Galapagos

It was in the isolated environment of the Galapagos Islands that Charles Darwin made the observations that were crucial to the development of his ideas of natural selection, and it is on the Galapagos Islands that another epic of evolution is played out. A small, mismatched group of people are shipwrecked on one of the Galapagos Islands just as the world economy collapses, and when a subsequent disease renders all humans infertile, this group are the only ones unaffected. The novel then follows their descendants over the next million years as they evolve into small, furry creatures with flipperlike hands and a smaller brain located in a streamlined skull better shaped for swimming and catching fish. Since Vonnegut acerbically maintains that the biggest problems human beings face are caused by their over-large brain, this is clearly meant to be a happy ending. Why it’s on the list: One of the consistent threads in a lot of posthuman science fiction is the idea that humanity as we know it is not the end point of evolution, and we have no right to consider ourselves the natural inheritors of the future. But the idea has rarely been expressed with the sour wit on display here.