Book 47: "Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut
Friday, June 19th, 2009 12:12![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakePeople still get the hiccups, incidentally. They still have no control over whether they do it or not. I often hear them hiccupping, involuntarily closing their glottises and inhaling spasmodically, as they lie on the broad white beaches or paddle around the blue lagoons. If anything, people hiccup more now than they did a million years ago. This has less to do with evolution, I think, than with the fact that so many of them gulp down raw fish without chewing them up sufficiently.
(PEOPLE)
And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.
The Nature Cruise of the Century is the over-hyped maiden voyage of a new cruse ship to the Galapagos Islands, which has attracted celebrities from Jackie Onassis to Mick Jagger, but a world economic and political crisis means that only six passengers have made it to the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador and they expect the cruise to be cancelled at any moment.
There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.
When a small group of people end up marooned on an uninhabited island in the north of the Galapagos, they expect to be rescued, but humanity is in melt-down, and the islanders end up as the sole fertile representatives of the human race.
Over the next million years, they evolve into creatures rather like seals and their brains shrink to allow their heads to be more stream-lined. According to Leon Trout, the ghost of a ship worker killed during the construction of the cruise ship, all mankind's problems were caused by our big brain. Apparently our descendants are much happier, lying round on the beach, with plenty of fish to eat and sharks to keep their numbers down so the population doesn't outgrow the Galapagos Islands (since the bacteria that causes human infertility is still extant everywhere else).
Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge - ECUADOR / GALAPAGOS ISLANDS
And people still laugh about as much as they ever did, despite their shrunken brains. If a bunch of them are lying around on a beach, and one of them farts, everybody else laughs and laughs, just as people would have done a million years ago.
The Nature Cruise of the Century is the over-hyped maiden voyage of a new cruse ship to the Galapagos Islands, which has attracted celebrities from Jackie Onassis to Mick Jagger, but a world economic and political crisis means that only six passengers have made it to the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador and they expect the cruise to be cancelled at any moment.
There was still plenty of food and fuel and so on for all the human beings on the planet, as numerous as they had become, but millions upon millions of them were starting to starve to death now. The healthiest of them could go without food for only about forty days, and then death would come.
And this famine was as purely a product of oversize brains as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It was all in people's heads. People had simply changed their opinions of paper wealth, but, for all practical purposes, the planet might as well have been knocked out of orbit by a meteor the size of Luxembourg.
When a small group of people end up marooned on an uninhabited island in the north of the Galapagos, they expect to be rescued, but humanity is in melt-down, and the islanders end up as the sole fertile representatives of the human race.
Over the next million years, they evolve into creatures rather like seals and their brains shrink to allow their heads to be more stream-lined. According to Leon Trout, the ghost of a ship worker killed during the construction of the cruise ship, all mankind's problems were caused by our big brain. Apparently our descendants are much happier, lying round on the beach, with plenty of fish to eat and sharks to keep their numbers down so the population doesn't outgrow the Galapagos Islands (since the bacteria that causes human infertility is still extant everywhere else).
