Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos

Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos was written one million years ahead of the year 1986 AD. In this book, Vonnegut argues that the ultimate effect of humanity's sociological problems with technology is that man's intelligence will be the downfall and destruction of the human race. The essential point made by Vonnegut in this work is that the "great big brains" of humanity drives people to go further into technology and create new weapons that will lead to the demolition of man kind; Vonnegut disagreed against virtually every technological development (made by "big brains").

It was the humans' "big brains" that always gave them foolish or reckless ideas that almost always had negative results. Though it may tell the rest of your body to do the things that make you eat, breathe and sleep, it will occasionally tell you to something that might endanger or kill you. For example, Mary Hepburn's big brain was telling her she had nothing to live for, and gave her the urge to grab the plastic wrap from her red gown to suffocate herself and commit suicide (page 26).

Kurt Vonnegut journeyed into the minds of each of the characters, the readers are be able to know what the character was thinking, which played a good part in the story; particularly because the author made mention to how the great big brains of one million years ago (1986 A.D.) gave people all of these thoughts and ideas that people "today" can't do with their smaller brains. The characters begins with a ghost of a decapitated shipbuilder, that narrates the humorous, sarcastic and sometimes critical decline of the human race, as seen through the eyes and minds of the survivors of a doomed cruise to the Galapagos Islands.

Vonnegut's cast of unlikely Adams and Eves setting out on an evolutionary journey includes Mary Hepburn, an American biology teacher and recent widow; Zenji Hiroguchi, a Japanese computer genius (who doesn't make it to the ship, although his language-translating and quotation-spouting computer does); his wife, Hisako, carrying radiated genes from the atomic bombs; James Wait, who has made a fortune marrying elderly women; and Captain Aolph von Kleist, the Captain of the Bahia de Darwin; also included were six orphaned girls of the Kanka-bono tribe, who became the founding mothers of the fisher folk after a bacteria determined all other women infertile. This small group of survivors