Galápagos

Galapagos is a satirical science fiction novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1985. It was his eleventh novel, and it appeared from Delacorte Press.

The book begins with a cruise that goes wrong. A group of passengers with little in common ends up stranded on Santa Rosalia, a fictional island in the Galapagos, at the same moment that the world's economy collapses and a disease spreads that leaves every other human being unable to have children. That accident makes the castaways the ancestors of the entire species, and the novel follows what their descendants become over the following million years: smaller, furrier and better adapted to swimming than the people they came from, and no longer much interested in the things that preoccupied their ancestors.

The story is told by a ghost who has been dead for the whole period and observes the whole of it, and Vonnegut uses the distance to argue about the human brain and what it is for. The title refers both to the islands where the survivors land and to Charles Darwin, whose account of evolution provides the novel's method.