Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle is a satirical novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1963. Narrated by a writer identified as John, or Jonah, who sets out to research a book about what prominent Americans were doing on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the novel traces his investigation into the family of the late Felix Hoenikker, a fictional co-creator of the bomb, and in particular into Hoenikker's final invention, ice-nine, a form of water ice stable at room temperature that instantly freezes any liquid water it touches. Jonah's research draws him to the impoverished Caribbean island republic of San Lorenzo, where Hoenikker's three children have each carried a fragment of ice-nine, and where the islanders practice Bokononism, a self-consciously invented religion founded by the exiled prophet Bokonon and built openly around lies its own scripture admits are false, on the premise that comforting untruths serve people better than the truth. When a sample of ice-nine is accidentally released on San Lorenzo near the novel's end, it freezes the world's oceans and effectively ends civilization, leaving Jonah among a handful of survivors to complete his manuscript on a devastated Earth. Blending bleak apocalyptic satire with black comedy about science, religion and the arms race, the novel was influential enough that the American Anthropological Association rejected it as a master's thesis in anthropology when Vonnegut first submitted it in that form, decades before it was later accepted as one after his fame as a novelist was established.