Cat's Cradle.

Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical masterpiece, a darkly comic novel that follows a writer researching Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, and stumbling into the story of ice-nine, a substance capable of freezing all the water on earth and ending life itself. Interweaving the invented Caribbean religion of Bokononism and the doomed island of San Lorenzo, the book is a mordant meditation on science, religion, and humanity’s capacity for self-destruction in the nuclear age. Published in 1963, it became one of the defining works of American countercultural literature and secured Vonnegut’s reputation; the University of Chicago later accepted it in place of the master’s thesis in anthropology it had once denied him. It remains among his most beloved and widely read novels.