Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel about a writer, the children of an atomic scientist, and a speck of ice that can freeze all the water on Earth.
Science fiction
Stories built on an invention or a discovery that does not exist yet, followed through to see what it would do to the people who have it.
Science fiction starts from a single change to the world as it is: a machine, a voyage, a substance, a signal from space. Then it asks what follows. The change can be large or small, but the book has to take it seriously, working out how it would be built, who would pay for it, and what ordinary life would look like afterwards.
Jules Verne gave the form much of its early shape in Paris, in the novels his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel issued as the Voyages extraordinaires. His books spend pages on how a submarine is powered or how a shell could be fired at the moon, because the reader has to believe the trip is possible before the adventure can begin.
Kurt Vonnegut used the same apparatus for a different purpose. In The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle the invented thing, a message carried across the solar system or a crystal that freezes water, is there to show how people behave around power and belief. The inventions are exact and the tone is comic, and the jokes are how the books make their argument.
The science fiction we recommend
Kurt Vonnegut's second novel: the richest man in America is sent to Mars, Mercury and a moon of Saturn, and finds out why.
An American club of cannon-makers with no war left to fight decides to fire a shell at the Moon, and a Frenchman telegraphs from Paris to ask for a seat inside it.
A Hamburg professor decodes a medieval cipher, drags his nephew to Iceland and climbs down an extinct volcano to see what is underneath.
Five Northerners escape the American Civil War in a stolen balloon, fall onto an unknown island, and rebuild an industrial country there from nothing.
A Paris museum professor is taken prisoner aboard an electric submarine and spends ten months crossing the world's oceans with the man who built it.
Other styles on the shelf
Newsletter
One remarkable science fiction pick, when it earns it.
The Friday letter explains one book at a time — what style it works in, why that matters, and where to go next.