“‘That wonderful Mandarax you're scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?’”
Galápagos (1985)
“‘You think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable resources and have too many children. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery.’”
“She turned really mean now, and wanted to diminish his accomplishments as much as he, in her opinion, had diminished her own. ‘I must be awfully stupid,’ she said. ‘It has taken me an unforgivably long time to realize how much malice there is, how much contempt for others there is, in what you do.’
"’Oh, yes,’ said Hisako, ‘I am sure you did it for Mrs. Onassis, and to honor your wife as well. You have placed me among the immortals.’ She was talking about the heavy thinkers Mandarax could quote.”
“This happened to be the truth, but Hisako did not believe him. That was how bad things had become back in 1986. Nobody believed anybody anymore, since there was so much lying going on.“
“*Zenji said to Hisako that he had had Mandarax learn ikebana as a pleasant surprise for Mrs. Onassis, to whom he intended to present the instrument on the final night of ‘the Nature Cruise of the Century.’ ‘I did it for her,’ he said, ‘because she is supposed to be such a lover of beauty.’"
“*Zenji Hiroguchi had not himself taught Mandarax ikebana or anything else it knew. He had left that to underlings. The underling who taught Mandarax ikebana had simply taken a tape recorder to Hisako's famous ikebana class, and then boiled things down.”
“‘I was going to tell you. I meant to tell you,’ he said. This was another lie, and her learning that Mandarax knew ikebana was as improbable as her guessing the combination to a bank vault. She had been very reluctant to learn how to work Mandarax, and would remain so until she died.”
“That was what she had been so proud of being, of course. But her self-respect had been severely crippled by the discovery that a little black box could not only teach what she taught, but could do so in a thousand different tongues.”
“‘I accidentally found out something Mandarax could do which you somehow forgot to tell me Mandarax could do,’ Hisako went on. ‘Mandarax,’ she said, ‘turns out to be a very good teacher of the art of flower arranging.’”
“Mandarax knew the rules, too, for two hundred games, and could recite the basic principles laid down by masters for fifty different arts and crafts. It could moreover recall on command any one of twenty thousand popular quotations from literature.”
“Not only could Mandarax traffic in one hundred times more languages than its progenitor and correctly diagnose more diseases than the majority of physicians of that time. It could also name on command important events which happened in any given year.”
“Mandarax could identify every one of the thousand languages after hearing only a few words, and begin to translate those words into the operator's language without being told.”
"It has taken me an unforgivably long time to realize how much malice there is, how much contempt for others there is, in what you do." "You, *Doctor Hiroguchi," she went on, "think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you're scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?"
Anticipating the invention of chat LLMs nearly 40 years before their commercial proliferation, Kurt Vonnegut gave us “Mandarax” in his 1985 novel, Galápagos.
“As long as they did not use nuclear weapons, it appeared, nobody was going to give the right name to all the killing that had been going on since the end of the Second World War, which was surely ‘World War Three.’” 4/4
“This new explosive was regarded as a great boon to big-brained military scientists. As long as they killed people with conventional rather than nuclear weapons, they were praised as humanitarian statesmen.” 3/4
“The pilot was in turn being instructed by computers on the ground and in his cockpit. The warhead of each missile carried a new Israeli explosive which was capable of creating one fifth as much devastation as the atomic bomb the United States dropped on the mother of Hisako Hiroguchi during WW2.”
“It had eight new French fighter-bombers and each of these planes, moreover, was equipped with an American air-to-ground missile with a Japanese brain which could home in on radar signals, or on heat from an engine, depending on instructions from the pilot.“
Galápagos (1985) 1/4
“And the old man who had moved that I be allowed to speak later on got up and said this: ‘Young man, you're no better than the Albanian influenza or The Green Death, if you can kill for joy.’” 5/6
"’Sooners’ were people from Oklahoma, and, by extension, anybody in the service of the Duke of Oklahoma...The blacksmith was told that ‘Sooners’ were human beings, too, no better or worse than ‘Hoosiers,’ who were people from Indiana.” 4/6
“To my surprise, he was scolded by several speakers for his military ardor. He was told that war wasn't supposed to be fun, and in fact wasn't fun—that tragedy was being discussed, and that he had better put on a tragic face, or he would be ejected from the meeting.” 3/6
“There was one strapping young man, I remember, a black-smith, in fact, who told the meeting, ‘Send me. There's nothing I'd rather do than kill me some 'Sooners,' long as they ain't Daffodils.’ And so on.” 2/6
“The most pressing business had to do with selecting four replacements for fallen Daffodils in the army of the King of Michigan, who was at war simultaneously with Great Lakes pirates and the Duke of Oklahoma.” 1/6
“I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to.
Bully for them!”
Slapstick (1976) 6/6
“He was almost as tall as I was. We must have been quite a sight on the floor.
‘What does it all mean?’ he said over and over again.
‘I don't know, Albert,’ I said. ‘And maybe I'm glad I don't know.’
‘Ask a Chinaman!’ he said, and he went to his reward, as the saying goes.”
5/5
“We began to cannibalize the White House almost absent-mindedly, burning furniture and bannisters and paneling and picture frames and so on in the fireplaces, to keep warm…My science advisor, Dr. Albert Aquamarine-1 Piatigorsky, actually expired in my arms on the floor of the Oval Office.” 4/5
“People continued to send news to us at the White House for a little while. We ourselves were…expecting to die.
Our personal hygiene deteriorated quickly. We stopped bathing and brushing our teeth regularly. The males grew beards, and let their hair grow down to their shoulders.” 3/5
“Oh, there were claims of Dukedoms and Kingdoms and such garbage, and armies were raised and forts were built here and there. But few people admired them. They were just more bad weather and more bad gravity that families endured from time to time.” 2/5
“But then, just when everything was going so well — when Americans were happier than they had ever been, even though the country was bankrupt and falling apart — people began to die by the millions. . . And that was the end of the Nation. It became families, and nothing more.”
Slapstick (1974) 1/5
“[He] described the incredible artificial weather that Earthlings sometimes create for other Earthlings when they don't want those other Earthlings to inhabit Earth any more. Shells were bursting in the treetops with terrific bangs, he said, showering down knives and needles and razorblades.”
(S5)
