Cat's Cradle - A Harmless Untruth
First edition, 1963
Cat's Cradle (1963) is one of Kurt Vonnegut's major novels, built around two converging catastrophes. The first is ice-nine, a crystalline form of water invented by Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional creators of the atomic bomb, that freezes any water it contacts at room temperature. The second is Bokononism, a religion invented wholesale on a desperately poor Caribbean island, founded openly on harmless lies and outlawed by the same government that secretly practices it. Vonnegut uses both to ask the same question from opposite ends: what happens when science produces certainty without meaning, and what happens when meaning requires fiction to survive.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, three-quarter cloth and boards. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1963. Hugo Award nominee (1964). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (40). #10404.
Fine in near fine dust jacket that has tiny chip at base of spine and some light wear. An attractive copy.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, three-quarter cloth and boards. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1963. Hugo Award nominee (1964). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (40). #10404.
Fine in near fine dust jacket that has tiny chip at base of spine and some light wear. An attractive copy.
Additional Details
Cat's Cradle opens with its narrator, who calls himself John but identifies with Jonah, sitting down to write a book about what various people were doing the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. His research leads him to Felix Hoenikker, one of the bomb's creators, now dead, who is remembered less as a man than as a force of pure intellectual energy indifferent to human consequences. Hoenikker's colleagues describe him with a mixture of awe and unease. He treated science as play, kept toys on his desk alongside his calculations, and seems never to have considered what his work was actually for. Before he died, he solved a problem the Marines had brought to him, how to make mud navigable, by inventing ice-nine, a crystalline form of water that freezes at room temperature and converts any water it contacts into more of itself. He gave the three remaining chips to his three children as Christmas presents.
The novel's second movement takes John to San Lorenzo, a Caribbean island so poor and so bleak that its founders, a pair of American drifters named McCabe and Johnson, solved the problem of social order through an arrangement of deliberate theater. McCabe became the dictator. Johnson, who renamed himself Bokonon, invented a religion he called Bokononism, founded entirely on what he called foma, harmless untruths. The government outlawed Bokononism and made its practice punishable by death on the hook. The entire island practices it in secret, including the dictator. The religion's central texts, the Books of Bokonon, are quoted throughout the novel as epigraphs and asides, and they are among the funniest and bleakest passages.
What holds the novel together is Vonnegut's understanding that Hoenikker's ice-nine and Bokonon's foma are the same problem approached from different directions. Science in the novel is not evil but it is radically indifferent to meaning, and meaning is what people cannot live without. Bokononism provides meaning through acknowledged fiction. Ice-nine provides certainty through annihilation. The novel moves toward its ending with a logic that is both comic and inevitable, and the ending, which involves the destruction of the world's water supply through a political accident, is presented in Vonnegut's flattest, most deadpan style.
The last page finds Bokonon himself sitting on a rock writing the final sentence of his Books. He hands the paper to John. The sentence describes what Bokonon would do if he were a younger man, and it is the novel's final and most precise statement about the relationship between human ambition and human scale. Vonnegut does not explain it.
Cat's Cradle was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1964 and is listed in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. It remains one of the few novels that can be read as both comedy and as a serious engagement with the ethics of science, the sociology of belief, and the question of what human beings are actually for.
The novel's second movement takes John to San Lorenzo, a Caribbean island so poor and so bleak that its founders, a pair of American drifters named McCabe and Johnson, solved the problem of social order through an arrangement of deliberate theater. McCabe became the dictator. Johnson, who renamed himself Bokonon, invented a religion he called Bokononism, founded entirely on what he called foma, harmless untruths. The government outlawed Bokononism and made its practice punishable by death on the hook. The entire island practices it in secret, including the dictator. The religion's central texts, the Books of Bokonon, are quoted throughout the novel as epigraphs and asides, and they are among the funniest and bleakest passages.
What holds the novel together is Vonnegut's understanding that Hoenikker's ice-nine and Bokonon's foma are the same problem approached from different directions. Science in the novel is not evil but it is radically indifferent to meaning, and meaning is what people cannot live without. Bokononism provides meaning through acknowledged fiction. Ice-nine provides certainty through annihilation. The novel moves toward its ending with a logic that is both comic and inevitable, and the ending, which involves the destruction of the world's water supply through a political accident, is presented in Vonnegut's flattest, most deadpan style.
The last page finds Bokonon himself sitting on a rock writing the final sentence of his Books. He hands the paper to John. The sentence describes what Bokonon would do if he were a younger man, and it is the novel's final and most precise statement about the relationship between human ambition and human scale. Vonnegut does not explain it.
Cat's Cradle was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1964 and is listed in David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. It remains one of the few novels that can be read as both comedy and as a serious engagement with the ethics of science, the sociology of belief, and the question of what human beings are actually for.
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