Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut sees the future in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, and not only is it scarier than we might imagine, it is comically much, much crazier. In brief, pungent chapters, he describes a world racing toward apocalypse, courtesy of a deadly discovery made by a brilliant scientist—a matter called "ice-nine"—that becomes the secret weapon of his three incredibly dysfunctional adult children. Along the way, the reader becomes acquainted with an outlawed religion called Bokononism, a Caribbean banana