Tralfamadore

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tralfamadore is the fictional home planet of aliens from several novels by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. Details on the inhabitants of the planet vary from novel to novel:

In The Sirens of Titan, Tralfamadore is a planet in the Small Magellanic Cloud and the home of a civilization of machines, which dispatches Salo to a distant galaxy with a message for its inhabitants. After a part in his ship breaks, however, Salo is forced to land on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he befriends Winston Niles Rumfoord. Rumfoord exists in much the same way as the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five, while Salo appears to move in a linear fashion. The translation of Tralfamadore is given by Salo as both all of us and the number 541.
In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Tralfamadore is a hypothetical foreign planet, used in a purely rhetorical sense as part of a thought exercise.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadore is the home to beings who exist in all times simultaneously, and are thus privy to knowledge of future events, including the destruction of the universe at the hands of a Tralfamadorian test pilot. They kidnap Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of the novel, and place him in a zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana Wildhack, an actress in pornographic films.
In Hocus Pocus, the Tralfamadore is the planet nearest to where ancient multi-dimensional beings meet that supposedly control all aspects of human life including social affairs and politics. The actual Tralfamadorians are said to have too much of a sense of humor to be affected by the beings, unlike humans. Their exploits are chronicled in The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore (an overt reference to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), which is published serially in a pornographic magazine called Black Garterbelt. Though the author is never specified, the media in which it is published suggests that it may be Kilgore Trout.
In Timequake, Tralfamadore is mentioned offhand as a fantastical meeting place of anthropomorphized chemical elements.