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1[[quoteright:318:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/cats_cradle_2226.jpg]]
2
3->''"There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, 'Science has now known sin.' And do you know what Father said? He said, 'What is sin?'"''\
4
5->''"No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's..."''\
6
7->''"And?"''\
8
9->''"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."''\
10\
11
12''Cat's Cradle'' is a 1963 novel by Creator/KurtVonnegut. The protagonist, who introduces himself to us in the [[PointOfView first person narration]] as simply "Jonah", real name "John", begins the story intending to write a book about the atomic bomb. In his research, he comes to learn about the family of one of the chief scientists who created it: Dr. Felix Hoenikker. His research also uncovers the possibility that the man went on to create something else that could wipe out all life on Earth.
13
14Some time afterwards, John winds up on the Caribbean island of [[BananaRepublic San Lorenzo]], where he meets all three of Dr. Hoenikker's children, as well as the woman of his dreams. He also learns about the history of the island, and a man known as Bokonon, who has created a strange religion that almost every resident of the nation seems to practice, despite it being outlawed by the country's eccentric military dictatorship.
15
16And then everything goes completely to hell.
17
18[[JustForFun/IThoughtItMeant No relation to a certain]] Music/HarryChapin [[JustForFun/IThoughtItMeant song.]]
19
20----
21!!Tropes in this book include:
22
23* AbsentMindedProfessor / MarriedToTheJob: The only thing that interests Felix Hoenikker is his scientific work. He barely even notices his wife and children. Once, after a breakfast, he gave his wife a tip.
24* AliensInCardiff: Ice-nine is invented in Ilium, NY.
25** There's no such place, but "Ilium" was another name for "Troy", and there is a Troy, NY. Vonnegut used Ilium as a location in a bunch of his novels.
26* AllCrimesAreEqual: The island of San Lorenzo has only one punishment for any crime: death by impalement on a giant hook. Though it's rare that anyone actually gets punished.
27* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: InUniverse. John admits that he can't decide whether Mona's strange aloofness and detachment was a sign of a deep serenity making her "[[WomenAreWiser the highest form of female spirituality]]" or if she was just cold and empty inside.
28* ApocalypseHow: [[spoiler:Planetary-scale, and is implied to cause the eventual extinction of all life on earth (although this is not depicted). Except for ants, that is.]]
29* ArcWords: Bokononism has a lot of them. Website/ThatOtherWiki has a [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_Cradle#Terms_introduced_in_the_novel full list]].
30** "See the cat? See the cradle?"
31* ArtisticLicenseBiology: After [[spoiler: ice-nine is released into the ocean, turning all the seas into ice and destroying the world]], the protagonist sees ants gathering around some ice-nine and melting it with their collective body heat for sustenance. Ants are too cold-blooded to do that, but it makes a nice twist of "life struggles on, at least a little".
32* ArtisticLicenseChemistry: Ice-nine. Formed of ordinary oxygen and hydrogen, it is able to freeze all liquid water that it touches into identical crystals of ice-nine via chain-reaction—eventually freezing all water on Earth. This is impossible in the real world due to the simple state of hydrogen-bonds that form liquid [=H2O=] and ice, preventing any such strange isomer-crystal. There are crystals that can react that way, just not water; the ice-nine crystal is supposed to "teach" any liquid water it comes in contact with to freeze as ice-nine.
33** Scientists have actually found new ways for water molecules to arrange themselves in crystals and have named these forms with the same convention (ice-one, ice-two, etc). So there is an ACTUAL ice-nine at this point, but neither it nor any of the other man-made ice-crystal formations have the apocalyptic features of the one in the book.
34* AuthorTract: Readers of this book will not have a hard time figuring out how Vonnegut feels about the atomic bomb, or about scientific research without giving any consideration to the possible consequences.
35* BananaRepublic: San Lorenzo.
36* BecomingTheMask: This happens to President Earl [=McCabe=]. {{Lampshaded}} by Bokonon in "Between Time and Timbuktu" when Bokonon repeats a line from the beginning of ''Literature/MotherNight'': "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be very careful who we pretend to be."
37* BelievingTheirOwnLies: Bokonon and Earl [=McCabe=], rulers of the fictional Caribbean country San Lorenzo, create a new religion, Bokononism, in order to ease the suffering of the people. To increase the new religion's appeal to the masses by giving them some entertaining drama, [=McCabe=] outlaws its practice upon pain of death (while practicing it in secret), whereupon Bokonon "flees" into the jungle, a "wanted" man. Over time, however, the two men become so habituated to their respective roles in the charade that they go insane and become enemies for real. [[spoiler: Though when "Papa" Monzano (Mc Cabe's successor) dies, he rejects the Christian Last Rites - having declared Christianity the official religion of San Lorenzo -- because "I have always been a Bokononist."]]
38* BenevolentDictator: Bokonon and [=McCabe=]. They divided the country's total income between every adult (which amounted to six dollars each nonetheless...). Also, after being officially banned and every worshipper of his hunted, ''everyone'' is (secretly) still a Bokononist, including Papa Monzano, who made Christianity the state religion.
39* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Monzano commits suicide with a piece of Ice-Nine, freezing his whole body. Later, a plane crashes into his seaside palace, causing his frozen body to fall into the ocean. The Ice-Nine attached to him instantly freezes all of the Earth's seas and freshwater sources, causing storms and tornadoes that wreck havoc across the globe. Everyone on Earth dies, but at least John finds out his final purpose in life.]]
40* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}: Dr. Felix Hoenikker. He was so easily distracted that, at one time, he completely abandoned the development of the atomic bomb to study the skeleton of turtles. His daughter suggested his desperate colleagues to simply remove anything turtle-related from his laboratory, and he'd forget about his fascination with them completely (they did, he did).
41* ChekhovsGun: Played with when it comes to Ice-Nine, as the moment it's mentioned the narrator explains its importance, even though he didn't know it himself at the time.
42* CosmicDeadline: [[spoiler: Deaths only start piling on in the last 12 chapters, and en masse as the world comes to an end. Backstory about how ice-nine is divvied up between the Hoenikkers is filled in very late in the book as well.]]
43* CrapsackWorld: Starts bad, gets worse.
44* DeadpanSnarker: The Castles and Newt Hoenikker.
45* DeathWorld: [[spoiler:After the release of Ice-Nine.]]
46* DepopulationBomb: Ice-Nine instantly freezes any moisture it comes in contact with and turns it into Ice-Nine (including moisture contained within a living body), creating an unstoppable chain reaction. [[spoiler: Some Ice-Nine ends up falling in the ocean.]]
47* DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything: John's reaction to his first Boko-maru with Mona (which is literally just the two of them pressing the soles of their feet together) is a little....orgasmic.
48* DisasterDominoes: A single small plane crashing leads pretty directly to the end of the world.
49* DissonantSerenity: Mona.
50* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler:Angela starts playing a musical instrument she found in the ice, intentionally ignoring the real threat of Ice-Nine on the mouthpiece, which kills her. Mona, after she sees that everything has been or will be destroyed by Ice-Nine. The ending ''very'' strongly implies the state of the world drives the narrator to suicide as well.]]
51%%* TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt
52* [[EvenTheGirlsWantHer Even the Gays Want Her]]: Mona is just that captivating.
53* FantasyCounterpartCulture: San Lorenzo is quite obviously based on RealLife Haiti - their dialectal speech, poverty, tyrannical rule, economy based on sugar, and also by their glimpse of history (San Lorenzo had [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Christophe a mad Emperor]] who built [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadelle_Laferrière a gigantic and useless citadel]]). Though Haiti is also briefly mentioned in the novel.
54* ForegoneConclusion: John converts to Bokononism, [[spoiler:the Mintons die together]], and mentioned later on, [[spoiler:nearly everyone else too.]]
55* ForScience: Dr. Felix Hoenikker's invention of ice-nine. He was conducting basic research and essentially motivated by curiosity, disregarding the potential disaster that his invention could cause.
56* GeniusDitz: Dr. Felix Hoenikker. A scientific genius, he worked on the atom bomb and created ice-nine, but for life outside science his wife looked after him the same as their children.
57* GreyGoo: Ice-nine turns any water it touches into more ice-nine.
58* HowWeGotHere: The events of the book are all one long flashback, and it's revealed near the end that John himself has been writing it for six months.
59* HumansAreBastards: One of the central themes of the book, especially when it comes to the outlandishly cynical philosophies of Bokonon.
60* InMysteriousWays: The Bokononist religion says that all living beings are arranged by God in groups called a ''karass'', arranged around a person or object called a ''wampeter'' (in this case, ice-nine), in order to advance the divine will. The members of a ''karass'' may never even know each other, and their work may overlap in bizarre, coincidental ways, but they work together for a single purpose that they'll probably never know. John thinks he's figured his out by the end of the novel.
61** Bokonon also teaches that one should never decline travel suggestions from strangers, these are said to be God's dance directions.
62** It also teaches that one shouldn't assume a group they've fallen into is a ''karass''. It may well be a ''granfalloon'', a group that ''thinks'' they're joined together by fate but actually aren't.
63* IvyLeagueForEveryone: John's a Cornell alumnus, and Newt flunked out of the university.
64* JustBeforeTheEnd: Having loaded ChekhovsGun with the ice-nine, it was inevitably going to go off in everyone's face.
65* LackOfEmpathy: Dr. Hoenikker's fatal flaw. He simply doesn't care about anything other than sating his curiosity. While this lets him perceive reality without DoubleThink beliefs (the aforementioned Cat's Cradle) and achieve technological marvels by tinkering every moment of his life, he could not see his own family as anything more than curiosities and conveniences, and gave Cold War powers dangerous and controlling technologies because he spared no thought as to what they would do with it. This eventually screws over the world.
66* LensmanArmsRace: The Americans, Soviet Union, and San Lorenzo all want to be the first to have ice-nine in their arsenal.
67** And by all accounts, they all DO have it by the time the protagonist arrives in San Lorenzo. The story points out the problem with this kind of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrent scenario: sooner or later somebody nuts (or about to die anyway) can get their hands on the {{doomsday device}}. And even if there are advisors and systems dedicated to preventing the doomsday devices from actually being used, all it would take is one unforeseen accident to kick-start the device and initiate the apocalypse.
68* LoveAtFirstSight: The narrator falls in love with Mona before even meeting her, seeing her image in a magazine.
69* MikeNelsonDestroyerOfWorlds: Dr. Hoenikker is completely oblivious to the fact that his puttering around in the lab inventing whatever pops into his head might have undesirable consequences, and if somebody were to point this out to him he seems to lack the ability to understand the seriousness of it or to care.
70%%* MinovskyPhysics
71* MostWritersAreWriters: The main character is a writer. In the beginning he's doing research for a book. He later gets assigned to write an article about San Lorenzo, which necessitates him traveling there.
72* MundaneUtility: As revolutionary (and potentially destructive) as ice-nine is, it was only created so that American soldiers wouldn't have to spend so much time slogging through the mud and getting their boots dirty. [[spoiler: It eventually ends up wiping out all life on Earth. Whoops...]]
73* MyGodWhatHaveIDone: The quote at the top of the page provides an example of at least ''one'' scientist feeling this way. [[LackOfEmpathy Dr. Hoenniker didn't get it]].
74* ObiWanMoment: [[spoiler:Mona]] calmly touches a bit of Ice-Nine to their lips [[spoiler:after discovering that the entire surviving population of San Lorenzo committed a similar form of suicide at Bokonon's direction.]]
75* OhCrap: The three Hoenikker siblings upon being shown "Papa" Monzano's Ice-Nine infected corpse. Newt goes one better and throws up.
76* ParentalNeglect: Felix Hoenniker hardly ever showed any interest in his children. They were raised by their mother, and after her death, the oldest child, Angela.
77* PosthumousCharacter: Felix Hoenniker and to a lesser extent Earl [=McCabe=].
78* PromotionToParent: Angela Hoenniker has to take care of her two brothers and, to an extent, her father after her mother dies.
79* SacredScripture: The ''Books of Bokonon'', which start with the handy warning: "All of the true facts I am about to tell you are shameless lies".
80* ScienceIsBad: Or at least, science for its own sake is bad, because it doesn't know or really care about the consequences of what it creates.
81* SelfDeprecation: This exchange between John and Phillip Castle:
82-->"I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."\
83"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?"\
84"I'll accept that. Guilty as charged."
85* SelfProclaimedLiar: The first thing written in the books of Bokonon is that it's all made up. This doesn't stop it being a workable religion.
86* ShortLivedLeadership: John becomes the new President of San Lorenzo for at most a few hours before the world ends.
87* SpoilerCover: As seen above, though the earlier hardback versions tended to be better about it, often showing, yes, a cat's cradle.
88* StealthPun: Boko-maru, the only real ritual of the Bokononists, is described as a meeting of '''souls'''. It is performed by having the two participants remove their footwear, and then press the '''soles''' of their feet together.
89* TogetherInDeath: [[spoiler: Horlick and Claire Minton]] die in this way.
90* TooDumbToLive: The ''entire human race''. From the beginning, we get the sense that humans are stupidly rushing themselves toward destruction and that it's just a question of how and when it happens.
91* TropicalIslandAdventure: The novel is set on a fictional tropical island in the Caribbean.
92* TrueCompanions: See InMysteriousWays.
93* UnwittingInstigatorOfDoom:
94** "Papa" Monzano, twice. The first time [[spoiler: when he commits suicide by swallowing the ice-nine, dramatically raising the risk of it getting into the world's water supply]], and the second time [[spoiler: when the ceremony arranged by him prior to his death results in an airplane crashing into his home and sending his ice-nine-infected corpse tumbling into the sea.]]
95** Also the unnamed US military officer who got Dr. Hoennikker interested in the idea of Ice-Nine in the first place.
96* UnwittingPawn: Newt and Angela both get played like violins in the back-story by [[spoiler: agents of the U.S. and Soviet governments]] looking to get control of some Ice-Nine.
97* VillainSong: The serial killer George Minor Moakely wrote and performed a song at his execution in 1782 about how he killed twenty-six people and didn't feel a shred of remorse about it. The lyrics can be found over at the Historical Society.
98* WhatDoesSheSeeInHim: People don't understand why Emily Hoenikker, who was a very beautiful and popular woman, married Felix, who only cared about science and barely noticed her.
99----
100-->''And I would climb to the top of Mount [=McCabe=]\
101 and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow,\
102 and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men\
103 and I would make a statue of myself lying on my back, grinning horribly\

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