Galapagos

Galapagos is a 1985 satirical After the End novel by Kurt Vonnegut.


 * Anachronic Order: Vonnegut just loves this trope, doesn't he. The narrator will constantly throw out tidbits about what the future is like left and right.
 * Adam and Eve Plot: Sort of... Just replace Adam with a drunk, racist sea captain and Eve with six pre-teen girls (the last of an isolated tribe from the rainforest) and a fur-covered teenager who looks like Chewbacca, and then throw in a blind girl, a depressed Japanese woman, and a suicidal widower, and you've pretty much got the cast. Well... At least it tries to avoid Hollywood Science...
 * Anticlimax: Vonnegut actually goes so far as to point out which characters will die. Considering the novel takes place over about a million years, this is all of them. However, he also makes note of when characters die, and how soon in relation to the immediate plot, completely ruining the suspense.
 * Apocalypse How: A little of column 3a, a little of column 3b.
 * Better Than Sex: Colonel Reyes launches a missile from his aircraft and tells his friend that the experience felt better than sexual intercourse.
 * Crapsack World: In the far distant past of 1986, the world is on the verge of World War III, most countries (including Ecuador, Peru, Turkey, Mexico, and more) are all starving to death. Keep in mind this book was written in 1985.
 * Depopulation Bomb: Humanity goes extinct outside of the Galapagos (both then, and forever and ever) due to a bacteria which feeds only on the ovaries of humans that evolved at a book fair in Germany.
 * Evolutionary Levels: Averted, the future surviving humans look like little more than seals, and have the intelligence to match.
 * Foregone Conclusion: The human race all dies out, except for these seal-people on one island of the Galapagos. The author even marks those who are going to die with a big, fat star in front of their names.
 * Humans Are Bastards / Humans Are Morons / Humanity Is Insane : Apparently, yes. The narrator states continually through the book how our sentience is the root of our problems and considers their future forms - hands sealed up in flippers, redundant big brains atrophied by evolution - to be an improvement.
 * I Love Nuclear Power: Little Akiko's fur coat is due to radiation her grandmother received in the Hiroshima bombing.
 * In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves : Hey, it's a Kurt Vonnegut novel. This trope is pretty much a given.
 * Just Before the End: Humanity is about to be wiped out by a bacteria, but none of the characters know this.
 * New Eden: Future humanity's existence can be considered this... if not for the fact that they'll never know it, having lost the capacity to even conceive the word "Eden". Indeed, by the end, the narrator describes it as an endless safari.
 * Our Ghosts Are Different: They are human souls who refuse to go into the afterlife (well, until they get bored), can read minds, and can manifest from time to time. The narrator is one.
 * Only You Can Repopulate My Race: The entire future human race. And there is inbreeding. A loooot of inbreeding. Averted somewhat in that the effects of such inbreeding are actually shown.
 * Painting the Fourth Wall: The narrator muses that his father - science fiction author Kilgore Trout - would sometimes try to get his books adapted as movies, but they were always scuppered by having one vital scene that could never be included in a film. Then he describes how, after sex with the ship's captain, the island's only adult woman extracts his sperm from herself and impregnates the girls with it. No Galapagos movie, then.
 * Posthumous Narration: The entire story is told by some guy (Leon Trout, the estranged son of Vonnegut's recurring character Kilgore Trout) who died during the construction of the ship that brought the original colonists to the islands.
 * Transhuman Aliens: The human race by the end of the novel looks like, well, seals. They lack language and technology, have flippers for hands and feet, long snouted skulls, become fertile at six and rarely live past thirty.
 * Unreliable Narrator: The ghost telling the story frequently inserts his criticisms of his cast, as well as diatribes against the human brain. Of course, by telling the story at all, he exempts himself, as he's already dead.