The Sirens of Titan (1959)

One of the things about Kurt Vonnegut that I think too often gets lost in the overweening attention paid to his dark humor, liberal politics, and/or various silly conceits is what a fine writer he could be. Just simple and plain as that. He knew how to construct sentences and choose words with an art and craft that he brought with equal force to putting together his best work, among which you would have to include his second novel, The Sirens of Titan. In fact, subsequent visits to this absurdist tract only underline the point. He may have grown a bit lazy further along in his career, too often reaching for familiar (and annoying) repetitive tics such as "So it goes," but he was also capable of this kind of deceptively simple, rollicking novel, which relentlessly builds on itself, starting out with all the self-conscious trappings of science fiction and a story about one Malachi Constant, richest man in the 22nd century, on a journey from Earth to Mars to further his holdings in anticipation of a coming interplanetary war with "the Martians." From there it telescopes outward, embracing wider and wider themes, ultimately introducing religion itself, first as an element of the absurd and then, through some trick of sleight of hand, of the profound, grappling with the grand meaning of historical human events and ultimately the significance of life itself—and managing it all within the confines of a continuing space opera. As overblown as the action becomes, the events and characters remain resolutely straightforward, as concrete and plainspoken as anything you might encounter in the work of Mark Twain, which only means it is sly and funny and careful always about what it is up to. Vonnegut, at the time, was among a relatively tiny minority to recognize the powerful subversive potential of science fiction. That's not to overlook the work of the titans of the field at the time—notably Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke—but only to mention that Vonnegut here found a way to uncover and point to vast levels that the genre held still unexplored. This is a very funny book, the first of his greatest work, and one that even warrants the term "mind-blowing."

In case it's not at the library.