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This 127 chapter novel is the story of Hoenikker family and the ultimate destruction
of the world. Felix Hoenikker is the man responsible for creating the doomsday device known as \"Ice-9.\" The Ice-9 is unique in that it freezes water at a much higher temperature. After his death, the children go their seperate ways only to wind up on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo when Frank Hoenikker gives Ice-9 to San Lorenzo\'s dictator, Papa Monzano. Tragedy strikes when Papa Manzono accidently ingests the Ice-9 and turns himself into human icicle. Matters complicate further when Papa\'s dead body accidently tumbles down a great hill and into the sea, thus freezing all water in the world and killing nearly everyone. The narrator John, who is to marry Papa\'s daughter Mona, is one of the few to survive along with the contraversial religeous figure Bokonon. Bokonon proclaims to John that Ice-9 is God\'s final practical joke whereupon the novel ends with this quote from Bokonon:
\"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity...
I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumb my nose at You Know Who.\"
In this novel Vonnegut makes a very cynical evaluation of the world and its possibility for human-assisted apocalypse and our inability to do anything about it.
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