F13 Book Club Week One-Two: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

[lamaros]

Edit: I'm reformed. 

[Phildo]

The jaggies on snow catch on to things and let go a lot more reluctantly than sand does.  Anyway, it's silly to consider going out in anything less than a hazardous environment suit.  If the wind changes and the tiniest bit gets inside your hood then you're dead, so you'd better bundle up, yes?

[lamaros]

But sand can be so fine is sneaks inside those tiny gaps! It's probably safest to go about inside a bubble, and more fun too; just roll everywhere.

[Phildo]

Hamster Wheel... of the FUTURE! 

[NowhereMan]

It's interesting that you can call something like Bokononism as being concerned with both "everyday concerns" and "high ideals". For while it does talk about literal life it goes about it in an abstract way. This same point extends to Religion: "Love thy neighbour" is both an ideal and a literal command.

I don't think this is a contradiction nor results in meaningless. It's more of an aspirational edict. If you play that against Ice-9 what you are shown is the distinct lack of direction in that particular scientific aspiration. It is not aspiring to a goal, just aspiring to creation.

But then, if Bokonon himself wants to celebrate thumbing our noses at 'God', what better way to do it than to desire to create?

I think the meaningless I saw between Bokononism is that even though it talks about God and creation and the way we relate to each other in His grand plan, it all boils down to that plan being unknowable and any attempt to explain it being doomed to being little better than lies. It makes high ideals and systems of thought meaningless because they will always be wrong, it puts forward its own but at the same time explicitly states that even if you want to follow it, it's wrong. Bokononists like the narrator just smirk at everyone else for thinking they can understand the world while putting forward their own interpretation that they happily admit is just lies itself. I suppose there's a comparison with Buddhist doctrines that teachings need not be true in order to be useful in helping one achieve Nirvana. The difference being in Bokononism there's no end goal, it's just living your everyday life, whatever helps you through for now. Thus Bokonon hasn't got a problem telling everyone to kill themselves because he's got nothing else helpful to tell them, they're screwed.

You're right though that Ice-9 shows a total lack of direction in the science, which I guess was part of what I meant when saying it didn't have anything to do with the practical world. The director revelled in the fact that pure science didn't have direction, that it was aimed at coming up with new things that noone else could have imagined previously but purposely avoids the issue of what the consequences of this could be.

[bhodi]

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!

Yeah, I'm a slacker. I just finished this; I read this one after Canticle. It was my first exposure to Vonnegut; I wasn't sure what I was in for, but I sure didn't expect this.

I did enjoy it; It's definitely black humor... of a sort. I think the deconstruction has been handled pretty effectively, so I don't have anything to say about that.

Arguing about retarded make-believe science and imaginary creations? OH HELL YEAH. Maybe some of you know that I'm a sucker for disaster theories and doomsday scenarios and try and work out the science behind them. This one's a goodie.

Look; Ice-9 should have been instantly fatal when it was created. Depending on contamination properties, it would have transformed all moisture in the air into a particulate cloud of Ice-9 (moisture in the air is simply small particles of liquid water, and normal moisture ). I don't think I need to spell out what this would mean. Pretty much instant death, everywhere. Propogation rates are at the rate of convection for air, and probably somewhere around the speed of sound for water. This means that within a few hours, it would have made a full lap around the planet.

If for some reason there was a smallest possible size at which ice-9 could spread, a quanta that was larger than the water droplets suspended in air, we're all dead anyway. It's in all the world's oceans, there would be huge climate changes as accurately described in the book; massive dust storms, clouds of the stuff would be everywhere. I'd imagine the relative humidity would drop sharply. You breathe in the dust, you die. There is plenty of water in the throat and lungs. You touch it with your bare skin, you die. Sweat. Remember that we are "bags of mostly water".