The author would have turned 85 this week.
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Ice-nine
The deceptively simple name “Ice-nine” does little to suggest just how dangerous this theoretical substance could be. Serving as a major plot point in Cat’s Cradle, Ice-nine is a form of water that is solid at room temperature. To melt it, you have to heat it up to 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit. That might sound great for that ice sculpture you commissioned for your next birthday, but there’s just one problem: ice-nine is almost a virus of sorts — any regular water it comes into contact with automatically becomes ice-nine itself. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize how bad it would be if somebody accidentally swallowed a chunk of the stuff, or dropped it into the ocean. Indeed, Cat’s Cradle explains that ice-nine was created as a weapon by the Manhattan Project, and leave it to Vonnegut’s darkly brilliant mind to conjure up something even worse than the atom bomb.
Ice-nine’s real-world origins are nearly as interesting as its fictional ones. Apparently the notion of water being a stable solid at room temperature was first suggested by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Irving Langmuir, who at one point pitched it as a story idea to H.G. Wells himself! Neither Wells nor Langmuir ever did anything with the idea, but Vonnegut heard the story while working at General Electric. Vonnegut’s delightfully bleak imagination gave ice-nine its deadly transformative properties, and Cat’s Cradle was off and running. As for Langmuir, he became the inspiration for Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the creator of ice-nine within the story.
‘There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice-nine.’
– Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
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