“Now I will destroy the whole world.”
– What Bokonists say when they commit suicide, Cat’s Cradle, Chapter 106

You’d think a story about the end of the world – not just the world of one person, or human civilization, but all life on the planet – would be a grim affair, but Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is replete with wit, wry humour, and a touching compassion for human frailty.

 

Vonnegut’s book is no bright dystopia, like the one portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, nor is it as unrelentingly dark as George Orwell’s 1984. It’s our world that Vonnegut so amusingly satirizes, a world in which human beings are awfully good at creating doomsday devices (atomic bombs, religions), and lying to themselves.

 

Many have said this is a story about the insanity of the Cold War, but I think it’s a short history of human stupidity. And it is as relevant today as it was when it was first published in 1963. The plot follows a narrator who is writing a book about one of the creators of the atomic bomb and in the process discovers the scientist has also made Ice-9, a substance with the potential to turn all water into solid ice. Why invent such a dangerous thing? Come on, science can’t be held back by such existential worries – it’s progress, baby.

Our world is beset with climate change caused by our technologies. As a species, we’re on the cusp of massive changes that could exceed the pace of evolution – whether from genetic engineering or through fusing our biology with information technology – and this is precisely the kind of book that everyone needs to read.

 

We need to think about what we are doing with our scientific power, not just proceed blindly.

 

Cat’s Cradle is the book that helped me find a way I could be a writer: it’s literary, but it plays with science fictional tropes; it’s funny, but there’s a point to it all. In it he invents a religion, Bokonism, that is both humane and ironic, and that puts the lie to all other human religions. He spoofs geopolitics as easily as he skewers human egocentrism. And he does it all with humour and prose that’s accessible and well crafted. It’s deceptively simple, in fact. You can’t help but be moved, and then you think, “How did he do that?”

The short chapters are perfect for today’s attention-deficit-disordered readers (at least, until we have our concentration chips implanted), so it works as a book that everyone at university could read.

 

Not to mention all the greatideas (foma: a harmless untruth) and kickass existential “Calypso” lyrics from the Book of Bokonon:

 

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself, he understand.

 

I know I'm going to rate a book highly when I highlight/note the book heavily. That was definitely true of this book. Touching on science, technology, religion, and the morality of them all, this book really had a lot going for it, and dealt with all of the themes evenly and seriously, with a good plot behind it. The pace of the book was great. Short chapters. Fast moving. But deep as well. Great book. Vonnegut is fast becoming one of my favorites.

One of the first books I remember being 'required' to read in school (Middle School to be exact) happened to be Slaughterhouse-Five. Looking back, even though I had been reading at a college level since I reached double-digit age, I probably wasn't ready for the subject matter. Come to think of it, I should probably re-read Vonnegut's most famous novel again, from the other end of three decades of my life gone by. The same could be said for Cat's Cradle, if I had read it back then, but I'm reading it for the first time on the downhill side of my life. Published a year before I took my first breath, I get all the cultural references. I am still pondering the ramifications of the 'Truth' of all religions, according to Vonnegut's character (who remained nameless throughout the entire novel). Satire? Irony? Poetic justice? Nihilism? Or some chaotic cohesion of all of them? I found a few gems among the exceptionally short chapters (some less than a page in length): The ambassador's speech before tossing the wreath in honor of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy: 'Think of what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise'; Newt: 'No damn cat, and no damn cradle.'; and Mona: 'I love everyone.'I actually heard Kurt Vonnegut speak during my college years. He came to Wichita State University in the early 80s to give a lecture. I learned about his appearance late (on the same day in fact), so arrived almost too late to get a seat. For some reason, the facility decided to open up seating on the stage, so I sat cross-legged within ten or twenty feet of him to his right. As memorable as my seating arrangements were, I cannot remember anything he said during that lecture, nor even what his topic was. My book collection remained at home in Leavenworth County, so I had nothing to ask him to sign. I sincerely regret that now. I gave Cat's Cradle three stars. I liked it, and it definitely made me think deeply and ponder many questions, but I can't say I really liked it. An interesting read, and it has aged remarkably well.

Once again I can't remember much about this book, but since I believe I got my hands on all of the Cat's Cradle series then I suspect that I must have read it. From a quick glance over some of the other reviews it seems that this was not a particularly popular Doctor Who novel. In fact one person describes is as 'the most blandest book ever to bear the name of Doctor Who' while another says 'this seems to be a book that the author took out of his draw and decided to throw the Doctor and Ace into it so as to make it a Doctor Who book'. Well, with comments like that (and them being near the top of the list of reviews) I feel that I really should not waste too much time commenting on this book.

Having a look over the blurb though, I noticed that it seems to involve fantasy elements. Granted there is probably not much of a problem with that, however I have always considered Doctor Who to be a work of science fiction, which means that everything eventually has an explanation (even if the scientific laws themselves may be fictional). However, a fantasy story generally does not have explanations, things simply happen because that is the way that it happens (no scientific law involved). When dealing with magic most authors do not go into detail as to how magic works (though some set it in a modern setting, such as the Dresden Files, do).

In Doctor Who books that involve magical or fantasy elements there usually is an explanation. The Doctor is a scientist and he simply cannot have unexplained phenomena scaring people, and thus he will begin to investigate the causes of these phenomena, with the story leading to the conclusion where everything is explained. There is also the motives of a mystery novel, in that there is always an explanation at the end, and we, the reader, can leave satisfied in knowing that the mystery has been revealed. I am not trying to use this as the only way to differentiate fantasy from science-fiction (there are no hard and fast rules, and in many cases the science-fiction/fantasy genre is usually one in the same), but it is just something that I have noticed and wanted to spend some time exploring.