic. His ability to find humor in it all—even if it’s dark—is a relief. This book is cathartic. As our country becomes increasingly controlled by authoritarians seemingly hell-bent on the destruction of everything in their path, this book begs the question: must we be passive subjects to the will of those more powerful than us (parents, teachers, the President, aliens from a planet called Tralfamadore), or can we make our own way to something better?