Cat's Cradle is a satirical postmodern novel, with science fiction elements, by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's fourth novel, it was first published in 1963, exploring and satirizing issues of science, technology, the purpose of religion, and the arms race, often through the use of black humor. After turning down his original thesis in 1947, the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut his master's degree in anthropology in 1971 for Cat's Cradle. The first-person everyman narrator, a professional writer introducing himself as Jonah (but apparently named John), frames the plot as a flashback. Set in the mid-20th century, the plot revolves around a time when he was planning to write a book called The Day the World Ended about what people were doing on the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Throughout, he also intersperses meaningful as well as sarcastic passages and sentiments from an odd religious scripture known as The Books of Bokonon. The events of the novel evidently occur before the narrator was converted to his current religion, Bokononism. While researching for his upcoming book, the narrator travels to Ilium, New York, the hometown of the late Felix Hoenikker, a co-creator of the atomic bomb and Nobel laureate physicist, to interview Hoenikker's children, coworkers, and other acquaintances. There, he learns of a substance called ice-nine, created for military use by Hoenikker and now likely in the possession of his three adult children. Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly freeze and transform into more ice-nine. Among several odd unfoldings in Ilium, the narrator meets Hoenniker's younger son, a dwarf named Newt, who recounts that his father was doing nothing more than playing the string game "cat's cradle" when the first bomb was dropped... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle