“Galápagos” tells, from the viewpoint of the ghost Leon Trout, the history of the last days of modern civilization, as it appears a million years after the disaster. After a worldwide catastrophe, only a handful of people survive and land on one of the Galápagos archipelago islands. There they live, mutate, and turn into a kind of thinking fish.
The main difference between these poor souls and us is that they live and think much more simply: according to Vonnegut, humanity’s chief enemy is too-big brains—the ones modern people have.