The narrator of Cat’s Cradle is writing a book about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped, by collating the stories of people who were involved in its creation. One of the inventors of the bomb, Dr. Hoenekker, no longer lives, so the narrator contacts his three children instead, to record their impressions of the day.

Hoenekker’s three children, the narrator, and some other people happen to converge on the island of San Lorenzo, a poor island dictatorship somewhere close to the US. The state religion in San Lorenzo is bokononism, a joke of a religion founded to give the people of the island something to be happy about.

The children have inherited Hoenekker’s last invention: ice-nine, a form of water that is solid at room temperature. It is also very stable, and when it touches ordinary water, it turns that into ice-nine too. (A pre-nanotech version of grey goo.) Each of the three got a small piece each. And though none of them is evil or power-hungry – just careless and thoughtless – they manage to destroy the world.

The book has no one central point; rather, it has a bundle of ideas. It’s a tight and focused book, and Vonnegut fits a lot of story and a lot of ideas in few pages. There’s the obvious commentary on the Cold War and nuclear proliferation. There’s making fun of just about every kind of blind following: blind nationalism, blind local patriotism, blind adherence to religion, blind belief in science, etc. There’s man’s folly and tendency to, semi-innocently, invent things that can destroy the world, while claiming that technology is not inherently evil. (”Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”)

And underlying it all is the darkly humourous view that life just does not make sense. And yet we try to make it make sense. The opening quotation of the book is as follows:

Nothing in this book is true. Live by the foma [harmless untruths] that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Which is what most of us do most of the time, anyway.

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