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First edition hardcover
Galápagos is Vonnegut's eleventh novel, published by Delacourt Press on October 4, 1985. It was drafted primarily in 1983-1984 at a two-room studio at 5 MacDougal Alley in Greenwich Village, specially rented to provide solitude. Sam Lawrence received the manuscript in February 1985 and a brief excerpt of the novel appeared in the August 1985 Esquire under the title "A Dream of the Future (Not Excluding Lobsters)". A Literary Guild and Science Fiction Book Club hardcover editions were both published simultaneous to the Delacourt release, while in the fall of 1985, the British trade edition was published by Jonathan Cape.[1] The novel is dedicated to one of Vonnegut's early teachers, Hillis L. Howie, and features an epigram from Anne Frank: "In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart".[2]
Narrated by the ghost of Leon Trout—son of science fiction author Kilgore—one million years in the future, the story recounts how a motley group of tourists, indigenous orphans, and an incompetent sea captain fled an uprising in Ecuador due to a global financial collapse, arriving in the Galápagos Islands. There, isolated from a plague that caused infertility among the rest of the species, they became the nucleus for the next stage in human evolution: small, furry, seal-like creatures without the hands, tools, and the "big brains" that made human life so destructive in the 20th century.
Franklin Library Edition[]
In the fall of 1985, the Franklin Library privately printed a specially designed "deluxe" edition of Galápagos for members of its Signed First Editions Society. In New York City, Vonnegut wrote a "Special Message" for this edition which was later included in the third volume of the Library of America's Vonnegut set.
Summary[]
Daniel Boorstin, 1950
Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, visited the Galápagos Islands on a two-week cruise in March, 1982 on a ship, the Santa Cruz, similar to the Bahía de Darwin of the novel. A trained guide would lead guests around the island, with educational lectures in the evenings. Krementz lost interest almost immediately, instead finishing a book she was writing on children of divorced parents. This annoyed Vonnegut at the time, who saw the trip as "a dream come true", but now he applauds her indifference to "the moral blankness of Nature in the raw". Calling the isolated animals "clocks whose only purpose was to duplicate their repetitious, predictable selves", he realized that the constant adaptability of human children is more interesting.
Once, at a cocktail party when Vonnegut was a student at the University of Chicago, Dan Boorstin—then a history professor and later Librarian of Congress—blithely proposed that major scientific theories had social consequences, citing Darwin's Theory of Evolution. This idea quickly died when no one could find within Newton's Laws of Motion, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or Einstein's Theory of Relativity anything that "altered people's notions of how best to act in harmony with Creation". Evolution, on the other hand, teaches the lesson that all species must "[p]rove by fucking or killing that you are Nature's favorite. Never mind mere human law". Thinking and planning become pointless when it is only up to Nature to decide.[3]