Tralfamadorians

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Tralfamadorians are a fictional alien race mentioned in several novels by Kurt Vonnegut.

In the novel Slaughterhouse-Five, protagonist Billy Pilgrim reports that the Tralfamadorians look like upright toilet plungers with a hand on top, into which is set a single eye. They have the ability to experience reality in four dimensions; meaning, roughly, that they have total recall of both past and future, and they are able to randomly access any part of their lives from birth to death, at will. Able to see along the timeline of the universe, they know the exact time and place of its accidental annihilation by means of a Trafalmadorian experiment, but are powerless to prevent it. Because they believe that when a person dies, he is still alive in another time and place, they reply "So it goes" to news of a death. They are placid in their fatalism, and patiently explain their philosophy as he is caged in a Trafalmadorian zoo; eventually he adopts their attitude, is returned to Earth, and tries to spread their philosophy.

In The Sirens of Titan, Vonnegut wrote that the Tralfamadorians are a race of intelligent machines, originally developed by super-beings who built them to give meaning to their own lives. Unable to achieve this task, the precursor race used the Tralfamadorians instead to extinguish themselves.