Eccentric, almost crazy, Vonnegut’s novel builds a science fiction satire on the evolution of humankind, narrated by a sort of ghost with a million-year perspective. It consists of two parts: the first, "The Thing Was", and the second, "And the Thing Became".
The author includes a collage of characters with completely different profiles, all connected through the promotion of a trip to the Galápagos Islands: a widowed high school teacher from the United States, a swindler who deceives widows, a millionaire with his blind daughter and her guide dog, a neurotic Japanese couple who designed the first computer translation machines, an incompetent ship captain and his brother, the director of a hotel in Guayaquil, and the organizer of the promotional trip to the Galápagos, who was meant to gather numerous global personalities, not to mention seven wild girls from a lost Amazonian tribe.
A global crisis and chaos lead the ship to drift aimlessly and eventually run aground on the fictional island of Santa Rosalía. There, the last human community on Earth takes shape, adapting both mentally and physically to its new conditions. A metaphorical novel, dull at times but brought to life by its imaginative characters and situations.