Although For All Mankind is a hard science fiction series focused on the realities of spaceflight and living on other planets in an alternate timeline, it’s also a show rooted in a lot of sci-fi history. With references to Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica throughout, the series pays homage to types of science fiction less plausible than the show itself, but thematically, often on the same page. Back in Season 3, the finale was titled “Stranger in a Strange Land,” echoing the 1961 Robert A. Heinlein novel of the same name, all about a human raised on Mars coming back to Earth. Now, with Episode 7 of Season 5, For All Mankind has given us the episode title “The Sirens of Titan,” which very clearly references the 1959 novel from Kurt Vonnegut.
But what does a wacky Vonnegut satire about a time-traveling dog, an eccentric billionaire, and an alien stranded on Titan have to do with For All Mankind? A deeper look at the plot of the novel and the themes of FamK Season 5 reveals that this Easter egg isn’t just a fun reference, but instead is a very deep connection to one of the greatest sci-fi books of all time.
Spoilers ahead.
By this point in Season 5, For All Mankind is basically juggling two major plot points: the impending landing of Sojourner on Saturn’s moon Titan, and the revolution on Mars, which is threatened both from within and out. In order to land on Titan, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) has to defy orders, which is complicated by the fact that another earthship, Kosmos-1, has just burned up in Titan’s atmosphere. At the time, as the Marsies try to figure out their next move after taking control of MOCC (the Mars-based mission control), there is a ship full of Marines from Earth, being sent to retake Mars. All the while, tech mogul Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) has gone into hiding in a more secure part of Mars to avoid the fighting. He also launches an attack against his own people, which results in devastating civilian casualties.
In Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant, the richest man in America, is connected to an accidental time traveler named Winston Niles Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak. Rumfoord created private spaceflight and became an unwitting time traveler after encountering a timey-wimey phenomenon called a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. These meetings eventually result in a staged conflict between Earth and Mars, in which humans trained on Mars invade Earth for the sole purpose of losing, in order to prove a larger point. At the same time, there’s an alien robot named Salo, stranded on Titan, who needs a missing part for his spaceship. Much of Salo’s attempts to communicate with his home planet have influenced major historical events on Earth.
Vonnegut’s novel is short, but it has a huge scope and heavy themes: It suggests that an invasion from Mars in which humans were the “Martians” would be seen as both tragic and life-changing. Add in the strange spacefaring billionaires and the moon Titan, and if you squint a little, those things are basically present in For All Mankind Season 5. Obviously, the Marsies in FaMk aren’t on their way to invade Earth, and instead are about to be confronted with Earth forces, surely, in the final episodes of the season. But the message of the book — that interplanetary warfare could and should make human beings think differently about how we treat each other — totally applies to FaMk.
The bloodshed between Mars and Earth, against the backdrop of trying to land on a distant moon in orbit of Saturn, describes both stories pretty well. Vonnegut peppered The Sirens of Titan with his signature dark comedy, but the novel, which was his second, predates some more famous books like Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, and is very clearly a work of social science fiction. And, at the end of the day, for all of its spaceflight nitty-grittiness, For All Mankind is too.
