Kosmos Traveler was just my spin on the Malachi Constant, Unk, the Space Wanderer in The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, with a little inspiration from Alexander von Humboldt, who published a collection called Kosmos.
If you haven’t read Vonnegut or simply haven’t attempted The Sirens of Titan, I highly recommend it! I think his work is timeless, where Vonnegut had such great exposure to how we built the modern day back in post war era of the GE company, that it must have helped him dream up all these possibilities for sci-fi rooted in scientific fact. Overall, I put Kurt Vonnegut up as one of the greatest novelists America’s produced so far.
On the other end, Alexander von Humboldt was another fascinating individual, one of the first ‘naturalists’ if you can make the claim, but he really promoted the idea of a connected world when it wasn’t popular in modern thought at the time. Also, hanging out Vienna with Goethe and the rest of the intelligentsia, that must have been fun.
I learned the most about Humboldt from the book The Invention of Nature. I absolutely adored reading this, it really made me a fan of Humboldt (to the point of getting a tattoo of a Kosmos book cover!). Now every time I see a Humboldt park or town, I remember why he’s got the most things named after him in the world!
