This is an end-of-the-world apocalypse novel, made all the bleaker by the warm chatty style of everything which precedes the final doom.

The plot – Ice-nine

For 150 or so pages the narrator (named John, but on the first page he suggests we call him Jonah, in line with the usage indicating someone who brings bad luck) pursues an elaborate and good-humoured picaresque as he tracks down the grown-up children of the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker.

The narrator is planning to write a book about what people were doing on the day the atom bomb was dropped, although he never really gets much further than talking to the members of Hoenikker’s family and his boss and co-workers.

John corresponds with Newton Hoenikker, and his sister, Angela Hoenikker Conners, then travels to the town of Ilium to meet them, and also Hoenniker’s former employer, Dr. Asa Breed, head of the General Forge and Foundry Company where the late Felix worked.

He explains that the company is really a top secret government agency. Breed explains that Hoenniker was like a child who just liked solving whatever problem was put in front of him. The agency had a request from the U.S. Marines who (in Vonnegut’s cheerfully childish way) are described as being fed up of crawling through mud. Can’t the scientists do anything to clear up all this mud?

And so we are told that Hoenniker came up with the notion that ice may potentially be formed in different ways from usual. He starts by considering that ice is just a solid way for molecules of H2O to exist. It consists of a latticework of molecules in a steady state. But plenty of other chemical substances, ones we think of as crystalline, in fact form crystals in a variety of ways. They are all crystals but she shape of the latticework which makes them solid can be altered in the laboratory by ‘seeding’ the chemical solution, as it approaches solidifying point, with the desired pattern. Then all the other molecules in the chemical crystalise in that pattern.

To cut a long story short, John discovers that Dr Hoenikker had discovered a new way of making water solidify at a higher than usual temperature, roughly room temperature. After experimenting with seven other versions he has called this ice-nine. If crystals of ice-nine touch any other form of water, it will all immediately solidify according to the ice-nine crystal or lattice structure.

Now all this was done to help out the U.S. Marines who were fed up of getting dirty and muddy while they went about their work. (See the absurdity on which all Vonnegut’s stories are based?) But of course, you and I – having read hundreds of end-of-the-world books and watched hundreds of end-of-the-world movies – instantly spot the risk involved. Potentially one little sliver of ice-nine could end the world by converting all the water – all the seas and oceans and rivers and lakes and streams and all the rain and, yes, all human beings (who are, after all, mostly made of water) into solid blocks if ice-nine.

And that, after another 100 pages of very entertaining travelogue, is exactly what happens.

The book is extremely readable (I couldn’t put it down, I read it in one four-hour sitting) because:

1. it is broken up into dinky little two-page chapters, so it feels like it moves very fast
2. in almost each chapter we are introduced to new and strikingly drawn characters, often very secondary – like the secretary at the General Forge and Foundry Company, the old black lift boy, Lynton Enders Knowles, a taxi driver, a bartender, a headstone salesman – but all of whom have zippy cameos
3. it is often very funny – it is certainly much more upbeat than The Sirens of Titan which I found unpleasantly nihilistic – with light humorous touches all over the place

When John stops by at Ilium’s gravestone dealership he discovers the owner is the brother of Ava Breed, head of the General Forge and Foundry Company.

‘It’s a small world,’ I observed.
‘When you put it in a cemetery, it is.’ Marvin breed was a sleek and vulgar, a smart and sentimental man. (p.44)

When he stops off at Jack’s Hobby Shop the page or two describing the shop and its owner and all its hundreds of miniature trains and dioramas is sweet. For a two-page chapter we learn that during his trip to Ilium John lent out his room to a New York poet, Sherman Krebbs, who proceeded to have wild parties and trash it. Someone had written in lipstick over his bed, ‘No, no, no, said Chicken-licken’ (p.53).

Apparently Vonnegut himself claimed that his books ‘are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips…and each chip is a joke.’ That is eminently true of Cat’s Cradle.

The whimsy in Sirens felt utterly contrived. Here it is genuinely charming and helps you whizz through the story. Part two of it is set on the dirt poor Caribbean island of San Lorenzo. This is because both Newton and Angela Hoenikker thought their older brother, Franklin, was dead. (On Hiroshima Day Newton had told John he remembers discovering Franklin under a bush trying to persuade some red ants he’d captured and put in a jam jar to fight some red ants.)

Newton (nickname ‘Newt’ and a midget) and Angela thought Franklin was dead because he got caught up in some car-smuggling racket in Florida and disappeared, assumed wasted by the Mob. But suddenly he turns up as the right-hand man of San Lorenzo’s dictator, ‘Papa’ Monzano.

The second and longest part of the story is set on the island, although it takes a few pages to get there as Vonnegut enjoys describing the wacky characters who share the small charter plane there with John – a hustling bustling businessman, H. Lowe Crosby, who wants to set up a bicycle factory on the island (and his wife Hazel), and the new U.S. ambassador, Horlick Minton, a picture of haughty aloofness (and his wife Claire).

There’s also the figure of Julian Castle, once the multi-millionaire ex-owner of Castle Sugar Cooperation, who gave up business in order to set up a charity in the jungle, the whom John travels to San Lorenzo to interview. He abandoned his business ventures to set up and operate a humanitarian hospital, the House of Hope and Charity, in the jungle. And he has a son, Philip, who has a wonderful dry wit: there are several really funny dialogues between him and the narrator.

To cut a long story short, the dictator ‘Papa’ Monzano is really ill with excruciatingly terminal cancer, and so he hands over power to his military adviser, Franklin Hoenikker. But Franklin doesn’t want the job and hands it over to the narrator. A big fireworks display and flyover by the San Lorenzo air force is planned for inauguration day. Just hours before it, the narrator discovers that Papa has committed suicide (to escape the unbearable pain of his terminal illness) by touching a fragment of ice-nine to his lips. One of the bloody Hoenikker kids must have given him some.

So John and Newt very very carefully use a blow torch to raise the temperature of the ice-nine and scoop up every sliver into a bucket of hot water and generally quarantine it. But all this comes to nothing when one of the six jets flying overhead crashes into the big castle on a cliff where John, Frank, Newt, Angela, the ambassador and Crosby are standing. The particular tower they’re on cracks and crumbles, half of it toppling into the sea.

And then, with all the horror of full knowledge of what is coming, John is forced to watch the bed on which the ice-nined body of Papa Monzano was lying, slowly slide across the slanting floor and into the ocean.

In a flash the entire ocean is solidified, every river, lake and sea in the world is solidified, all rain turns to hail, and almost everyone in the world who is touching the contaminated water dies. The sky immediately turns into a hell of thousands of tornadoes, like an endless sack full of grey wriggling worms.

John and Papa’s beautiful adopted daughter, Mona, who he has lusted after throughout the novel, escape down to a bunker where there is food and safe drink for three or four days. When they go back above ground, nothing has changed. The world has come to an end.

Exploring the island and looking for survivors, they discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans had killed themselves with ice-nine, on the facetious advice of Bokonon. Displaying a mix of grief and resigned amusement, Mona kills herself as well.

John later discovers Newt and Franklin survived, as did H. Lowe Crosby and his wife. They eke out a living not touching any of the ice and heating all water before they drink it. It is in the months since the apocalypse that John has written this account, the book we hold in our hands.

The religion – Bokononism

But this summary has so far completely ignored what is arguably the more important aspect of the book which is that John, right at the end of the story, had become a convert to a new religion known as Bokonism, with the result that the book is packed, from start to finish, with explanations of key Bokononist terms and ideas, as well as quotes from the calypso songs in which Bokonon expressed himself collected in the so-called Books of Bokonon.

In essence, Bokononism teaches that life is empty and meaningless and therefore we must comfort ourselves with useless lies.

There’s a lot of fol-de-rol surrounding the religion but the basic idea is that it was dreamed up by two castaways on the island (a merchant seaman from Tobago, Lionel Boyd Johnson, and a deserting U.S. marine, Corporal Earl McCabe) who set out to create a utopian religion from scratch.

They initially ruled San Lorenzo (giving it, in a typical piece of sardonic Vonnegut humour, a national anthem based on the tune ‘Home, Home on the Range’) but quickly realised that a religion needs the ‘glamour’ of being struggled and suffered for. And so they banned their own religion, and Bokonon himself (in fact his name was Johnson but the islanders couldn’t pronounce it) went into hiding. Any followers were liable to be hung up on a giant meathook which was set up in the centre of the capital city.

After which Bokononism really took off. (You see Vonnegut’s sardonic humour / understanding of human nature?)

Throughout the book the author takes particular incidents and demonstrates how they are good examples of Bokononism’s main concepts. Some twenty of these are demonstrated and explained in the text, but about three are important because they will recur in Vonnegut’s later works.

karass – a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.

granfalloon – a false karass i.e. a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist, for example ‘Hoosiers’ are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name. Another example Vonnegut gives is Americans.

wampeter – the central theme or purpose of a karass. Each karass has two wampeters at any given time, one waxing and one waning

foma – harmless untruths

There’s much more, and the weaving of Bokononism into the plot is very cleverly done (well, ‘clever’ in the sense that it is obvious nonsense invented to demonstrate the power of obvious nonsense over the stupid human mind).

More to the point, it is funny, often very funny – and the combination of the a) fairly normal social comedy of fat bicycle manufacturer, waspish hotel owners and so on with b) the very thoroughly worked-out integration of this imaginary religion into all aspects of the plot all leading up to a c) all-too-believable sci-fi apocalypse make this a compelling and disorientating read.

Anti-war

Here, as in all his books, Vonnegut makes his anti-war sentiments crystal clear. He has the U.S. ambassador, at a commemoration service for San Lorenzans who died in the Second World War, remark:

‘And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.

‘Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.’

Right on, man.

Related links

• Cat’s Cradle on Amazon

Kurt Vonnegut reviews

• The Sirens of Titan (1959)
• Mother Night (1962)
• Cat’s Cradle (1963)
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
• Breakfast of Champions (1973)
• Slapstick (1976)
• Jailbird (1979)

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the enormous monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, a moon of the former Jupiter, but the thriller aspects are only pretexts for Clarke’s wonderful descriptions of landing on Halley’s Comet and the evolution of wild and unexpected new forms of life on Europa