The Sirens Of Titan

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

This is the novel in which we first encounter some of the themes and ideas that would later emerge in Slaughterhouse-Five. There are Tralfamadorians, there's the familiar resignation in the face of the inevitability of fate, there's a central character who is cut loose in time, in this case because he is caught in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Salo, the Tralfamadorian, has been trapped on Titan for two billion years since his craft broke down. In the course of the novel we discover that the entirety of human history has been manipulated by the Tralfamadorians in order to create the situation in which Malachi Constant, the richest man on earth, arrives on Titan with exactly the small part Salo needs to repair his craft. Why it's on the list: It's funny, it's clever, it's brilliantly written, and it's a key influence on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, what more do you need?