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Why Fahrenheit 451 is the Book for Our Social Media Age

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Why Fahrenheit 451 is the Book for Our Social Media Age

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Why ‘Fahrenheit 451’ Is the Book for Our Social Media Age (Published 2018)

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Ray Bradbury believed that serious thought was under threat from television and mass media. Ramin Bahrani, who adapted Bradbury’s novel for film, says it’s more relevant than ever.

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This Designer Built Some Of The Crazy Tech From “Brave New World”

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This Designer Built Some Of The Crazy Tech From “Brave New World”

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What would it be like to experience music through smell? In Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1931 novel Brave New World, the writer imagined such a device: a "synesthetic instrument" that he called a "scent organ." At New York's Panorama Festival, the New York-based artist and experience designer Emilie Baltz brought Huxley's vision to life in her installation The Dream Machine -with a twist.

"Huxley is looking at how do we experience the future, and he invents all of these magical things," Baltz says in a video about The Dream Machine. "One of them is a scent organ, where you can play and there are arpeggios of thyme and cinnamon and lemon, and then disgusting flavors as well. I read that, and thought, oh! We're in the same place now in culture."

The scent organ is one of several types of high-tech entertainment in Brave New World, meant to give pleasure, numb pain, and squash any sentiment against the status quo. The organ, Huxley writes, plays:

"...a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio-rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and new mown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord-a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began."

Baltz's version of Huxley's scent organ has brass horns mounted around the edge of a pentagonal platform. While Huxley's vision was simply a passive instrument, Baltz's is more interactive. In front of each horn is a bicycle pump that produces a sound, a smell, and a light display all representing an emotion. For "contentment," the sound of cow bells accompanies woody, musky smells with mahogany-colored light. "Disgust," appropriately, smells like bodily fluids with a backdrop of fart noises and brown light. For "liking," there's a vanilla smell with a tinkling sound and yellow lights.

The sounds are produced by a combination of a French horn and a trombone-when people push down on the bicycle pumps, they quite literally pump scented air through the instruments. A pressure sensor then translates the force of their pumping into a sound and light show. In order for it to work, both human and machine have to work together.

When they're all pumped in unison, the installation releases a jet of fog and triggers music from the surrounding speakers that turns the room into the perfect stage for a dance party.

"In the context of the Panorama Festival, this my ode to a vision of the future of experience where feelings are fun, the whole spectrum of human emotion is embodied, and we can play with it as a collective-regardless of race, background, gender, class, or skill," Baltz tells Co.Design in an email. The Dream Machine was part of The Lab, where New York artists displayed installations using technology as part of the Panorama Festival. Next, it'll be on display at the New York coworking space New Lab, and Baltz hopes to take it on tour.

"A lot of the dreams that [Huxley] had 100 years ago are actually coming true now," she says. "We can make them. The Dream Machine is my dream of how I wish humans to act in the future-through all their senses, by playing together."

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This Designer Built Some Of The Crazy Tech From "Brave New World"

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What would it be like to experience music through smell? In Aldous Huxley's dystopian 1931 novel Brave New World, the writer imagined such a device: a "synesthetic instrument" that he called a "scent organ." At New York's Panorama Festival, the New York-based artist and experience designer Emilie Baltz brought Huxley's vision to life in her installation The Dream Machine -with a twist.

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Is The Handmaid's Tale a representative example of Canadian literature, a feminist novel, a bleak look at a possible conservative and fundamentalist future, or a criticism of humanity's violent and oppressive tendencies? As it turns out, the novel might fit all of these descriptors.

Canadian Literature

Atwood grew up within a Canadian culture that struggled for an identity of its own. Of her childhood, she writes in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature about being caught between U.S. and British culture: "At school we were being taught to sing 'Rule, Britannia' and to draw the Union Jack; after hours we read stacks of Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, and Batman comic books." Over time, Atwood developed a theory that most Canadian literature has two underlying themes-victimhood and survival-that make it distinct from both U.S. and British literatures.

While The Handmaid's Tale is distinctly Canadian in its examination of one woman's victimhood and survival, it is also a novel that speaks to the author's cross-cultural identity. The novel is dedicated to Mary Webster, about whom Atwood also wrote the poem "Half-Hanged Mary." Webster, an American Puritan ancestor of Atwood's, was tried and hanged as a witch, but survived and lived another 11 years. Webster, like Offred, was victimized by authoritarian male figures, yet she, too, survived this British-American brand of oppression. In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood offers Canada as a refuge for those who would flee Gilead and its oppression.

Feminism

Although feminists generally respect her work, Atwood maintains that she did not set out to write feminist literature and does not consider herself a feminist-she simply draws ideas from real life. If women suffer in her stories, it is because they suffer in the real world. Although the novel takes place in the future (circa 2015-2045), Atwood insists that she limits the events of Gilead to real events from world history that are technologically possible. While these actions and technologies may take on slightly different forms and applications in the novel, they are strictly based on real elements already present in human history and society.

Despite Atwood's dislike of the label, feminism and debates within the feminist movement play a central role in The Handmaid's Tale. For example, feminist views on marriage differ. Some feminists believe that marriage is a patriarchal institution that is inherently misogynistic. Others believe that the nature of marriage is evolving into a relationship of equals. In the novel, Offred's marriage to Luke is based on love and shared responsibility for the care of their family. Yet their marriage suffers when Offred loses her job and her income and thus her power to be an equally contributing partner or self-sufficient, if need be. In contrast, in Gilead, marriage has been reformed to stand on unquestioned and clearly defined patriarchal roles, even if the institution now lacks love and romance. The conflicting feminist views represented in the novel suggest that social reforms intended to protect some of the concerns of women often come at the unintended cost of other freedoms.

Conservatism and Religious Fundamentalism

The basis of Christian religious fundamentalism is the belief that the Bible is the word of God and that the Bible should be read and followed literally. Beginning in the 1920s, fundamentalists avoided the political arena as a place of un-Christian impurity. However, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a small but vocal percentage of fundamentalists known as the Christian Right became interested in the idea of rebuilding the United States as a Christian theocracy. This movement was a response to changes in U.S. culture that fundamentalists viewed as direct threats to biblical practice, such as the civil rights and women's movements. This shift was the beginning of a social trend toward conservatism that was supported by Ronald Reagan's rise to the presidency in the United States (1981) and Margaret Thatcher's rise to prime minister in Great Britain (1979). Feminists became worried that important gains would be lost in this new political climate. In The Handmaid's Tale, written right after Reagan's election, it is just such a group of religious fundamentalists who have overthrown the U.S. democratic government and replaced it with a theocracy. Atwood shines a harsh light on the hypocrisy of these fundamentalists, who manipulate biblical text for their own selfish political gains.

Dystopian Fiction

While a utopia is a perfect society, a dystopia is its opposite-a deeply flawed, even nightmarish, society. Dystopian novels, such as The Handmaid's Tale, frequently depict a future in which social or political structures established to form a utopian society are revealed to be oppressive. These novels often provide criticism of real governments, laws, and social norms by removing them from their real-life contexts and making them more extreme. In this case, Atwood posits the question, how could someone take over the United States?

Atwood developed a taste for dystopian literature by reading 1984 (George Orwell, 1949), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932), and Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953). The Handmaid's Tale shows the influences of these novels: the idea of surveillance from 1984, the eradication of individuality and government-controlled procreation from Brave New World, and the power of language from Fahrenheit 451.

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The Handmaid's Tale Context | Course Hero

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Is The Handmaid's Tale a representative example of Canadian literature, a feminist novel, a bleak look at a possible conservative and fundamentalist future, or a criticism of humanity's violent and oppressive tendencies? As it turns out, the novel might fit all of these descriptors.

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Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939. She published her first book of poetry in 1961 while attending the University of Toronto. She later received degrees from both Radcliffe College and Harvard University, and pursued a career in teaching at the university level. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969 to wide acclaim. Atwood continued teaching as her literary career blossomed. She has lectured widely and has served as a writer-in--residence at colleges ranging from the University of Toronto to Macquarie University in Australia.

Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin and Alabama in the mid-1980s. The novel, published in 1986, quickly became a best-seller. The Handmaid's Tale falls squarely within the twentieth-century tradition of anti-utopian, or "dystopian" novels, exemplified by classics like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. Novels in this genre present imagined worlds and societies that are not ideals, but instead are terrifying or restrictive. Atwood's novel offers a strongly feminist vision of dystopia. She wrote it shortly after the elections of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, during a period of conservative revival in the West partly fueled by a strong, well-organized movement of religious conservatives who criticized what they perceived as the excesses of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s. The growing power of this "religious right" heightened feminist fears that the gains women had made in previous decades would be reversed.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood explores the consequences of a reversal of women's rights. In the novel's nightmare world of Gilead, a group of conservative religious extremists has taken power and turned the sexual revolution on its head. Feminists argued for liberation from traditional gender roles, but Gilead is a society founded on a "return to traditional values" and gender roles, and on the subjugation of women by men. What feminists considered the great triumphs of the 1970s-namely, widespread access to contraception, the legalization of abortion, and the increasing political influence of female voters-have all been undone. Women in Gilead are not only forbidden to vote, they are forbidden to read or write. Atwood's novel also paints a picture of a world undone by pollution and infertility, reflecting 1980s fears about declining birthrates, the dangers of nuclear power, and -environmental degradation.

Some of the novel's concerns seem dated today, and its implicit condemnation of the political goals of America's religious conservatives has been criticized as unfair and overly paranoid. Nonetheless, The Handmaid's Tale remains one of the most powerful recent portrayals of a totalitarian society, and one of the few dystopian novels to examine in detail the intersection of politics and sexuality. The novel's exploration of the controversial politics of reproduction seems likely to guarantee Atwood's novel a readership well into the twenty-first century.

Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and their daughter, Jess. Her most recent novel, The Blind Assassin, won Great Britain's Booker Prize for literature in 2000.

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Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18, 1939. She published her first book of poetry in 1961 while attending the University of Toronto. She later received degrees from both Radcliffe College and Harvard University, and pursued a career in teaching at the university level.

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In the fourth episode of "The Handmaid's Tale," the gripping new Hulu adaption of Margaret Atwood's novel, Offred, our narrator and heroine, goes to the gynecologist. She lies on an examining table, her lower body, and the male doctor poking at it, concealed from her view by a gauzy white curtain. Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, is a handmaid in Gilead, the brutally repressive patriarchy that has subsumed the place formerly known as the United States, and a handmaid's job is to reproduce; she is "a womb on two legs," solemnly raped once a month by her Commander, Fred (Joseph Fiennes), as she lies rigid in the lap of his "barren" wife. At least the official explanation is that she's barren. The nation's plummeting birth rates are blamed on its women. Offred's doctor has a different idea. The Commander is probably sterile, he says. Most high-ranking men in Gilead are. "Sterile. That's a forbidden word," Offred thinks. For a woman, to speak it could mean death.

As in the Oceania of George Orwell's "1984"-as in all authoritarian regimes, and those that would emulate them-language, in Gilead, is a weapon of the state. Handmaids are the chattel "of" their commanders in name as well as fact, and are forbidden from reading or writing on pain of losing a hand. Undesirable words, like undesirable people, are made to disappear by the government; even "hello" and "goodbye" have been replaced by the creepy pieties "Under His eye" and "Blessed be the fruit." When the Commander breaks the law to ask Offred to see him alone in his office, she thinks that he is after a blow job. What he actually wants is to play Scrabble, and as Offred moves her hands over the contraband tiles you can almost see her brain, dull from neglect, light up with happiness.

I thought of these scenes when I read that another word has apparently been struck from the vocabulary of " The Handmaid's Tale": feminism. Last week, at a panel discussion at the Tribeca Film Festival, members of the cast were asked whether they considered the show to be feminist. As Laura Bradley reported for Vanity Fair_,_ the answers came in various shades of "hell, no." Madeline Brewer, who plays Janine, a handmaid subjected to particularly grotesque abuse-when she scoffs at the new regime's restrictions on women, her right eye is plucked out-replied that "any story that's just a powerful woman owning herself in any way is automatically deemed 'feminist,' " and said that the show is "just a story about a woman," not "feminist propaganda." Ann Dowd, terrific and terrifying as the Trunchbullesque Aunt Lydia, one of an army of potato-sack-clad matrons who indoctrinate the handmaids with the help of a cattle prod, felt comfortable enough to call on viewers inspired by the show to picket the White House, but not to use the F-word, which she dodged. Weirder still was Elisabeth Moss, who said that Offred's tale, like that of her character Peggy Olson, on "Mad Men," is "a human story because women's rights are human rights." This is as clear and succinct a definition of feminism as any-Hillary Clinton famously used it in her 1995 speech at the U.N.'s World Congress on Women, in Beijing-except that Moss, too, insisted that "The Handmaid's Tale" is "not a feminist story."

All this smacks of some Gilead-style prohibition. Had the cast members been explicitly instructed to distance themselves from the feminism label, maybe for marketing purposes? That seems improbable, considering that in our age of pussy-grabbing Presidents and pussyhats, the word has been rehabilitated from its commercially toxic status and spun into marketing gold. You can find the phrase "feminist as fuck" emblazoned on everything from hoodies to hoop earrings; Dior is selling T-shirts printed with the sentence "We should all be feminists," after the title of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's TEDx Talk turned book, for a cool seven hundred and ten dollars each. (Proceeds go to charity: Rihanna's.) Then there are companies, such as the embattled Thinx, peddler of period-absorbent underwear, that proudly brand themselves feminist even as their business practices suggest otherwise. We have corporate feminism, consumer feminism, life-style feminism. In current adspeak, a feminist is someone who buys bras, not burns them.

It seems more likely that the example is being set by Atwood herself. "The Handmaid's Tale" has been hailed as a feminist work since its publication, in 1985, and that characterization has never been a liability; as my colleague Rebecca Mead wrote in her recent Profile of Atwood, the book, a staple of high-school curricula, has sold "so many millions of copies that Atwood considers them uncountable." But Atwood told Mead that she has an aversion to the term "feminist," which she felt was used in the nineteen-seventies by women who identified with it to call women like her, who liked wearing lipstick and dresses, "a traitor to your sex." In a recent Times article, Atwood again bristled at the word: "When you say 'feminist' do you mean: Should women have the same rights as other human beings? Then, yes. But what else do we mean by that term? Do we mean women are angelically more perfect than men? Well, no. Women are human beings."

I take Atwood's point. The term is elastic, changing with the ethos and the demands of the given era and the individual living in it. I doubt that any two people have exactly the same definition, and for Atwood, as Mead writes, precision is paramount.

Still, echoed by the cast of "The Handmaid's Tale," the disavowal amounts to a deeply strange evasion of the themes that animate the book and the show. Women's rights are indeed human rights. But the ways in which women are deprived of those rights-in Atwood's fiction, and in the reality, past and present, that she bases it on-are unique. It seems oddly rudimentary to point out that "The Handmaid's Tale" is not just a "story about a woman," as Brewer had it, or just "a survival story," as the showrunner, Bruce Miller, told the Times. ("I don't feel like it's a male or a female story," he said, amazingly; at the same time, he and Moss, a producer on the show, had the good sense to make sure to hire female directors for a majority of episodes.) It is a story about the ways in which women are oppressed in a society run by men for their own benefit (no one involved seems to have a problem with the word "patriarchy"), and about how certain women take advantage of the situation to ally themselves with male power for personal gain.

It's also full of warnings about the danger that comes from failing to recognize that such oppression is categorical, and gendered. In one of the show's many flashback scenes to the pre-Gilead U.S., a country that looks, disconcertingly, just like ours, Offred-still called by her real name, June-and her best friend, Moira (Samira Wiley, of "Orange Is the New Black") find that their bank accounts have been frozen. The government has seized the assets of all its female citizens. The women are perplexed, and pissed. "They can't do this!" they say. But it still feels like a personal grievance, one of the familiar irritations of modern life: the card that doesn't work, the order that gets lost, the password that needs to be reset, all fixable with a call to customer service. June is on hold with her bank when the coup begins.

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In the fourth episode of "The Handmaid's Tale," the gripping new Hulu adaption of Margaret Atwood's novel, Offred, our narrator and heroine, goes to the gynecologist. She lies on an examining table, her lower body, and the male doctor poking at it, concealed from her view by a gauzy white curtain.

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We should all be feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | TEDxEuston

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Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship

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Context Is All: Feminism and Theories of Citizenship

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Margaret Atwood: Feminism is not about believing women are always right

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Margaret Atwood: Feminism is not about believing women are always right

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Margaret Atwood has argued feminism is not defined as the assumption women are always right regardless of the context.

The Canadian novelist, who eschews the feminist label for own books, said feminism has dissolved into a catch-all term used to denote myriad definitions.

Atwood did not say which wave or offshoot of the feminist movement she was referring to but argued one brand of feminism was defined as thinking women are "better" than men.

During an interview with Emma Watson for Entertainment Weekly, Atwood was asked about whether she was "bored" of the frequent conversations about whether the Handmaid's Tale is a feminist book.

The Harry Potter actor asked: "Are you bored of the "Are you a feminist" question? You must have been asked that a lot whilst talking about the new TV show."

"I'm not bored with it, but we have to realise it's become one of those general terms that can mean a whole bunch of different things," Atwood replied. "So I usually say, 'Tell me what you mean by that word and then we can talk.'"

"If people can't tell me what they mean, then they don't really have an idea in their heads of what they're talking about. So do we mean equal legal rights?"

"Do we mean women are better than men? Do we mean all men should be pushed off a cliff? What do we mean? Because that word has meant all of those different things."

Much discussion of the Handmaid's Tale has centred on whether or not it is a feminist book. Women have found new relevance in the 1985 novel which recently returned to the bestseller list. This is a renaissance brought to life by both Hulu's upcoming adaptation and its arguable similarities to President Donald Trump's misogynistic political agenda.

In June, women staged a protest against a proposed ban on Ohio's most common abortion procedure while dressed in character from the dystopian novel. They wore red capes and white bonnets to resemble the costumes worn in a new TV series based on Atwood's novel in which women are forced to give birth.

Atwood went on to compare the factionalism of feminism to different branches of Christianity, saying: "It's like Christians. Do we mean the Pope? Do we mean Mormons? What are we talking about here? Because they're quite different."

The author, who has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, then made it clear that she aligned herself with notions of feminism founded on equality but did not specify any further about which part of the movement she meant.

"So, if we mean, should women as citizens have equal rights, I'm all for it and a number of advances have been made in my lifetime regarding property rights and divorce and custody of children and all of those things," Atwood said. "But do we mean, are women always right? Give me a break! I'm sorry, but no! Theresa May is a woman, for heaven's sakes!"

Despite the fact Atwood frequently depicts female characters dominated by patriarchy in her books, she has denied the notion The Edible Woman, which was published in 1969 and coincided with the early second wave of the feminist movement, is a feminist title, claiming she wrote it four years before the movement.

The author has argued the feminist label can only be given to writers who willfully and consciously work within the context of the movement.

She has been similarly reluctant to label the Handmaid's Tale as a feminist title, saying she does not perceive the Republic of Gilead to be a solely feminist dystopia because not all men have greater rights than women. Atwood has claimed while some of the observations that informed The Handmaid's Tale may be feminist, her novel is not intended to convey "one thing to one person" or serve as a political message, on the contrary The Handmaid's Tale is "a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime".

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Feminism is not about believing women are always right, says Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood has argued feminism is not defined as the assumption women are always right regardless of the context. The Canadian novelist, who eschews the feminist label for own books, said feminism has dissolved into a catch-all term used to denote myriad definitions.

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Dystopian fantasy? The Handmaid's Tale is based entirely upon real history

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Dystopian fantasy? The Handmaid's Tale is based entirely upon real history

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In Genesis 30, Jacob has two wives, Rachel and Leah. When Rachel cannot bear a child, she orders Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah. The relevant passage - "And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her" - is recited as part of the 'ceremony' in The Handmaid's Tale, in which the man ritually rapes the handmaid in his wife's presence.

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Dystopian fantasy? The Handmaid's Tale is based entirely on real history - BBC Three

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In Genesis 30, Jacob has two wives, Rachel and Leah. When Rachel cannot bear a child, she orders Jacob to impregnate her maid, Bilhah.

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Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel about a society with a plummeting birth rate, in 1984. In the book, a totalitarian American regime strips women of their rights and forces those who are fertile to become "handmaids" to bear children for wealthy men and their barren wives.

Atwood challenged herself to only include events in the book that had happened in history. The result was a tale about the future that can, at turns, feel all too contemporary. The story includes an environmental crisis, restrictions on abortion, marches for women's rights and Americans fleeing to Canada.

When Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss signed on to play the lead Offred in the Hulu adaptation of the landmark novel, most pundits predicted Hillary Clinton would be president. But just months after filming the show, Trump won the election and protesters at the Women's March carried signs that read, "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again" and a Latin line from Handmaid's, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum " ("Don't let the bastards grind you down").

The book is back on top of the bestseller lists and the show, which premieres April 26 on the streaming service, is "accidentally the most prescient story on TV," says Moss. The novelist and the actor sat down with TIME to discuss The Handmaid's Tale's newfound relevance, how they define feminism and the joys and ills of social media, from Peggy Olson memes to slut-shaming.

TIME: Why this show now?
Elisabeth Moss: I get asked a lot whether the show is in response to the election, but we were filming beforehand.

Margaret Atwood: The control of women and babies has been a part of every repressive regime in history. This has been happening all along. I don't take it lightly when a politician says something like a pregnancy can't result from a rape because a woman's body knows it and rejects it. There's an undercurrent of this [type of thinking]. And then it rises to the surface sometimes. But The Handmaid's Tale is always relevant, just in different ways in different political contexts. Not that much has changed.

Moss: When we first met, we were in a very loud restaurant, so I was sort of leaning over the table trying desperately to hear all of your answers. But you said that the kernel of the idea was how you would control women by shutting down their bank accounts.

Atwood: Also it was, If America were going to do a totalitarian government, what kind of totalitarian government would it be? It wouldn't be communism. No surprises there. I thought it would have to be some sort of theocracy, like the 17th century in the U.S. I was always very interested in the Salem witch trials, another instance of controlling women.

Moss: We touch on this more in the show than in the book, but even though things are bad for the handmaids, the government has improved some things. There are more babies being born, the air is cleaner.

Atwood: A character in the book says, "Better never means better for everyone."

Moss: You've said a lot, and I've repeated often, that everything that happened in The Handmaid's Tale has happened.

Atwood: Somewhere at some time. I made nothing up.

Moss: And now we're at a time when our climate is what it is in America and in the world. Do you still feel this could happen?

Atwood: Even more so. When I first published the book, some people did the "it could never happen here" thing. "We're so far along with women's rights that we can't go back." I don't hear that much anymore.

Moss: I know. One of the things when we first started talking about making the show was whether this was something that could be plausible. I love it, but is this something the public is going to buy into? And then unfortunately, six months later, it became a hell of a lot more plausible.
TIME: There are some differences between the show and the book. Why did you add more nonwhite, nonstraight characters?
Atwood: We're taking off from now rather than 1984, and there are more multiracial couples now. In the book I had them being so segregationist, they were just separating everybody and shipping them off the way the Nazis did.

In the show, it's different. So just as we have cell phones in the plot now, we have to update other things. Although I was setting it in the future when I was writing it, I didn't know anything about the future. I wrote that thing on an old typewriter in Berlin. We didn't even have personal computers yet.

Moss: We wanted the show to be very relatable. We wanted people to see themselves in it. If you're going to do that, you have to show all types of people. You have to reflect current society.

A question I get asked a lot in interviews: Do you gravitate toward feminist roles? This is a question I struggle to answer because I don't necessarily feel like they are feminist roles. I feel like they're interesting women. The Handmaid's Tale is considered one of the great feminist novels. I actually consider it a human novel about human rights, not just women's rights.

Atwood: Well, women's rights are human rights unless you have decided that women aren't human. So those are your choices. If women are human, then women's rights are part of human rights.

Moss: Exactly.

Atwood: When we use that word, feminism, I always want to know: What do you mean by it? What are we talking about? If the person can describe what they mean by the word, then we can talk about whether I am one of those or not.

Moss: I find myself getting slightly tripped up because I am a feminist, and I'm not ashamed of it. But that's not why I chose this role. I did it because it's a complex character.

Atwood: If it were only a feminist book, you would think, in that case, all the women are over here on the low side, and all the men are over here on the high side. But it's more like the way human societies actually arrange themselves, which means some powerful people at the top. The women connected to those people have more power than the men connected to the bottom rank.

Moss: The commanders' wives have more power than the male servants.

Atwood: You betcha. And Queen Elizabeth I had more power than Joe the peasant.
(Interview continues below)

Moss: What is the book ultimately about for you?

Atwood: I think it's about a totalitarian society in America the way it would likely be-except maybe the outfits.

Moss: Well, time will tell about the outfits.

Atwood: We're heading into a situation in which health coverage is going to be removed for pregnancy and childbirth. At the same time, you're going to force women to have babies by making it so they can't get abortions. That's like being drafted into the army. Except at least in the army, you get three square meals a day and a place to sleep. You're not left out on the street. If you're going to take away women's choice and not give them an adequate wage or healthcare, what would you call that? I'd call it a bad deal.

Moss: We're not politicians, but I get asked a lot what's the average women or average person can do to prevent Gilead from happening.

Atwood: Well, they can vote, just to begin with.

Moss: That would help, wouldn't it? Voting helps. Showing up. That's a good first step.
Is it harder to get projects with multiple female leads made?
Moss: I've found that to be an issue. I optioned a book with two women in it and was told multiple times it was "too female." I was like, Are you even allowed to say that?

Atwood: It's not a problem in the world of writing because publishers have this lightbulb over their head that tells them that women read a lot of books. In fact, there was a funny thing that happened a few years ago in which they were girlifying the covers of fiction, including men's fiction.

Moss: Really?

Atwood: You really had to fight off the publishers to keep them from putting flowers on your book.

Moss: What does Margaret Atwood read while she's relaxing?

Atwood: I'm pretty omnivorous. Pop science-something where somebody else tells me the result with usually, I hope, lovely colored illustrations. Show me the pictures and tell me what you found out. Don't make me actually do the study and kill all those mice.

Everything from there all the way through to sci-fi, spec-fic, regular novels, nonfiction, history, biography and graphic novels. A lot of history, as you might imagine.

TIME: Margaret, you mentioned earlier that you were struck by the fact that Elisabeth filmed without makeup.

Atwood: They wanted you to look sort of tired and baggy.

Moss: The worse, the better!

Atwood: Bruce Miller, who is the showrunner and chief writer, he said he felt that it allowed the acting to be more direct and because every little twitch and twinge was visible. There wasn't anything between you and the camera.

Moss: Absolutely. And same with if I went paler or if I flushed or if I was cold, you could really see it. And we also did very, very close shots.

Atwood: So in a situation in which someone is not supposed to be registering seething rage, for instance, you can see your character is trying to keep a straight face. But you can see the tension.
Margaret, you're very active on Twitter. Elisabeth, you're not on Twitter at all. What do you make of the sometimes toxic nature of social media, including slut-shaming?
Atwood: I am on Twitter, but I'm too old to attract slut-shaming. I hate to break this to you, but I don't think anyone's interested in me.

Moss: [ Sarcastically] What a shame. That's too bad. I'm so sorry about that.

Atwood: Right? There are pluses and minuses of getting older. The closer you come to being dead, such as myself, the less likely you are to attract such things. Young women with some power are particularly subject to it, because it's also a love-hate-love-hate thing. This is an attractive person whom I'm never going to have a date with, so I hate them. Don't you think?

Moss: It's similar to a scene in the show: a woman reveals that she was the victim of rape, and she's told, "You brought this upon yourself. You deserve this."

You go out in a sexy dress on the red carpet, so now we're allowed to say whatever we want about you. But that's not O.K.

Atwood: That's always been the case. If you go back to the 19th century, it was opera stars and female theater stars who attracted this kind of thing. It's not new. It just gets amplified.
Speaking of social media, Elisabeth, an image of your character Peggy from the end of Mad Men became a feminist meme. Do you think that will happen with The Handmaid's Tale?
Atwood: Why did that become a meme for feminism? Because of smoking?

Moss: [ Laughing] No. It's her walking into her new job. She leaves this old place after a very long time.

Atwood: It's a brave new world. You've come a long way, baby. Virginia Slims.

Moss: Exactly. She's walking down the hall, and she's carrying a box of her things and wearing sunglasses, doesn't give a sh-t and has made this giant leap because it takes place in the '60s. I'm super-proud to have been part of a moment that people can gain any inspiration from or connect with women's rights.

I can ask the same question of you: Does the fact that I have the nolite te bastardes carborundorum ("Don't let the bastards grind you down") line from the book on my necklace, or the fact that people get it tattooed, is that weird?

Atwood: I'll tell you the weird thing about it: it was a joke in our Latin classes. So this thing from my childhood is permanently on people's bodies.

-

This interview appeared in the April 24 issue of TIME. It has been edited for clarity and context.

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Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel about a society with a plummeting birth rate, in 1984. In the book, a totalitarian American regime strips women of their rights and forces those who are fertile to become "handmaids" to bear children for wealthy men and their barren ...

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Cat’s Cradle: Kurt Vonnegut and Cat’s Cradle Background | SparkNotes

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Important information about Kurt Vonnegut’s background, historical events that influenced Cat’s Cradle, and the main ideas within the work.

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15 Things You Might Not Know About Cat's Cradle

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15 Things You Might Not Know About Cat's Cradle

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Even the most diehard Vonnegut fan may not be familiar with these facts about Cat's Cradle, one of the author's best-known works-and one of the 20th century's most beloved satires.

1. KURT VONNEGUT GOT THE IDEA FOR CAT'S CRADLE WHILE WORKING AT GENERAL ELECTRIC.

A background studying chemistry at Cornell University, mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee, and anthropology at the University of Chicago-not to mention experience working as a journalist for the City News Bureau of Chicago-led a 25-year-old Vonnegut to, of all things, a job in public relations for General Electric in 1947.

Vonnegut spent his time on the clock interviewing the corporation's vast array of scientific minds and, as he put it, "asking them what they were up to" in the hopes of capturing a conversation worthy of the public eye. Vonnegut's collective gatherings ultimately fueled the idea for two of his novels: Player Piano and Cat's Cradle. Like Vonnegut, the narrator of Cat's Cradle is a writer swept up in a story about a scientific discovery.

2. THE NOVEL'S MAIN CHARACTER WAS MODELED AFTER A REAL NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING SCIENTIST.

In Cat's Cradle 's fictional world history, Dr. Felix Hoenikker is a Nobel Prize winner who boasts principal credit for inventing the atomic bomb. Vonnegut invented the character following a particularly rich interaction with Irving Langmuir, a pioneer in atomic theory and himself a Nobel laureate. Vonnegut took special note of Langmuir's absolute ambivalence about the possibility of his research "falling into the wrong hands." The author slipped this trait into the characterization of Hoenikker.

3. VONNEGUT BORROWED SOME OF LANGMUIR'S MORE ECCENTRIC QUIRKS FOR THE HOENIKKER CHARACTER.

In a 1977 conversation with The Paris Review, Vonnegut admitted to swiping a few traits directly from the real Langmuir for his novel. "Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded," Vonnegut said. "He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in."

4. MUCH OF THE SCIENCE ILLUSTRATED IN THE NOVEL WAS BASED ON WORK DONE BY VONNEGUT'S BROTHER.

Vonnegut's brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist working for General Electric since 1945, was responsible for getting Vonnegut the job at GE in the first place. Bernard Vonnegut was a partner of Langmuir in the pursuit of an understanding, and perhaps the manipulation or synthetic reproduction, of snow.

5. LANGMUIR ORIGINALLY PITCHED THE ICE-NINE STORY TO A DIFFERENT AUTHOR.

Basic characterization is hardly all Vonnegut derived (or, as some would put it, stole) from Langmuir. The ice-nine concept-a chemical bastardization of ice that remains stable at room temperature-was Langmuir's idea, which he had pitched previously as the premise for a potential science fiction story to writer H. G. Wells. The Time Machine author was uninterested, leaving Vonnegut to snatch the concept for his 1963 novel.

6. VONNEGUT WAS DRIVEN TO WRITE THE NOVEL BY HIS MORAL OBJECTION TO INDIFFERENCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.

"I was hideously disillusioned-that is when I lost my innocence, really-when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima," Vonnegut says in the 1983 BBC Arena documentary Kurt Vonnegut So It Goes. While the World War II veteran's experiences as a POW are best known for inspiring his later novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut's emotional reaction to the United States' use of the atom bomb on Japan helped shape the themes of Cat's Cradle.

In the documentary, Vonnegut explains how this cynicism only grew during his stint at General Electric. "It seemed wrong to me, in view of some of (Langmuir's) discoveries, that he should be so indifferent to what became of them," he says. "This dreadful substance, which is discovered by a man who is purely interested in truth, finally winds up in the hands of a dictator and-not to leave you in suspense-the world ends."

7. CAT'S CRADLE EARNED VONNEGUT A MASTER'S DEGREE.

Before he became one of the great voices of American science fiction, Vonnegut earned a reputation at the University of Chicago as a student of little promise. After his original master's thesis, which compared 19th century Cubist painters with 19th century Native Americans, went nowhere, he started on Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, which traced how different cultures' stories have their own distinct footprints, providing hints as to their origins. However, Vonnegut left school without earning his degree. Just shy of 25 years later, the institution decided to accept Cat's Cradle as his submitted thesis, and granted Vonnegut his Master of Arts at last.

8. VONNEGUT COLLABORATED ON AN ORATORIO ADAPTATION OF THE BOOK.

We're accustomed to seeing great works of literature adapted for film and television, but Cat's Cradle's reimagining as an album is pretty unusual. To make matters more interesting, Vonnegut himself was involved in adapting his story. The author wrote and performed the prose lyrics to a nine-track oratorio based on his novel. The project was spearheaded by musician and Columbia University neuroscientist David Soldier (real name: Sulzer), and was released as the studio album Ice-9 Ballads in 2001. The Manhattan Chamber Orchestra and Jimmy Justice contributed to the piece.

9. A MINOR PLANET AND ITS MOON WERE NAMED FOR THE BOOK.

In September of 1999, astronomers David C. Jewitt, Jane X. Luu, and Chadwick Trujillo discovered a cubewano-that is, an object whose revolution extends beyond Neptune's orbit (a range known as the Kuiper belt)-and its "moon." The trio borrowed the terms "Borasisi" and "Pabu," which refer to the mythical personifications of the sun and the moon in the fictional language of San Lorenzan featured in Cat's Cradle, to name their discoveries.

10. FOLLOWERS OF THE BOOK'S FICTIONAL RELIGION MEET EVERY YEAR AT BURNING MAN.

An adamant critic of religion, Vonnegut likely never intended for his creation, Bokononism, to earn a following beyond the shores of the fictional San Lorenzo. Nevertheless, Cat's Cradle's ideology of "harmless untruths" is celebrated year after year at California music festival Burning Man. The Camp of Bokonon has become a fixture of the annual event, preaching the bliss of Lionel Boyd Johnson's embrace of the foma.

11. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HELPED FUEL VONNEGUT'S RELIGIOUS SATIRE.

Along with the novels of Herman Melville and Mark Twain, a short piece by George Bernard Shaw was a heavy influence on Cat's Cradle. "To hell with the plays," Vonnegut joked during a 2003 discussion with The Progressive, emphasizing the impact that reading Shaw's prefaces, in particular, had on his writing. Vonnegut recalled a religious satire penned by Shaw as a preface to his 1912 drama Androcles and the Lion: "Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?" (incorrectly referred to by Vonnegut in the interview as "Christianity-Why Not Give It a Try?").

12. VONNEGUT ALMOST QUIT WRITING ALTOGETHER BEFORE HE EVEN BEGAN CAT'S CRADLE.

Following his tenure with General Electric and the publication of his first book, Player Piano, Vonnegut endured a quick, ostensibly agonizing stint as a writer for Sports Illustrated. Frustrated throughout his employ by the banality of his assignments, Vonnegut was brought to his breaking point when told to write a story about a racehorse that had hopped the fence of his owners' grounds and run away. He wrote only, " The horse jumped over the f-----g fence," and quit the gig on the spot, believing himself to be done with the written word altogether. Afterwards, Vonnegut spent a similarly brief period managing a Saab dealership in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

13. HE GOT BACK INTO WRITING NOVELS TO SUPPORT HIS THREE NEPHEWS.

Vonnegut took on a new financial burden when he adopted his three nephews following the sudden deaths of their parents (his sister and brother-in-law) in 1958. With three children of his own already, Vonnegut returned to the only career in which he was certain he could sustain employment: writing. Judging himself as unfit for any other line of work and in newly dire need of regular income, Vonnegut engaged once again with his literary passions, turning out novels The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and Cat's Cradle over the next five years.

14. CAT'S CRADLE WAS ONE OF ONLY TWO OF HIS OWN BOOKS THAT VONNEGUT GRADED AN A-PLUS.

In the two decades following Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut published a legion of novels, short story and essay collections, and stage plays that attracted mainstream attention and critical acclaim. However, Vonnegut wasn't especially satisfied with how some of his works turned out. In the eighteenth chapter of the 1981 collection Palm Sunday, Vonnegut took each of his published pieces to task with the assignment of an academic letter grade. He doled out two Ds (for the 1971 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June and the 1976 novel Slapstick), three Cs (for the 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions, the 1974 collection Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, and for Palm Sunday itself), one B-minus (for the 1968 collection Welcome to the Monkey House), one B (for the 1952 novel Player Piano), four As (for the 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, the 1961 novel Mother Night, the 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and the 1979 novel Jailbird), and two A-pluses (for Cat's Cradle and the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five).

15. THE NOVEL INSPIRED A GRATEFUL DEAD BUSINESS VENTURE.

In 1970, the popular rock band the Grateful Dead founded a San Francisco-based publishing company named Ice Nine, through which all of its music and lyrics would be copyrighted.

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15 Things You Might Not Know About Cat's Cradle

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Even the most diehard Vonnegut fan may not be familiar with these facts about Cat's Cradle, one of the author's best-known works-and one of the 20th century's most beloved satires. 1. KURT VONNEGUT GOT THE IDEA FOR CAT'S CRADLE WHILE WORKING AT GENERAL ELECTRIC.

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Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was published in 1963. While Vonnegut felt that science fiction was too limiting a genre description, Cat's Cradle probably fits in that genre most accurately. It is an imaginative fantasy, in which the exact date and time are not clearly established, as is common with science fiction. The novel's plot reflects the cold war atmosphere of the early 1960s, when it seemed that any minute the escalating march toward larger and more deadly weapons might lead to war and the possible massive destruction of whole cities and populations. The title of the novel is taken from a children's game, for which there is no solution. This title reflects the novel's focus on the nature of so-called scientific progress, which puts the world at risk for annihilation. Vonnegut uses satire, irony, and parody to question the integrity and responsibility of scientists who create weapons with no thought to their destructive powers or how they might be used. He also parodies religion as a cure-all for the people and a means by which leaders are able to calm their subjects and allow them to exist happily amid poverty, disease, and destruction. Even the location that serves as a setting for Vonnegut's novel, San Lorenzo, is a parody of the island nations of the Caribbean that are ruled by ambitious wealthy men.

In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's fourth novel, the careless use of ice-nine, a weapon capable of destroying all life, serves as a warning about the drawbacks of technology. Although Vonnegut's

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His father, Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., was a successful architect. His mother, Edith Sophia Lieber, was the daughter of a brewer. Vonnegut was the youngest of the family's three children. Vonnegut grew up not knowing that the family was originally from Germany. Even though they were fourth generation Americans, anti-German sentiment following World War I caused Vonnegut's family to hide their heritage. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1940. Although he wanted to study journalism in college, he enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a biochemistry major. Vonnegut's father felt that his son would have a better future in biochemistry than as a writer. While at Cornell, Vonnegut became a writer and editor for the university newspaper. In the middle of his junior year at college, Vonnegut dropped out of school and enlisted in the army. It was 1942 and the United States was at war. Vonnegut was assigned to an infantry battalion and trained as a mechanical engineer. He returned home on Mother's Day 1944, to discover that the evening before, his mother had committed suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. Three months later, Vonnegut was sent overseas, and in December 1944, he was captured by German troops during the Battle of the Bulge. As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut worked in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. On February 13, 1945, Dresden was annihilated by a firestorm of bombs that killed 135,000 people in about two hours. Vonnegut and other prisoners of war survived because they were locked in a cold meat locker three stories beneath the slaughterhouse. After the night of bombing, the prisoners emerged from their shelter to discover that the city and all its people had vanished in the firestorm. Vonnegut spent the next several weeks helping to recover the burned corpses of Dresden's population.

When he returned to the United States in 1945, Vonnegut went back to college, studying anthropology at the University of Chicago. He married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children between 1947 and 1954. In 1947, Vonnegut began working as a publicist for General Electric in Schenectady, New York. He also supplemented his income writing short stories, the first of which was published in 1950 in Collier's magazine. Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. A second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959, followed by Mother Night in 1961. Cat's Cradle, published in 1963, brought Vonnegut more attention than his previous works but not much money. After the publication of his fifth novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Vonnegut began a two-year residency at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Vonnegut to return to Dresden in 1967, where he began doing research for his most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969. Vonnegut's master's thesis at the University of Chicago had been rejected by the Anthropology Department in 1947, but it was awarded in 1971, after he had become a successful and quite famous writer. He used Cat's Cradle as the subject for his anthropology thesis. Vonnegut published several more novels, collections of short stories, collections of essays and speeches, plays, and a variety of other works. Vonnegut's first marriage ended in divorce in 1979. He married Jill Krementz in 1979, with whom he adopted a child. In addition, Vonnegut adopted his sister's three children after her death from cancer. Vonnegut attempted suicide with sleeping pills and alcohol in 1984, but recovered. He died on April 11, 2007, from brain injuries sustained several weeks earlier in a fall at his New York City apartment.

Chapters 1-20

Readers are introduced to the narrator, John, in the first of 127 very brief chapters, most only a page or two long, that make up Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. On the first page, John explains that when he was younger he began to write a book, The Day the World Ended, about the day that the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. John explains that he was a Christian then, but he is now a Bokononist. Bokononism is a religion that is little known outside of one location, the Republic of San Lorenzo. Bokononism's followers believe that humanity is organized into teams who inadvertently, without either knowledge or intent, do God's will. Each of these teams is called a karass, which explains how strangers can become connected, even when there seems to be no explanation for how the connection was established. John will discover the members of his karass as the book progresses and the story is told. Bokonon, who founded the religion that bears his name, claims that people should not try to understand what God is doing; they are fools if they try to do so. John admits that this is true, but regardless, he intends for the book that he is now narrating, Cat's Cradle, to offer an explanation for what God is doing in the world.

John next explains that his own karass includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. John also explains how he became connected to the Hoenikker family. After he discovered that the youngest Hoenikker son, Newt, has pledged to his old college fraternity, John writes to Newt asking for his recollections of August 6, 1945, the day the bomb was dropped. When he replies, Newt tells John about his father playing with a piece of string the day the bomb was dropped. A man who was in prison had sent Newt's father a novel about a bomb that would destroy the whole world. There was string wrapped around the novel, and Newt's father began to use it to play the children's game cat's cradle with his son. Because his father never played any games with anyone, Newt was frightened of his father, who seemed very large and scary when he came that close. In his letter to John, Newt explains that his father was very hurt that his son was frightened and ran away from him. Newt also tells John that when he told his sister, Angela, that he hated his father and that he was ugly, Angela slapped him and told him that his father was a great man who won the war the day the bomb was dropped. In one of his many postscripts to this letter, Newt explains that he is a midget and his brother, Frank, who has disappeared, is a criminal wanted by the police. Chapter 8 ends with the information that Newt was in love with a forty-two-year-old Russian midget, Zinka, who rejected him.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

Ice-9 Ballads, by Dave Soldier, was released by Mulatta Recording in 2001. The album features a selection of spoken text, some of it set to music, from Cat's Cradle.

A year later, John is traveling through Ilium, where the Hoenikker family lived, and decides to stop and ask about the family. There he meets a woman, Sandra, whom he describes as a whore, and who used to attend school with the middle child, Frank Hoenikker. While in Ilium, John makes an appointment with Asa Breed, Dr. Hoenikker's old boss at the Research Laboratory. Asa relates a story to John about how one morning on the way to work, Dr. Hoenikker had gotten tired of driving in traffic and simply abandoned his car in the middle of the road. After the police towed the car, the doctor's wife, Emily, picked the car up, and on her way home was in an accident. The injury from that accident ultimately led to her death in childbirth. This story is meant to illustrate Dr. Hoenikker's carelessness and his lack of concern for even his own family.

Asa next gives John a tour of the Research Laboratory, where one of the secretaries explains that she does not understand what she types, just that it is about a bomb that will turn everything inside out or upside down. When John finally sits down in Asa's office and begins asking him questions, Asa thinks that all of the questions are an attack on scientific discovery, especially the kind of discoveries that lead to bombs and other weapons. Asa then becomes angry at John's perceived attack on all scientists. Asa defends the scientists at the Research Laboratory as the only people who are doing pure research, simply seeking more knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not for commercial use. Asa explains to John that Dr. Hoenikker was asked to solve the problem of mud that bogs down Marines in combat. Asa hypothesizes that quite by accident scientists might discover a way to use a very small seed of some kind that would freeze the water in mud so that mud becomes solid. This hypothetical seed would be called ice-nine.

Chapters 21-40

After he leaves the Research Laboratory, John decides to go to the cemetery and photograph Dr. Hoenikker's grave. Once he arrives, he discovers that the tallest memorial in the cemetery is in the Hoenikker family plot. The memorial is for the doctor's wife, Emily, with the word, MOTHER, carved on its surface. The doctor's monument is a simple cube, with the word, FATHER, carved on it. After he leaves the cemetery, John visits a local tombstone establishment. The owner is Marvin Breed, Asa Breed's brother. Marvin tells John that the Hoenikker children used the doctor's Nobel Prize money to buy the monument for their mother a year after her death. It never occurred to the doctor to put a monument on his wife's grave. Marvin also tells John that when they were in high school, he and Emily had dated and later became engaged, but then his older brother came back to town, stole Emily from Asa, and promptly married her. According to Marvin, though, Hoenikker had no interest in people and neglected his wife, never showing her any love. Marvin tells John that Frank Hoenikker walked out of the cemetery during his father's funeral, not even remaining until it was over. Frank moved to Florida, got caught up with a group of car thieves, and is presumed dead. Marvin also explains that while Newt might be a four-foot tall midget, his sister, Angela, is six feet tall. Dr. Hoenikker had forced Angela to quit high school at age sixteen and stay home to keep house for him. She had no friends and only an isolated, lonely existence in her father's home. As John is leaving the tombstone office, he asks about a carved angel on display and is told the story of how it was ordered many years earlier but not paid for, since the immigrant who bought it for his wife's grave was later robbed. The name carved on the bottom of the angel is John's last name, which is not revealed to the reader. The discovery of the angel, however, is further evidence of the link that John has to the Hoenikker family and Ilium.

Before he leaves Ilium, John stops by Jack's Hobby Shop, where Jack shows John the model of a small country that Frank Hoenikker created in the basement. The model is carefully detailed, the result of thousands of hours of meticulous work. Jack is heartbroken that Frank might be dead at the hand of some gangsters and all his talent lost. The great irony here is that Frank, who never cares how his actions might affect others, was having an affair with Jack's wife. This is John's last stop in Ilium, and after it is over he returns to his New York apartment, where he discovers that the poet who sublet the place has completely trashed the apartment, run up a huge phone bill, and killed the cat. Rather than be angry, John decides that the damage done by the poet is meant to turn him from his nihilistic beliefs, and so the poet has done John a favor.

An indeterminate period of time later, John notices a supplement in the Sunday New York Times. The supplement, which is meant to attract investors and tourists, promotes the Republic of San Lorenzo, which is undergoing a building boom. John immediately falls in love with the girl pictured on the cover of the insert. Mona is the daughter of the dictator, Miguel "Papa" Monzano, who is pictured on a page inside the supplement. John also notices that the man standing next to the dictator is identified as General Franklin Hoenikker, the Minister of Science and Progress of the Republic of San Lorenzo. The supplement explains that Frank is responsible for the revitalization and building plan currently under way in San Lorenzo. In a separate section of the supplement, Frank explains that he was lost at sea and starving when he was literally washed up on the shore of San Lorenzo. Because he had no passport, Frank was immediately jailed, but then "Papa" Monzano visited and asked if Frank was the son of Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Once he was identified as Dr. Hoenikker's son, Frank found that he was welcomed everywhere. Sometime later, John is assigned to write a story about Julian Castle, who abandoned his life as an American millionaire to build a free hospital in San Lorenzo.

Chapters 41-60

John quickly decides to fly to San Lorenzo, where he can meet with Philip Castle, the proprietor of the hotel and Julian's son. The bigger motivation for going to San Lorenzo, however, is Mona, with whom John has been in love since he first saw her photo on the cover of the Sunday New York Times supplement. On the plane trip to San Lorenzo, John meets the Mintons, an elderly couple so involved with one another that they manage to exclude John from even the most casual conversation. John also meets H. Lowe Crosby and his wife, Hazel, who are moving their bicycle business to San Lorenzo, where the government does not interfere as much in commerce. Crosby complains that back in Chicago, where their original business was located, the government interfered constantly and made it nearly impossible to run a business. Hazel is pleased that John is also from Indiana, since Hoosiers from Indiana are always the most successful people. John decides that Hazel is a granfalloon, a term that Bokonon applies to people who find false affinity to others based solely on some vague connection. Every single person who has ever lived in Indiana is connected, according to Hazel.

Hazel's husband admires the dictatorship in place in San Lorenzo, where there is absolutely no crime. There is no crime because the punishment, regardless of the kind of crime, is to be impaled on a giant hook and left to dangle from a gallows. While Crosby thinks that the hook might be a bit extreme for a democracy, such as in the United States, he does think that public hangings might work well to stop juvenile delinquents from committing crimes. Crosby tells John that Minton was fired from his last diplomatic assignment after his wife wrote a letter that was published in a newspaper, in which she was critical of Americans for being self-centered and egocentric. Minton was accused of being soft on communism, a label that Crosby agrees is accurate, since anyone who does not love America and Americans is clearly a traitor. Minton's reassignment to San Lorenzo is a punishment and demotion.

The Mintons encourage John to read a history of San Lorenzo that they have with them on the plane. This is when John learns about Bokononism for the first time. He learns that Bokononism claims that evil is necessary, since the conflict between good and evil creates a tension that is important because the existence of evil makes good so much better. A biography of the founder of Bokononism explains that Bokonon's real name was Lionel Boyd Johnson who, after many journeys, was washed ashore naked in San Lorenzo, where he re-created himself as Bokonon, the founder of a new religion. Also washed ashore was Edward McCabe, a marine deserter, who had been shipwrecked with Bokonon. While John is reading the book about San Lorenzo, he discovers that Angela and Newt Hoenikker have boarded the plane and are also on their way to San Lorenzo, where Frank is to be married to Mona. Angela and Newt are eager to share photos and stories about their father, whom Angela idolizes as a great scientist. Angela tells John that she married a very handsome man who heads a company that manufactures weapons. He came to Ilium and sought her out after the death of her father. They married within two weeks of their first meeting. John then returns to his seat on the plane and continues reading the book about San Lorenzo's history, which details all of the times that this small country has been conquered and the many rulers who have controlled it. San Lorenzo has never been independent, and the people, who live in terrible poverty, have always been exploited in some way. Although fictional, San Lorenzo is similar to any number of small countries in the Caribbean that are exploited by larger and wealthier countries. Countries like San Lorenzo are often referred to as banana republics.

Chapters 61-80

When the plane finally lands in San Lorenzo, John learns that Bokononism is outlawed in San Lorenzo. Anyone caught practicing the religion will be executed by the hook. Bokonon has disappeared, but there are posters seeking his capture, dead or alive. San Lorenzo is supposed to be a Christian country and no other religion is to be tolerated. Vonnegut describes the people of San Lorenzo as oatmeal colored, mostly naked, and very thin, with missing teeth; they are also very quiet. John then meets the dictator, "Papa" Monzano, who is obviously very ill. "Papa" names Frank Hoenikker his heir because Frank is a man of science. All of the passengers are then taken to their accommodations. On the way to the hotel, John learns the story of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy. This is the story of how, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, San Lorenzo declared war on Japan and Germany and drafted 100 young men, who with no real training were put aboard a submarine and promptly massacred in an attack by a German submarine in San Lorenzo's harbor. After Crosby insults Philip Castle and is in turn insulted by Philip Castle, Crosby insists that he and his wife must be given accommodations in the embassy. John, then, is the first and only person to stay at the hotel, where Philip is creating a twenty-foot high mosaic of Mona. It is obvious that everyone is in love with Mona, who is revealed to be a secret practitioner of Bokononism. Philip also believes in Bokononism, but as an American, he is exempt from the hook. John is no sooner shown his room than Frank calls and demands to see John, immediately.

John takes the island's only taxi to Frank's house, where he discovers Newt dozing on the Terrace. Newt has been painting and has created a childlike canvas of black marks that he later tells John is a picture of a cat's cradle. According to Newt, the cat's cradle is not real, since there is no cat and no cradle. This is true of many other things, says Newt, such as religion, which is only an illusion. Angela, who has been touring the free hospital that Julian Castle established, next arrives with Castle, who is an especially unpleasant man. Castle declares Newt's painting meaningless and throws it off the balcony. Castle explains to John that everyone on San Lorenzo is a Bokononist. The religion is all that gives them hope, in the midst of their miserable poor lives. Bokonon arranged with McCabe to disappear and have his religion outlawed, so that it would be more attractive and have more zest. Bokonon also suggested the hook as a punishment for anyone caught practicing his religion. For some time, McCabe played along with this game and staged ritual searches for Bokonon, which were more about bringing food to the exiled religious leader. The people were happy with this new arrangement, although they were still just as poor. Their belief in Bokononism, however, gave them hope and they forgot their hunger and disease. Eventually, though, Bokonon and McCabe forgot that they were playing a game and each became the prey and the hunter for real, and so finally each went mad.

Chapters 81-100

After Castle finishes his story, Angela and Newt rejoin them on the terrace, where Angela and Newt get very drunk. Once she is drunk, Angela begins to play the clarinet. Her playing is beautiful and frightening in its passion. After dinner, Frank has still not appeared, but he calls and tells John that Papa is nearly dead of his cancer. Frank also tells John that it is his destiny to continue to wait for Frank to return to his home. Soon a convoy of soldiers arrives and begins to build fortifications to protect the home of San Lorenzo's next president. Given the fear of the hook, it is not clear why the president would need protecting. John finally goes to sleep but is awakened in the middle of the night and discovers that Frank has returned. John and Frank walk to a cave to talk, and John quickly realizes that Frank only speaks in clichés. Frank explains that he realizes that he has no public persona, and so he offers John the job of president of San Lorenzo. The only catch is that the president must marry Mona, the woman with whom John has been in love since he first saw her photo.

Mona and John have their first meeting and perform boko-maru, the ritual touching of the soles of each person's feet by the feet of another. John immediately orders Mona not to perform this intimate ritual with another person, but she refuses and says she will not marry him if she cannot follow the rituals of her religion. John quickly agrees, and his first attempt to rule Mona is ended. The following morning, John and Mona are betrothed, and he is taken to see "Papa" before he dies, so that he can have the formal blessing of the former president. When he arrives at the president's castle, the first thing that John sees is the huge hook and the scaffold, which is designed to intimidate all visitors. John is escorted into "Papa's" bedroom, where the dying man lies with a small cylinder attached to a chain around his neck. Inside the cylinder is a sliver of ice-nine, although John does not know this yet. "Papa" tells John to try and kill Bokonon and to tell the people that science is truth. After "Papa" is given last rites according to the rituals of Bokononism, John begins to write his first speech as the new president and decides that, rather than reform San Lorenzo in any way, he will leave things as they are.

Chapters 101-120

At the reception to honor the Hundred Martyrs, where John will announce that he is to be the next president, everyone of importance on the island gathers to hear speeches and watch a display by the six Air Force planes that the United States has given to San Lorenzo. The food and drink are uniformly terrible. After John eats a piece of albatross meat he is violently ill and makes his way to a bathroom. He is stopped by Dr. von Koenigswald, who is hysterical. The doctor exclaims that "Papa" has committed suicide by ingesting the contents of the cylinder that hung around his neck. As soon as John sees "Papa's" body, he realizes that the cylinder contained ice-nine. Within minutes, the doctor also dies, after touching "Papa's" lips and then touching water, which when it comes into contact with ice-nine solidifies, thus quickly solidifying von Koenigswald as well.

This chapter begins with John accusing the three Hoenikker children of keeping ice-nine for their own use and risking the lives of everyone on Earth. Frank used ice-nine to buy his job on San Lorenzo, and he reminds his siblings that they each used ice-nine to buy what they wanted, whether it was a handsome husband for Angela or a Russian dancer for Newt. John immediately understands that the U.S. military has ice-nine, courtesy of Angela's husband, and the Soviet Union has ice-nine courtesy of Newt's Russian dancer girlfriend. The cold war standoff between the two countries is the only thing that has kept the world from self-destructing. As John and the three Hoenikker children clean up the mess of spilled ice-nine, Frank, Angela, and Newt tell how they divided up the ice-nine after their father died that Christmas Eve so many years ago. After the death scene in "Papa's" bedroom is cleaned, John rejoins the reception to honor the war dead, which has continued in his absence. The new ambassador is supposed to give a formal speech to honor the Hundred Martyrs, but instead begins to talk about the killing of children in war. Minton is referring to the young men who die as soldiers in times of war, and who are sacrificed by the stupidity of old men who do not go to war. After Minton completes his speech, everyone begins to watch the air show that is scheduled as the evening's entertainment. As the air show begins, one of the planes appears to have smoke billowing from beneath it. This plane crashes into the castle, and a large portion of the castle and the surrounding battlements collapse into the sea. The Mintons are among the first to be killed, and they disappear into the sea with dignity, standing upright and holding hands. In a moment, another section of the castle collapses into the sea, this portion containing the dead body of "Papa." Immediately, the sea becomes solid with the effects of ice-nine. Changing the seas from liquid to solid affects the weather patterns and soon terrible tornados fill the air.

As everyone begins to flee the castle, Mona takes John to the manhole cover that conceals an oubliette that leads into the dungeons under the castle, where they take cover in a carefully constructed bomb shelter. John decides that their forced isolation is the perfect opportunity to consummate his relationship with Mona. After seven days, John and Mona emerge from their shelter to find the world covered with ice-nine. They soon find stacks of dead people, all of them victims of ritual suicide. A note left under a rock explains that many of the local people had survived the freezing of the sea and the winds that followed. They had captured Bokonon and asked him what God was doing and what they should do. Bokonon told the people that God must want all the people dead, and so they should kill themselves, which they did. The note is signed by Bokonon.

Chapters 121-127

Although John is angry at what he reads in Bokonon's note, Mona laughs and explains that the people are better off dead. She then touches the ground, then her lips, and dies instantly. John is found by the Crosbys and Newt, and is taken to Frank's cave, which is all that remains of his former house. Frank has also survived, but Angela died when she attempted to play her clarinet, which had ice-nine on the mouthpiece. Julian and Philip Castle had also died as they tried to make their way through the tornados to their hospital. After six months, John feels that the small group of survivors is like the Swiss Family Robinson, carving out their survival completely isolated and alone in the world. As John ponders what he is supposed to do with his life, he sees Bokonon and asks the old man what he should do. Bokonon tells John that if he were younger, he would write a history of humankind's stupidity, climb to the top of the nearby mountain, thumb his nose at God, and kill himself with the poison that turns men to statues. The novel ends with Bokonon's words. Thus, it is not clear if John will take the religious leader's advice to kill himself.

Bokonon

Bokonon's real name is Lionel Boyd Johnson. After many journeys, he is washed ashore naked in San Lorenzo, where he decides that he can be reborn. He feels that San Lorenzo is his destiny. Johnson sees the poverty and disease on San Lorenzo and initially thinks he can turn the island into a utopia; when he sees that he cannot change things, Johnson reinvents himself as Bokonon. Bokonon realizes that there is no reality strong enough to combat the terrible existence of the people of San Lorenzo, and so he decides to create a religion based on lies. Although he is supposedly on a Wanted, Dead or Alive poster, no serious attempts have ever been made to arrest Bokonon. Likewise, although Bokononism is outlawed, nearly every resident of San Lorenzo follows that religion. Bokonon survives the disaster caused by the release of ice-nine. When asked by the people what caused this disaster, Bokonon tells them that God wanted all the people to die and that everyone who has not yet died should commit suicide. As a result of this statement, almost everyone in San Lorenzo commits suicide.

Asa Breed

Asa Breed was Felix Hoenikker's supervisor at Research Laboratory. He was also in love with Emily, the woman who would become Hoenikker's wife. John initially interviews Asa when he is planning on writing a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. When John learns about Dr. Hoenikker's work on ice-nine, he asks Asa if Dr. Hoenikker was successful in creating this weapon. Asa becomes very defensive and denies that ice-nine exists. Asa also takes offense at John's questions about the responsibility that scientists owe to mankind. Asa then throws John off Research Laboratory property.

Julian Castle

When he was younger, Julian Castle was like every other entrepreneur who moved to San Lorenzo. He planned to exploit the local labor and make himself even richer. Although he hoped to make money with his Castle Sugar Corporation, he never turned a profit. In fact, he lost money if he paid the local workers even the lowest wages. As a young man, Castle had been ruthless, had been married numerous times, and had exploited many people, whenever the opportunity to do so presented itself. He was also an alcoholic draft dodger who freely spent money without contributing to the world in any way. Then at age forty, Julian decided to build a free hospital in the jungle and named it the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. For the next twenty years, Castle was a reformed multi-millionaire, who provided free medical care to the poor who lived in San Lorenzo. No reason is given for Castle's transformation from selfish millionaire to philanthropist.

Philip Castle

Philip is the only child of Julian Castle. Philip wrote a book about San Lorenzo's history, which John reads on the plane ride to San Lorenzo. Philip opens a hotel, but has no guests. Like everyone in San Lorenzo, Philip is in love with Mona and creates a twenty-foot mosaic of her in the hotel lobby.

Harrison Connors

Harrison Connors is described as a very handsome scientist and the head of a weapons company. He seeks out Angela after the death of her father and marries her within two weeks. Later in the novel, readers learn that he married her only to obtain ice-nine. After their marriage, he cheats on Angela. Although he does not appear in the novel and is only mentioned briefly, he is important because he provides the U.S. government with ice-nine, the same weapon that the Soviet Union also possesses, thus maintaining cold war equality between the two countries.

H. Lowe Crosby

John first meets Lowe on the plane to San Lorenzo. Lowe is traveling to San Lorenzo to investigate whether he can move his bicycle manufacturing business to this small country, where he can take advantage of the poverty and lack of government labor restrictions to make his bicycles for less cost than in the United States. Lowe is an opportunistic drunk, who is bombastic and insulting to nearly everyone. He and his wife survive the contamination by ice-nine. As one of the few survivors, Lowe becomes the primary cook for the small group.

Hazel Crosby

Angela Hoenikker

Angela is the only daughter and the oldest child of Felix and Emily Hoenikker. She was taken out of school at age sixteen and turned into a full-time housekeeper, cook, and nanny after her mother died. Angela is described as six feet tall and having the face of a horse. She plays the clarinet very well, and uses music to escape the loneliness of her life. After her father died, Angela shared the ice-nine that her father invented equally with her two siblings. Within weeks of her father's death, the very lonely and vulnerable Angela marries Harrison Connors, a very handsome weapons researcher, who marries her only to gain access to her inheritance of ice-nine. Angela is convinced that her father was an underappreciated heroic figure. She is blind to his failings and proudly tells everyone of her father's many triumphs. Angela initially survives the destruction caused by the release of ice-nine but dies after she tries to play her clarinet, which has been contaminated with ice-nine.

Dr. Felix Hoenikker

Dr. Felix Hoenikker is one of the scientists who created the atomic bomb. He is long dead when Vonnegut's novel begins, but his research and the neglect of his children-who use ice-nine to buy the happiness they never had as children-play a central role in the events of the novel. When he was alive, Hoenikker was completely removed from the reality of ordinary day-to-day life, and as a scientist, he took no responsibility for anything he created. Dr. Hoenikker thought of his research as a game to be played. This allowed him to make ice-nine, without ever considering the disaster that would unfold if the material was ever used or if it ever escaped from its container. Hoenikker existed only in his own personal space, never considering the lives of anyone else, including the lives of his neglected wife and three children.

Franklin Hoenikker

Frank is the second child of Felix and Emily Hoenikker. After his father died, Frank shared the ice-nine that his father invented equally with his two siblings. Frank is like his father in that he has no social skills and is unable to interact well with other people. As a teenager, he built an elaborate model of a small country at a local hobby shop, but the primary reason for spending so much time building the model was mostly to disguise the affair he was having with the hobby store owner's wife. After Frank gets into some trouble with a group of car thieves, he takes refuge on San Lorenzo and gives ice-nine to the country's dictator. Just as his father took no responsibility for his scientific inventions, Frank takes no responsibility for the devastating effects made possible by ice-nine. Frank survives the destruction of almost all life in the world after the accident with ice-nine. Even after he has caused all this destruction, Frank takes no responsibility for what he has unleashed. Like his father, Frank lives in his own little world, in which the lives of others have no role or consequence.

Newton Hoenikker

John

Claire Minton

Claire Minton is the wife of the new ambassador to San Lorenzo. John meets Claire and her husband on the plane ride to San Lorenzo. Because of an earlier letter that Claire wrote criticizing Americans as self-centered, egocentric people who expect everyone to love them, her husband lost his former post as ambassador and is punished by being sent to be the new ambassador to San Lorenzo. Claire and her husband are so close that they seem to function as a single entity. John labels their unity a duprass, a karass composed of only two people, who are so close that no one else can invade their unity. Claire dies with her husband, the two holding hands and facing death with dignity.

Horlick Minton

John meets Horlick Minton on the plane to San Lorenzo. Horlick and his wife, Claire, form a duprass, a karass composed of only two people, who are so close that no one else can invade their unity. As the new ambassador to San Lorenzo, Horlick gives a speech at the celebration of the Hundred Martyrs that condemns war and the governments that send young men off to die as heroes. Horlick labels these young men murdered children and reveals that his only child died in war. He also says that, rather than honor wars with speeches and celebrations, people should despise the stupidity of a society that kills soldiers. Just after he completes his speech, Horlick and his wife die in an accident, the two holding hands and facing death with dignity.

Miguel Monzano

See "Papa"

Mona Aamons Monzano

Mona is the adopted daughter of "Papa" Monzano. She is a native of San Lorenzo and is the natural daughter of a Finnish architect, who died before her birth. Mona was adopted to boost "Papa's" popularity and then turned into an erotic symbol of the country as a way to boost tourism and investments. According to the writings of Bokonon, Mona must marry the next president of San Lorenzo, which at various times is either Frank Hoenikker or John. John only agrees to be president after he learns that Mona will marry the next president. Although John falls instantly in love with Mona when he sees her photo, she has no special love for him, beyond the love that she feels for all human beings, as a practitioner of Bokononism. Mona initially survives the contamination of ice-nine that brings about the end of the world. She and John spend seven days in an oubliette under "Papa's" castle. While they are trapped, John sees their isolation as an opportunity to have sex with Mona, but later she tells him that the world is not a good place to create children. After Mona and John leave the oubliette, she commits suicide by eating ice-nine.

"Papa" Monzano

See "Papa"

"Papa"

"Papa" is the dictator of San Lorenzo. In exchange for ice-nine, "Papa" gives Frank the title of Major General and a job as Minister of Science and Progress in the Republic of San Lorenzo. "Papa" is in his seventies and is dying of cancer. He uses the ice-nine to commit suicide, which triggers the deaths of most of the rest of the world, when his body is propelled into the sea after a portion of the castle collapses. "Papa" emphatically believes in the power of science, but his illness reveals that he is also a follower of Bokononism.

Dr. Schlicher von Koenigswald

Von Koenigswald is a former Nazi doctor, who murdered many people at Auschwitz. He began to work for Julian Castle at his free hospital as a way to atone for his crimes. It is estimated that he would have to work for more than a thousand years to atone for the many lives he took while working for the Nazis. Von Koenigswald is "Papa" Monzano's doctor, and after "Papa" dies, von Koenigswald accidentally touches the spilled ice-nine and dies instantly.

Zinka

Zinka is a midget, a Russian dancer with whom Newt is in love. She is also a Russian spy. Zinka pretends to love Newt only long enough to steal ice-nine from him. Although she appears only very briefly in the novel, she is important because she gives the Soviet Union the same weapon that the United States also possesses, thus maintaining cold war equality between the two countries.

Life as a Game

Vonnegut makes several references to games in his novel. The primary reference is to cat's cradle, a game played by children in all cultures. It is a game without a cat and without a cradle. It is also a game with no end or solution, a puzzle without meaning. The string in the game creates a series of X's that offer no real shape. The game is a metaphor for the lack of meaning in the characters' lives in this novel. The cat's cradle is an illusionary game, but so is life, in this novel. Newt claims that the game is like much of life, offering the illusion of reality but with no substance. Vonnegut also mentions that Felix Hoenikker saw the creation of weapons as a game. In other words, the creation of an atomic bomb, which is capable of terrible destruction, loss of life, and lasting effects on the environment and on people's lives, was just a game to the scientists who created it.

Religion as Thought Control

The religion of Bokononism is, as Vonnegut makes clear in his novel, formulated on lies. The purpose of Bokononism, as described by Bokonon, is to give the people false hope and help them to forget the abject poverty and disease that permeates their lives. Since there is no way to eliminate the terrible poverty and disease of their country, giving the people religion allows them to feel more hopeful about their existence. The larger implication is that all religions are a collection of lies used to keep the masses satisfied in times of great poverty, disease, and disaster. Although Bokononism is a fictional religion, there are elements of other religions present, such as the idea that destiny guides people's actions. Many people who define themselves as Christians will state that whatever happens was meant to be. Both Bokonon and the narrator, John, express a similar belief about destiny as the force that brought them to San Lorenzo. Religion is only one of many things that Vonnegut attacks using humor. From the wanted posters that call for the arrest of the religious leader, Bokonon, which he has created himself, to the threat of the hook for those who practice Bokononism-and it turns out everyone does practice Bokononism-the whole basis for religious belief on San Lorenzo is a sham. Like charlatans crying out in a marketplace, religion in Vonnegut's novel is about illusion and not reality. The purpose of Bokononism is for readers to think about religion in a more critical fashion.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

John's initial contact with the Hoenikker family is a result of his interest in the bombing of Hiroshima. Research the bombing of Hiroshima and the decision that was made to bomb Japan. Create a poster presentation that lists the arguments for and against the dropping of the atomic bomb.

The Republic of San Lorenzo is a fictional country, but it is meant to represent any number of small countries, such as Nicaragua and Haiti, where a long history of political and military influence by larger imperial countries has had an impact on the lives of the inhabitants. Research the history of Haiti under President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and write a paper in which you discuss Duvalier's rule.

Vonnegut's novel makes reference to the McCarthy era and the hunt for Communists. Research McCarthyism and its effect on writers, who were often targets of the McCarthy hearings. Prepare and deliver a speech in which you briefly outline the history of McCarthyism and then explain whether you think something similar could happen now.

Vonnegut's book questions the responsibility that scientists should assume for the weapons they create. A number of the scientists who worked to develop the atomic bomb wrote about the experience and about their feelings concerning the bomb's destructive force. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, and Otto Frisch are only a few of the scientists who were involved. Research at least one of the scientists who worked on what was then called the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb) and write a paper in which you discuss ways in which the scientist whom you chose either took responsibility for his or her contribution or failed to do so.

Bokononism is not a real religion, but there are similarities to bits and pieces from other religions. In the Caribbean, where the action of Vonnegut's novel takes place, Catholicism and Voodoo are the two most common religious forces. Write an essay that compares Bokononism with these two real religions. In addition to explaining what Bokononism borrows from other religions, you should argue what each religion might offer to people who live in extreme poverty.

The Pitfalls of Scientific Advancement

The Search for Happiness

The three Hoenikker children were all terribly neglected as children. After the death of their mother, the oldest child, Angela, became a surrogate mother, cook, housekeeper, and nanny. The neglect by their father leaves each one to search for happiness wherever it can be found. The neglected Angela, who was too tall and too unattractive to actually form any friendships, was pulled from school at age sixteen and further isolated from the rest of the world. She has had no opportunity to meet a young man to marry. Thus, when she is briefly courted by the incredibly handsome Harrison Connors immediately after her father's death, she willingly trades her ice-nine inheritance for the chance of marital happiness. The middle child, Frank, who as a teenager created models and seduced the wife of the town hobby store owner, used his ice-nine to buy a place in "Papa" Monzano's government. However, Frank is so scared of living that he begs John to take the presidency and the beautiful Mona, who comes with the job. For the youngest child, Newt, ice-nine provided a brief fling with a Russian dancer, Zinka. While ice-nine could buy Angela a handsome husband, it could not guarantee he would be faithful and she would be happy. Nor could Frank be happy as president of San Lorenzo, since ice-nine could not give him the ability to fill the role that it purchased. Similarly, Newt found only very brief happiness with Zinka, who quickly left him humiliated and feeling used, as so many newspaper accounts were only too happy to relate. Ultimately the three Hoenikker children's search for happiness put their father's invention of ice-nine into the hands of unscrupulous individuals and governments.

Black Humor

Black humor is the use of satire and irony to transform serious topics into absurd topics. In black or dark comedy, the author parodies things that might ordinarily be considered sacred, such as religion. For instance, Vonnegut's treatment of religion is an example of black humor. Bokononism is a fictional religion based on lies, in which the creator, Bokonon, says that God had no reason for creating mankind, and since God has no interest in mankind, humans are instructed to try and figure out their purpose for existing. In another humorous twist on religion, the seven days to create the world that form the beginning of the biblical Genesis story are rewritten by Vonnegut to become the seven days Mona and John hide in the oubliette under the castle. Although not a Garden of Eden, the makeshift bomb shelter has plenty of food and fresh water, and John is finally given the opportunity to engage in a sex orgy with Mona. It is not the biblical Garden, but it is, instead, a parody of paradise. Although black humor is intended to be entertaining for the reader, it is also supposed to prompt questioning of those social entities that are often taken for granted, such as the role of religion in society.

Invented Words

team), vin-dit (the idea that God has some plans for each individual, which will be revealed in good time). All of these newly created words allow Vonnegut to parody religion through the use of words that have no meaning, just as religion in this novel has no real meaning.

Single First-Person Narrator

Science Fiction

Cat's Cradle is an example of the science fiction genre, positing fantastic possibilities based on scientific advancements. As is common for this genre, the exact date of the events narrated is never clearly stated. The novel is set in a vague sometime after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, but whether that date is in the late 1940s, during the 1950s, or the early 1960s, is never clearly stated. Since the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, science fiction, whether in novels or in films, has often explored the destructive force of scientific advancement spinning out of control. Vonnegut presents a fantasy of a future destroyed by science, which is a common theme of this genre. Although the creation of the atomic bomb was a real event, Vonnegut takes one of the supposed fathers of the bomb, a fictional Felix Hoenikker, and uses him to create the ultimate weapon to destroy all of mankind. While the story is fantasy, the threat presented is a possibility; while most science fiction offers the opportunity for redemption, Vonnegut's novel ends with no such rescue.

The Cold War

Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle is set against the concern of imminent destruction that the events of the cold war created in people's minds. The horror of an estimated 150 million dead during World War II and fears that technology was capable of creating even more terrible destruction defined the period after World War II. This fear of war became known as the cold war. The United States and the Soviet Union, two former allies who had never been friendly even before their mutual hatred for the Nazis united them, emerged from World War II as superpowers, but they were superpowers who distrusted one another. In addition, each of the two super-powers was allied with groups of smaller countries. The Soviets allied with many of the Eastern European countries that formed their western border, while the United States allied with western European countries. This animosity spilled over into the Middle East, when the United States championed Israel, and the Soviets became allies with the Arab countries. While neither group wished to go to war again, the threat of war motivated the actions of both groups. The use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed that, not only did the United States have such a weapon but also there was a demonstrated willingness to use it against an enemy. By the early 1950s, both countries had nuclear weapons, and both countries were using frequent nuclear tests as an implied threat. As a result, the United States and the Soviets competed against one another in the developing and stockpiling of weapons. As each country developed larger, more deadly weapons, the other was forced to match that development. For instance, in 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb, which was smaller than the bomb used at Hiroshima, but it was 2,500 times more powerful. The following year, the Soviet Union tested its first hydrogen bomb. When the Soviets launched Sputnik into space in 1957, it became clear that the Soviets could also launch their nuclear bombs to the United States, using a similar rocket system. By 1961, when Vonnegut was writing his novel, it was estimated that there were enough bombs stockpiled to destroy the entire world. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, developed in the early 1960s, made certain that the arms race might well be a race toward the destruction of the world.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1960s: In 1957, the first efforts to end nuclear weapons testing begin. The following year, President Eisenhower proposes a conference to discuss test ban verification. Over the next few years, several proposals are made to end nuclear testing. The first limited ban on testing is implemented in 1963.
Today: Although there have been several comprehensive test ban treaties since 1963, a more comprehensive ban has not yet been approved. The United States government has consistently refused to ratify and sign such an agreement and instead argues for the right to maintain stockpiles without testing such weapons.

1960s: Air travel is still relatively unusual in the early 1960s, but gains in popularity throughout the decade.
Today: Air travel has become so ordinary that people no longer dress up for the experience, as they once did. The convenience of getting somewhere quickly continues to outweigh the inconveniences of air travel, such as increased security and travel restrictions.

1960s: The peace symbol-three lines pointing down, with one line pointing up, enclosed in a circle-is used for the first time in 1958. It is introduced as the symbol for nuclear disarmament by English philosopher Bertrand Russell, at an Easter march in Aldermaston, England.
Today: The peace symbol now stands for far more than nuclear disarmament, and it is used to protest war and violence of all kinds. Although technology still poses threats to peace, the prominence of the peace symbol since 1958 suggests that there will always be people who actively seek the end to war.

All of the escalating rhetoric of the cold war nearly led to a very real war during a very long fourteen days in October 1962. In events that came to be called the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world held its breath and waited to see if the two superpowers would finally unleash nuclear war upon the world. Anyone who was a child in the early 1960s probably still remembers the Duck and Cover exercise that all children in school practiced during that period. In the event of a nuclear bomb, schoolchildren were taught to duck down and hide under their desks. Many parents built bomb shelters in their back yards, as well. All of this preparation reached a climax in mid October 1962, when aerial photographs showed that the Soviets had installed missiles in Cuba. These missiles were aimed at the United States. For a week, President Kennedy conferred with advisors and then announced in a televised speech that any attack on the United States coming from Cuba would be considered to be an attack by the Soviets. Kennedy put the United States military on alert for all possible eventualities, which most observers took to mean a possible nuclear attack. A week later, the Soviets backed down, but the fear and panic caused by the Soviet missile scare was not soon forgotten. The idea that any country could so easily start a nuclear war and destroy one another became the topic of books, such as Vonnegut's, but also films, such as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Fail-Safe. The cold war and the Cuban Missile Crisis made it clear that technology and weapons had created a dangerous world in which to live.

C. D. B. Bryan observes in his 1969 New York Times Book Review article, "Kurt Vonnegut, Head Bokononist," that there are recurring messages in Vonnegut's writing. One message is "Be Kind," and the second message is that "God doesn't care whether you are [kind] or not." Vonnegut's writing, according to Bryan, is "quiet,

humorous, well-mannered and rational," the kind of writing that creates "an articulate bridge across the generation chasm." Indeed this ability to span the generations is best captured by a tribute written after Vonnegut's death. The student Kara Caldwell writes in the University News that Vonnegut's passing is personally "devastating" to her, but it is made worse knowing that so many people have not yet read his work. Caldwell hopes her column will inspire readers to pick up a Vonnegut book, and so she points out that Vonnegut's "life was one of a kind," and his "writing was even more unique." As Caldwell's tribute makes clear, one of Vonnegut's legacies remains his ability to inspire college students.

Indeed, the best indication of the lasting influence of Vonnegut's writing is found in the many obituaries and columns written after his death in April 2007. Gary Sawyer writes in the Herald & Review that, although Vonnegut wrote about depressing subjects, such as war, the end of the world, and suicide, he remained "a humanist." He could take the most difficult subjects and write about them "with humor and gentleness," because he "believed in the basic decency of mankind." The exact opposite view was take by Lev Grossman in his tribute in Time magazine. While Grossman celebrates "Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom" and that "something tender in his nature" that he was unable to suppress, Grossman does not agree completely with Sawyer's claims of Vonnegut's humanism. Grossman says of Vonnegut that his "opinion of human nature was low," and that the author was "endlessly disappointed in humanity." It is characteristic of Vonnegut's appeal that two people could read his work and emerge with such differing opinions. One of the most important and unique tributes to Vonnegut was published in the Chemical & Engineering News. Rudy M. Baum says of Vonnegut that he was a writer "who knew that words are powerful." His fiction is "free-form, raw, repetitive, and bursting with ideas, emotions, and anger, much like the rock and roll we were listening to" at the time of his writing. Baum explains that Vonnegut taught him that "skillfully wielded words are powerful, that irony and sardonic humor can prick the smug self-assurance of the powerful, and that a writer's work can help unite dispossessed individuals in their collective response to power." As many Vonnegut admirers would agree, Baum's words serve as a testament to the enduring power and legacy of Vonnegut's work.

Sheri Metzger Karmiol

Karmiol has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the university's honors program. Karmiol is also a professional writer and the author of several reference texts on poetry and drama. In this essay, Karmiol discusses the message of moral responsibility that Vonnegut delivers in Cat's Cradle.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Vonnegut's Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (1981) is a collection of autobiographical writings. Students interested in the author will find the book a valuable read.

Vonnegut's bestselling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is a fictionalized account of the author's experience as a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1943.

The Bible according to Mark Twain (1996), by Joseph B. McCullough, is a collection of Twain's humorous retellings of biblical stories, including diaries of Adam and Eve. Vonnegut was most often compared to Twain, both in appearance and in writing style. Like Twain, Vonnegut thought that the topic of religion was a good target for parody and sarcasm.

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) is an example of dark humor by one of Vonnegut's contemporaries. Kesey's novel of a mental ward in which the inmates rebel against authority has long been considered an anthem of the 1960s.

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, is considered a classic of the twentieth century. This 1954 novel, in which Amis parodies the stuffy academic life of a British university, remains a fine example of the kind of sarcastic humor that appealed to Vonnegut.

The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics and the First Atomic Bombs (2000), by John Canaday, is one of the very few books that attempts to bridge the gap between science and literature by examining the literary texts written by scientists who worked on the development of the atomic bomb.

In many ways, Cat's Cradle is an expression of Vonnegut's belief that writers have a responsibility to alert their readers to injustice, danger, and the need for social change. In a 1973 Playboy magazine interview with David Standish, Vonnegut argues that writers are "expressions of the entire society," and "when a society is in great danger, we're likely to sound the alarms." Sounding the alarm is what Vonnegut does in this novel; he takes on the scientific community, the ideology of truth, and the pursuit of knowledge, all of which he fears have created danger in a world without a social conscience. Being able to do something, according to Vonnegut, does not mean that that ability should necessarily constitute action. In other words, possessing the knowledge of how to create destructive technology does not mean that one should create such technology.

Vonnegut believed that writers have an obligation to serve as "alarm systems" who can challenge their readers to confront injustice and create change, and so he made cold war technology and naïve, foolish scientists the target of his 1963 novel. The fictional, irresponsible scientist, Felix Hoenikker, whose work destroys human life in Cat's Cradle, was based on a real person, a scientist with whom Vonnegut's brother worked. In his interview with Standish, Vonnegut explains that, historically, scientists were so focused on their work that they never considered what use might be made of their discoveries. He says that "it used to be that scientists were often like Irving Langmuir" (a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who served as the model for the childlike, innocent Felix Hoenikker). Vonnegut explains that Langmuir claimed that "he was simply unearthing truth, that the truth could never hurt human beings." Langmuir was not "interested in the applications of whatever he turned up," according to Vonnegut. The fictional Dr. Hoenikker also lacks any awareness of the dangers posed by his inventions. He is so unaware that he takes his invention, ice-nine, on his Christmas vacation and spends time playing with the compound. He dies as a result of handling the compound without taking care that the material does not fall into the equally careless and irresponsible hands of his children. During the time that Langmuir was working, scientists paid more attention to the search for knowledge than to any use that might be made of that knowledge.

The development of atomic weapons was one field, however, that led to a greater awareness of the social and moral responsibility that scientists must assume. In a 1950 letter to the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, Albert Einstein wrote: "In our times scientists and engineers carry particular moral responsibility, because the development of military means of mass destruction is within their sphere of activity." Einstein felt that scientists would need the backing of a strong social and scientific organization to withstand the pressures placed upon scientists, who "face difficulties" in following their conscience. Einstein clearly understood that scientific advancement in weapons research could pose a danger to the world. As if to confirm Einstein's fears, scientists continued to develop larger, more powerful, and more deadly nuclear weapons in the decade that followed his letter. The possibility of mass destruction became a reality, and literature became one way to sound the alarm that it was time for someone to take responsibility for the development and use of all this dangerous technology.

Vonnegut is not alone in claiming that writers have an artistic responsibility to serve as alarmists who can alert readers to risks they may not understand or to dangers of which they might be unaware. In his essay in Symploke, Robert L. McLaughlin discusses the ethical and moral responsibility of literature. He laments a world in which publishers and big-box booksellers seem only interested in bestsellers and profits. This is also a world in which potential readers are only interested in reality television. Because of a changing environment for writers, McLaughlin argues that the kind of literature that embraces social responsibility is no longer being written or read. In his contemporary world, fiction functions as occasionally challenging "our culture's values, raising consciousnesses, occasionally transforming individual lives." McLaughlin does not see these occasional possibilities for change as sufficient. Like Vonnegut, McLaughlin argues that literature's role "is to question, challenge, and reimagine the ideological status quo." Vonnegut, of course, goes beyond questioning and challenging in Cat's Cradle. What he does, instead, is imagine a world in which accountability is no longer relevant. In Vonnegut's fictional world, no one takes responsibility for his or her actions. Felix Hoenikker cannot envision a world where his inventions would not be valued, and his children are so busy searching for long-denied happiness, they never consider the results of their actions. Vonnegut makes sure that readers understand that the Hoenikker children are neglected, unloved, and unhappy. In creating these children as victims, as well as perpetrators, the author asks his readers to consider any possible excuses for their actions. Ultimately, Vonnegut proposes a world in which excuses cannot suffice to exonerate blame.

The search for reasons, for excuses, or for answering the question of why people behave as they do is a common query of philosophers. Philosophy professor Elinor Mason, writing in Philosophical Books, explores what kinds of situations might excuse an individual from accepting moral responsibility for his or her actions. As noted above, this is an important point to consider, with regard to the Hoenikker children, who were starved for affection as children and who each subsequently bartered ice-nine to buy a brief chance at happiness. Mason says that there are debates in the philosophical community about the kinds of conditions that "excuse someone from responsibility for something they have done." In particular, Mason notes that there are "debates about whether a deprived childhood is an existing condition" that absolves someone of responsibility. Vonnegut's position on this argument is clearly established in Cat's Cradle. After the release of ice-nine and the destruction of almost all life in the world, the middle Hoenikker child, Frank, spends his time creating an ant farm, where he observes that the ants have devised a system of cannibalizing one another to create water. Frank, whose ice-nine destroyed the world, is oblivious to his role in the destruction. No amount of baiting by the narrator, John, can get Frank to accept or admit any moral responsibility for the devastation he has caused. In fact, his response to John's comments is to say that he has grown up since the release of ice-nine. John's disgust with Frank's actions and his disavowal of responsibility illustrate Vonnegut's dismissal of the philosophical debate about whether there are excuses that negate actions. These excuses only camouflage a more serious issue-the absence of moral responsibility by those who fail to safeguard their fellow man. As a result, in Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut reimagines a world in which the collapse of social and moral responsibility can have destructive consequences for the world.

Cat's Cradle is an example of how imaginative, socially responsible literature can function in the world. The ending is bleak; nearly all life is destroyed, and there is no hope that the world can survive. Still, the ending argues that readers cannot just sit back and ignore the looming disaster presented by cold war technology. Although McLaughlin expresses concerns that modern writers have not taken up the baton of social responsibility, there are still writers willing to accept the challenge of changing the way their readers think about the world. Some novels, such as those in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series for example, continue the effort of writers to reimagine a world in which a few responsible people try to combat the carelessness of governments who fail to protect their citizenry. In Rowling's world, people reimagine a world in which the status quo of discrimination and hate are no longer tolerated. Although on the surface Rowling's adolescent novels might seem vastly different from Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, both authors hope to inspire their readers to meet the challenge presented by socially and morally responsible literature.

Source: Sheri Metzger Karmiol, Critical Essay on Cat's Cradle, in Novels for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Michael Bland
In the following essay, Bland argues that the game of cat's cradle has anthropological and cultural significance that reveals superstitious meanings about death, and that this device is a mechanism to provide continuity in Vonnegut's novel.
The cat's cradle probably originated as a primitive pastime in ancient China (Sigmund A. Lavine, The Games Indians Played. [NY: Dodd, 1974], 86). The game most likely came to America via the Eskimos, who in turn taught it to the American Indians (Lavine [,] 87). The tea trade brought cat's cradle to Europe from China in the 17th century (Camilla Gryski, Cat's Cradle, Owl's Eyes: A Book of String Games [NY: Morrow, 1984], 62). For many centuries the cat's cradle has been played and passed on from adults to children in almost every culture (Carolyn F. Jayne, String Figures and How to Make Them. [NY: Dover, 1962], xiv).

In his letter to Jonah [sic, et al.] in Cat's Cradle, Newt Hoenikker mentions the first and only time his father Felix tried to play a game with him. A prison inmate had just sent Felix a novel about the end of the world which was bound with a length of string that Felixb [sic] began to play cat's cradle with. Beyond the game's significance to the Hoenniker's personal relationship is the fact that Felix has continued the tradition of teaching the game to another generation.

Many cultures believe that the cat's cradle has magical properties. In Germany it is called hexenspeil, "witches game" (Gryski, 65). Before an Eskimo father leaves on a seal hunt, he tells his son not to play at home because he fears that the son's play may cause his fingers to become caught in the harpoon ropes (Lavine, 88). In the novel, Newt refers to Eskimos who play cat's cradle (113).

But the most relevant superstition belongs to the Navajos, who claim that cat's cradle was taught to them by the spider people and that it is to be played only in the winter, when the spiders are asleep. Legend says that if a spider sees a Navajo child playing cat's cradle, the child will have a horrible death (Lavine, 87).

The book that Felix Hoenikker receives from the inmate is 2000 A.D., a title suggesting both Christ's first and second comings. Here, Christ will appear on earth ten seconds before a nuclear holocaust. The apocalypse must anticipate, however, that Felix knows that ice-9 not atom bombs will end the world. Thus, when he uses the string that bound up the book to teach Newt cat's cradle, which resembles Christ's manger (Jayne, xiii), Felix joins the Eskimo and Navajo fathers who use the game as a superstitious way of protecting themselves and their children.

A number of images from Cat's Cradle echo the ominous superstitious beliefs cultures have attached to the string game. The lattice work holding up Papa Monzano's house resembles a cat's cradle. Jonah says the painting which Newt is working on resembles a spider's web, another reference to a cat's cradle and the possibility of horrible death. When asked what his painting is, Newt does not know, just as Felix does not know the terrible implications of his doomsday devices when he creates them.

The Eskimos played cat's cradle in the fall to catch the sun in the strands of the weave to delay the long winter night (Gryski, 72). In Vonnegut's novel eternal winter falls over the earth after an airplane crashes into the cradle-like lattice work of Papa Monzano's house and causes a sliver of ice-9 to fall into the ocean.

Vonnegut uses the cat's cradle image to [hold] his novel together in the same way that the prison inmate uses the string game to bind Felix's copy of 2000 A.D. Because the novel also links the game to destruction, Vonnegut, the former anthropology student, appears to be using ancient superstition to render a futuristic world.

Source: Michael Bland, "A Game of Black Humor in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle," in Notes on Contemporary Literature, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1994, pp. 8-9.

William S. Doxey

In the following article, Doxey suggests some possible sources for the characters' names in Cat's Cradle.

While some attention has been given to Vonnegut's use of names in Cat's Cradle (see Stanley Schatt, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [Boston: Twayne, 1976]), several important names remain unexamined, specifically those of Felix Hoenikker, Lionel B. Johnson, and Earl McCabe.

In Latin, "felix" means happy. "Hoenikker" may be pronounced the same as "Hanukkah," which is a Jewish holiday (also known as the "Feast of Lights") celebrated for eight days beginning on the 25th day of Kislev (3rd month of the Hebrew year corresponding to November-December). Hanukkah is marked by the exchange of gifts. The holiday commemorates the Jews' victory over the Syrians led by Judas Maccabeus, who reconquered Jerusalem and restored the temple in 165 B.C. "Hanukkah" is derived from the Hebrew hānakh, to be dedicated. Nobel Laureate Hoenikker is most certainly that, though it is through game-playing and following his curiosity that he makes his great discoveries.

Felix dies on Christmas Eve, and ice-nine-his most recent, and most lethal, formulation-is his gift to his children. "Some Happy Hanukkah!" Vonnegut seems to be saying.

As Bokonon, Lionel B. Johnson is a spiritual leader for the inhabitants of San Lorenzo. His message, cast in the form of calypso verses, is based upon his admonition that, "'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.'" The significance of his name seems to be in the fact that as "Johnson" he is a "son of John" who offers spiritual leadership as did his namesake John, author of the Book of Revelation which deals with "last things." It is Johnson-Bokonon who makes the last gesture of the novel by stating that were he a younger man he would "write a history of human stupidity" and then go up on the mountain and freeze himself into a statue "thumbing" his nose"-but at whom? Surely God; but rather than speaking the name of the [unnameable], he says "'at You Know Who.'"

The name of Earl McCabe-a deserter from the U.S. Marine Corps who, with Johnson, took control of San Lorenzo in 1922-may have no significance beyond itself. It may, however, contain an ironic reference to the Judas Maccabeus who, by leading his people to victory over the Syrians, caused the occasion for which the Hanukkah celebration was created. A parallel in Cat's Cradle may be seen in Felix Hoenikker's Hanukkah gift to his children eventually being used in San Lorenzo to freeze the world solid. The connection between the two characters seems to exist only on the level of names, but in accordance with Bokononist belief this in itself may be good evidence that the scientist and the deserter belonged to the same karass, a structure analagous to the checkerboard yet "as free-form as an amoeba."

Vonnegut's humor is of a cosmic type which, ultimately, enables the reader to smile at fate and perhaps even laugh. The extended significance of the names of Felix Hoenikker, Lionel B. Johnson, and Earl McCabe adds to one's realization of the comedy that is Cat's Cradle.

Source: William S. Doxey, "Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle," in Explicator, Vol. 37, No. 4, Summer 1979, p. 6.

Wayne D. McGinnis
In the following essay, McGinnis argues that Vonnegut's invention of ice-nine is not a device of science fiction. Instead, ice-nine serves as a metaphor to discuss the social problem of evil.
One of the more fascinating elements of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle (1963) is its fictional scientific discovery ice-nine, a seeded form of water which crystallizes or stays frozen at extremely high temperatures. Vonnegut fans and critics have long pondered the source and implications of ice-nine and have naturally turned to science for help; one of the first dissertations on Vonnegut contains this footnote: "I am indebted to Dr. William Brown, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, for pointing out to me that Russian scientists have isolated an 'ice-two' and 'ice-three.' This is further evidence that Vonnegut is a social critic who is dealing with problems of the present and foreseeable future." The bubble burst for this kind of speculation, however, when the "polywater" controversy was permanently shelved in 1973. The Soviet scientist Boris V. Deryagin, discoverer of what was taken to be the prototype of ice-nine, announced in that year that there was in reality no such form of dense water with "polywater's" amazing physical properties, properties of such interest to cold war-minded officials that a "polywater gap" had been declared in the mid to late '60's. Deryagin confirmed what some Western scientists had suggested all along, that polywater's properties could be attributed to contamination of ordinary water by outside agents such as dissolved quartz or even human sweat.

Had Vonnegut followers known the real source of ice-nine, all the speculation about this science fiction "invention" and its implications of social criticism could have ended long before, too. In 1969 Vonnegut addressed the American Physical Society in New York City and told of how he came upon the idea for ice-nine when he was working for General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early '50's. While working as a public relations man for GE, Vonnegut heard a story about H. G. Wells' visit to Schenectady in the '30's. Irving Langmuir, the Nobel Prize winning chemist (1881-1957), was recruited to entertain the dean of science fiction and thought up a story he hoped Wells would want to write: "It was about a form of ice which was stable at room temperature." Wells didn't take to the idea, and as Langmuir and Wells were both dead when he began writing Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut considered it his "found object." He tested the idea by suggesting an ice with such stability to a crystallographer at a cocktail party and was told that ice-nine was scientifically impossible (this episode antedates Deryagin's "confession" by ten years). Vonnegut still liked the idea: "Be that as it may, other scientific developments have been almost that horrible. The idea of Ice-9 had a certain moral validity at any rate, even though scientifically it had to be pure bunk" ( Opinions, p. 97).

Given this overriding moral validity, to insist on the mere contemporary social implications of ice-nine, or to make it some amazing science fiction contraption is to distort Vonnegut's purpose for basing a fiction on it. Because God speaks to Job from out of a whirlwind, we do not call the book of Job a piece of science fiction, nor do we treat the exposition of Job's problems as a piece of social criticism of the Old Testament era. Like Job and Candide and Ra[s]selas and many other parables, Cat's Cradle uses extraordinary devices as metaphors for age-old, universal problems. The ice-nine metaphor is closest to the poetic metaphor Frost uses in his poem "Fire and Ice"; morally, it represents an embodiment of the destructive principle or "evil." Scientifically, ice-nine is perhaps closest related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics' proposition of the concept of entropy, the final inert amalgamation of all matter and energy in the universe, as much a philosophic as a physical concept. Vonnegut has been robbed long enough of his poetic mantle by well meaning but misguided science fiction addicts and social critics. Since we have the origin of ice-nine from Vonnegut himself, let us place the writer of Cat's Cradle in the universal moral arena where he belongs.

Source: Wayne D. McGinnis, "The Source and Implications of Ice-Nine in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle," in American Notes & Queries, Vol. 13, No. 3, November 1974, pp. 40-41.

Baum, Rudy M., "Kurt Vonnegut," in Chemical & Engineering News, Vol. 85, No. 17, April 23, 2007, p. 3.

Boyer, Paul, "From Activism to Apathy: The American People and Nuclear Weapons, 1963-1980," in the Journal of American History, Vol. 70, No. 4, March 1984, pp. 821-44.

Bryan, C. D. B., "Kurt Vonnegut, Head Bokononist," in the New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1969, p. 2.

Caldwell, Kara, "A Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut," in University News, April 16, 2007, http://media.www.unews.com/media/storage/paper274/news/2007/04/16/Forum/A.Tribute.To.Kurt.Vonnegut-2844051.shtml (accessed December 19, 2007).

Einstein, Albert, "Letter to Society for Social Responsibility in Science," reprinted in "Social Responsibility in Science," in Science, Vol. 112, No. 2921, December 22, 1950, pp. 760-61.

Grossman, Lev, "Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007," in Time, April 12, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1609650,00.html (accessed December 19, 2007).

Jennings, Peter, and Todd Brewster, "Into the Streets 1961-1969," in the Century, ABC Television Group, 1998, pp. 373-75.

Mason, Elinor, "Moral Responsibility," in Philosophical Books, Vol. 46, No. 4, October 2005, pp. 343-53.

McLaughlin, Robert L., "Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World," in Symploke, Vol. 12, Nos. 1-2, 2004, pp. 53-68.

Sawyer, Gary, "Vonnegut's Work Will Be Read for Ages," in Herald & Review, April 15, 2007.

Selgelid, Michael J., "A Tale of Two Studies: Ethics, Bioterrorism, and the Censorship of Science," in Hastings Center Report, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2007, pp. 35-43.

Southern, Terry, "After the Bomb, Dad Came Up with Ice," in the New York Times, June 3, 1963.

Standish, David, Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, edited by William Rodney Allen, University Press of Mississippi, 1988, pp. 76-110; originally published in Playboy, Vol. 20, July 1973.

Trager, James, The People's Chronology: A Year-By-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present, Henry Holt, 1992, pp. 958-87.

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., Cat's Cradle, Dial, 2006.

Diederich, Bernard, Papa Doc: Haiti & Its Dictator, Marcus Weiner, 1990.

Vonnegut modeled San Lorenzo and its dictator, "Papa" Monzano, on Haiti and its dictator, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier. This book examines Duvalier's metamorphosis from country doctor to ruthless dictator.

Kelly, Cynthia, ed., The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses and Historians, Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

This book is a collection of essays, excerpts from books, and articles that creates a picture of the people who developed the atomic bomb, the policy that led to its use, and the ethical implications of its use.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, The Vonnegut Effect, University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

This book is a study of how Vonnegut's work reflects the cultural and social changes from 1964 to 2004.

Walker, J. Samuel, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic Bombs against Japan, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

This book is an analysis of the events that led the United States to decide to use atomic bombs against Japan.

Weeramantry, C., Nuclear Weapons and Scientific Responsibility, Springer, 2000.

This book explores the responsibility that scientists must assume in agreeing to hire themselves out to whatever nations offer employment. The author tries to alert scientists to the importance of conscience and legality as essential issues of their work.

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Making Idiots of Us All: Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) Revisited

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Making Idiots of Us All: Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) Revisited

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When he taught fiction writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the '60s, Kurt Vonnegut would remind his students they were in the entertainment business. Writing might be a merciless process, sure, but what comes out the other end has to be fun. Maybe it's this - the fun factor - that's meant his own work has sometimes been considered not as literary or highbrow as that of his contemporaries. Not for him the endless wordplay of Pynchon, the deadpan psychological excavations of DeLillo or the absurdities of Heller. His writing can feel cartoonish, brusque and broad-strokes, and Cat's Cradle, with its short chapters reading like a succession of comedy sketches, is perhaps the apotheosis of this. Yet, despite its weightlessness, it packs a serious punch.

Vonnegut's style is inimitable: absurd characters and fantastical situations depicted with such assurance you can't help but take them seriously. His number one trick is to use flamboyant anti-realism to convey realistic emotions. In his essay collection Fates Worse Than Death, he explains why he does so, aligning himself with the great Donald Barthelme as an 'aggressively unconventional storyteller' who tries to build 'dwellings such as no-one has ever seen before, but which prove to be eminently inhabitable.' This boldness might make his work reductive in some sense; but it doesn't matter, because it's also the reason for its brilliance.

Cat's Cradle 's dissolute narrator, John, sets out to write a history of the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and becomes embroiled in the life of Felix Hoenikker, the fictional father of the bomb, and his three children. In a completely improbable plot, John ends up on San Lorenzo, a made-up Caribbean island, with the Hoenikker siblings and various other unlikely characters. Here, Vonnegut stages an end-of-the-world black comedy - one that both looks at the dark historical moment in which it was written, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and also spreads its existential wings far further.

Lots of Vonnegut's aphorisms are well known, but one with an especially strong resonance is: 'I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.' Cat's Cradle takes up this proposition: its asks us "what is there to live for?' As for an answer, it's brimming with pessimism - but is this the whole story? And why would Vonnegut explore this question in a setting that's little other than a hallucinatory apocalypse? Surely that's loading the dice.

San Lorenzo is a mishmash of crude clichés if ever there were one - Benjamin Kunkel shows how in his brilliant introduction to the 2008 edition: 'it boasts a dictator called 'Papa' (shades of Haiti's 'Papa Doc' Duvalier?), a tutelary sex goddess (Argentina's Eva Peron?), a retired Nazi doctor (Mengele in Paraguay?) and a savagely exploitative history of sugar cultivation (several candidates here).' It's a ludicrous place, where reality is fashioned entirely to suit the contours of Vonnegut's imagination. It's this that allows it to be the perfect stage for a showdown between two "ultimate sources of meaning" - two ways to keep pessimism at bay - religion and science.

The religion of Bokononism rules San Lorenzo, but covertly - no one claims outright to be a Bokononist; it'd get you get hung on the Game of Thrones-like 'hook' if you did. Bokonon himself (in my eyes, a cartoonish take on Ghandi) is spectacularly evasive - he's not been seen for years. And the religion's key tenet is that it's a lie. In other words, it's profound, but empty. It offers wisdom and meaning, but undercuts this by reminding you that this succour is utter bollocks. The fourteenth book of Bokonon asks: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years? The answer? 'Nothing.' If anything should signal the end of illusion and the beginning of existential despair, it's a religion that relentlessly reveals itself to be a joke. The weird thing, though, is the characters of Cat's Cradle still draw strength from it. John, too, slowly turns into a Bokononist. They know they're fools to believe it, yet they still do.

The only bit of Bokononist philosophy that's not shrouded in self-refuting riddles is the outlandish, but great, concept of boko-maru (pressing the bare soles of your feet against someone else's). The importance of this practice as a way of expressing love suggests a shade of hope beyond the meaningless farting around. It means that Bokononism is part of Vonnegut's deep, mocking pessimism ¬- but simultaneously contains a sliver of hope and redemption. How does that square with the fact that Vonnegut was a staunch humanist, and honorary president of the American Humanist Association? I don't know. Maybe he just thought that while religion might be based on illusion, you can't deny that it offers its consolations.

Science, on the other hand, is as flesh-and-blood real as you can get - yet what do we do with it? According to Vonnegut: destruction. (Bear in mind the 1963 context - the world had just narrowly avoided nuclear disaster.) In Cat's Cradle, the atomic bomb has a mutant twin: ice-nine, a substance that can freeze all life on earth. Hoenikker invents it while working on the bomb, and it's clear that he develops them both for a sole purpose - the pursuit of knowledge. Vonnegut's not condemning the truths that science leads to, though. He's just showing, with ice-nine, that we can pursue science in order to understand the universe, but that we seem hard-pressed to use this power of understanding for good.

This deep pessimism about our pursuit of science continues with the fact that Hoenikker's kids - who each inherit a Mason jar of ice-nine - choose to use it. The only likeable one of the trio, Newt, is one of the novel's few genuinely warm characters. And yet when it comes to ice-nine, 'there was no talk of morals.' Is this Vonnegut suggesting that Newt has inherited flickers of his father's cold amorality? Or maybe it's the fact that we can't get science and morality to square up. Our imaginations fall into the gap in between - the God-like powers of science dazzle so much that we're blind to its moral implications. Having nice guy Newt be a part of this, too, might be Vonnegut's way of saying that the awesome powers of science - like those of religion - make idiots of us all.

Cat's Cradle 's take on religion and science, then, is that we stumble around searching for meaning, grasp like fools at the totalising narratives they offer, and remain determinedly oblivious to the compromises they require. Isn't this sad? Maybe instead, we should just be farting around - and occasionally putting the soles of our feet together.

Cat's Cradle remains in print, published by Penguin. Painting by Baila Goldenthal

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The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Making Idiots Of Us All: Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (1963) Revistied

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When he taught fiction writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the '60s, Kurt Vonnegut would remind his students they were in the entertainment business. Writing might be a merciless process, sure, but what comes out the other end has to be fun.

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Postmodernism in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

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Postmodernism in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

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"No damn cat, and no damn cradle." (Vonnegut 66). This quote encompasses the satiric postmodern themes of absolute truth in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. There are several significantly strong postmodern concepts Vonnegut brings into view in this novel. First is the idea of truth, which he satirizes though the religion Bokononism. Second, is the idea of progress and how society views that progress only betters mankind, and brings it good fortune. The third concept is the concept of absolute knowledge and the idea of attaining it through science and experimentation, which relates to the themes of progress through his use parody. The postmodern influence of Vonnegut's black humor and his satire can be seen when analyzed through the discussions in Jim Powell's Postmodernism for Beginners.

First off, what is postmodernism? Well "it has something to do with skepticism about Grand Narratives" (Powell). Cat's Cradle is a highly postmodern text because it parodies the Grand Narrative of absolute truth and the modern ideas of progress. Vonnegut uses Cat's Cradle to satire the ideas society holds about progress and how it is achieved through the pursuit of truth; the pursuit of knowledge gained through science and experimentation. Society seems to believe that it can better itself through obtaining empirical, scientific data about the world around us. This is a belief of Modernism. This belief is that the more man knows about the nature of how things work or the more knowledge society obtains, the better off it is. This is a modern idea which comes from the Enlightenment Era also known as the Age of Reason. "Probably the main value of the age, besides reason, was the idea of progress." (Powell). But this is a belief highly criticized by the principles of Postmodernism as well as by Vonnegut. A renowned example of postmodernism's questioning of this modern forgery is the creation of the atom bomb (which appears in the novel). Supposedly the progression of society into the realms of science, discovery, and knowledge, leads the world to the ever-nearing goal of a utopia. However the only benefit one of society's greatest scientific discoveries, in this case the atomic bomb, was the capacity and ramifications of endings hundreds of thousands of lives. So does this pursuit of science, of knowledge, of truth, really lead society to the bettering of mankind? Vonnegut uses this example in Cat's Cradle. This is one of the characteristics of the novel which makes it a postmodern work of art.

Vonnegut uses the plot of Cat's Cradle to make a postmodern parody of how science really does not lead to a utopia. In chapter 66 of the novel, Papa (the leader in San Lorenzo) suffers from a mysterious ailment and right before passing out he says "'You,' he said to Frank hoarsely, 'you - Franklin Hoenikker - you will be the next President of San Lorenzo. Science - you have science. Science is the strongest thing there is.' 'Science' said 'Papa' 'Ice'" (Vonnegut 146). He elects to make Frank Hoenikker the new president of San Lorenzo because he thinks he is about to die. He chooses Frank because he knows of his possession of Ice-Nine (which happens to be the greatest and newest scientific discovery of mankind in the novel). The satire is this: Papa assumes Frank would be the best option for President because he has science; Ice-Nine. Papa's ideas about how science betters society reflect the Modern idea of the concept. However, later in the novel, the reader discovers that Ice-Nine brings about the end of the world. Vonnegut's satire reflects the postmodern concept that pursuing a utopia through science is a facetious pursuit because the further mankind dives into scientific discovery, the more destructive society becomes.

Vonnegut uses a religion he created for the novel called Bokononism to convey society's misconceptions about the usefulness of truth. Bokononism is a religion that identifies with its own falseness. It rejoices in accepting that its ideals are not true. In The Books of Bokonon (the bokononist equivalent of the Christian bible) it states to "Live by the foma (harmless untruths) that make you brave and kind and happy and healthy." Bokononists see that a religion does not have to be true to be useful. The religion shows its followers that the ideals of a religion can be beneficial to oneself without them being based on ultimate truth. In the novel Vonnegut uses the island of San Lorenzo to portray how lies can help mankind more than truth. The island is extremely poverty stricken and they have no means of building the island's economy or natural resources to make it an island worth living on. So instead of attempting to do so, the citizens confide in the hope which their religion can bring them, regardless of whether it's true or not. It can bring them hope and happiness nonetheless. "'Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible'" (Vonnegut 172). This is a postmodern theme because it shows how gaining all truth, does not really better society in all cases, in fact in this case truth becomes the very antithesis of benefit. From a modern perspective it is assumed that gaining knowledge leads to good things, and that seeing beyond falseness brings mankind one step closer to a utopia. However from a postmodern outlook, in example the outlook of Vonnegut's Bokonism, this truth really leads society no closer to a perfect society, it actually causes deviation from it. Vonnegut uses Bokononism to parallel with the postmodern idea of there not being a single all-knowing religious being. Bokononism is used to parody the concept of a Grand Narrative. This is a postmodern idea, "We are beginning to realize that we live in a world of man-made signs and symbols, and have begun to play around with those signs and symbols humorously and ironically so that we are not enslaved to them. This often means accepting a Grand Narrative but having an ironic attitude toward it" (Powell). Bokononism is a perfect example of this kind of irony, in fact the entire novel is, "The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: 'All of the things I am about to tell you are shameless lies'" (Vonnegut 5).

Vonnegut goes on to satire these principles further, mainly the idea of progress through knowledge. Early in the novel, the main character has a conversation with two other characters and they land on the subject of the secret of life:

"'What is the secret of life?' I asked.
'I forget,' said Sandra.
'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found something out about protein."
'Yeah,' said Sandra, "that's it."

Vonnegut's sense of humor is directly in play here, he toys with the idea that discovering the secret of life would lead society to a catalyst of transcendence into depths of progression never seen before. However, the discovery of "the secret of life" in Cat's Cradle, leads to nothing. The fact about the importance and beneficial uses of protein to the human diet does nothing for society. It is merely a nifty fact and it does not lead mankind into new fields of undiscovered enlightenment or progress. Vonnegut uses postmodern irony to show that knowledge does not always mean progress, and that progress is not always beneficial. The author uses this comedic sense of irony throughout the entire novel, and he never does it without it having a postmodern twist. Later in the novel, several characters are talking about science and how wonderful it is. Yet Vonnegut makes sure to use the word "wonderful" very satirically.

"'How can anybody in his right mind be against science?' asked Crosby.'
I'd be dead now if it wasn't for Penicillin,' said Hazel. 'And so would my mother.'
'How old is your mother?' I inquired.
'A hundred and six. Isn't that wonderful?' (Vonnegut 231).

As you can see, Vonnegut's "jokes" are always flavored with a postmodern punch-line. This is ironic because it displays how science is not always a benefactor to an individual. In a modern perspective, it would be assumed that science -the pursuit of knowledge through collection of observation and empirical data- benefits people. However Vonnegut uses his postmodern irony to show that this is not always true. Clearly, just because a person's life is prolonged that does not mean they are in better shape. The author uses this satiric sense of how "wonderful" science is to convey these postmodern ideas.

One of the most significant examples of Vonnegut's postmodern attitude in Cat's Cradle is the entire symbol his novel is based on and titled after. The symbol of a " Cat's Cradle " (which is a design that can be made by threading string between one's hands) plays an extremely important role in the novel. Vonnegut uses this to symbolize how all of mankind's ideas and "truths" are really based upon lies, or narratives. Everything we accept as truth is either a myth legitimized by the necessity for its own creation, or science, which is a narrative that cannot even legitimize itself. In the novel the main character is talking with another character named Newt, and Newt says,

"'No wonder kids grow up so crazy. A Cat's Cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look at all those X's...'
'And?'
'No damn cat, and no damn cradle'" (Vonnegut 166).

This dialogue expresses everything the symbol represents, which is all of the lies mankind accepts as truth. What Vonnegut is really pulling into view here is that no one has the authority to say what is true, or really even define what truth means. In addition, that no one can define how much more useful one "truth" is than others, because it all depends on the individual. And moreover, that in reality, these truths are all ultimately untruths, because they are based on narratives- myths. This is an exceptional example of Vonnegut's understanding of postmodernism, and his use of its concepts in Cat's Cradle.

Vonnegut can certainly be considered a postmodern author. His satiric voice makes use of postmodernism and the irony of it holds for Grand Narratives. He eloquently constructs a tale filled with parodies of absolute truth and modern concepts. These parodies express postmodernisms key principles and show the flaws in modern ethic. Vonnegut's glorifications of untruths and his convey of modern shortcomings paired with his satire of Grand Narratives makes Cat's Cradle a literary piece of postmodern art.

References

Powell, Jim. Postmodernism for Beginners. Danbury: For Beginners LLC, 1998. Print.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle. New York, NY: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1998. Print.

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Postmodernism in Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle"

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"No damn cat, and no damn cradle." (Vonnegut 66). This quote encompasses the satiric postmodern themes of absolute truth in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. There are several significantly strong postmodern concepts Vonnegut brings into view in this novel. First is the idea of truth, which he satirizes though the religion Bokononism.

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Cat's Cradle: The Apocalypse of Human Thought

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Cat's Cradle: The Apocalypse of Human Thought

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From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes 1984 Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays.

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During the Two Minutes of Hate, Emmanuel Goldstein's face is shown on the telescreen and horrible screeches are heard in response. There are a number of different feelings and emotions going through people's minds.

" Before the Hate had proceeded...

View All Answers

From the text:

'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it

is. I'm too busy to take them. and Tom won't be back from work in time.'

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This is a question that needs a lot more detail than this short-answer space has. Newspeak is a language desined to destroy language. It is designed to break down the human spirit: to destroy the human ability to express emotion. Essentially, the...

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During the Two Minutes of Hate, Emmanuel Goldstein's face is shown on the telescreen and horrible screeches are heard in response. There are a number of different feelings and emotions going through people's minds. " Before the Hate had proceeded... View All Answers From the text: 'They're disappointed because they couldn't go to see the hanging, that's what it is.

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George Orwell | Biography, Books, & Facts

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George Orwell: George Orwell, English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).

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1984 by George Orwell, Part 1: Crash Course Literature 401

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George Orwell's 1984, Part 2: Crash Course Literature 402

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Microsoft President Brad Smith is optimistic about the potential of facial recognition technology to solve a range of societal issues, like finding missing children and diagnosing diseases. But he also has serious concerns about a future in which facial recognition spreads without strong regulations.

Smith outlined his fears during a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. Thursday.

"Technology is making possible a new type of mass surveillance," he said. "It is becoming possible for the state, for a government, to follow anyone anywhere. It's making it impossible for the government or state to follow everyone everywhere."

Smith raised three key concerns about the future of facial recognition. The technology has the potential to amplify bias against women and people of color. It can lead to invasions of privacy and, critically, it allows governments to monitor citizens in ways never before seen.

It is becoming possible for the state, for a government, to follow anyone anywhere. It's making it impossible for the government or state to follow everyone everywhere.

"The future I just described has been written about," Smith said. "It was almost 70 years ago that it was addressed by George Orwell and he painted a picture of Big Brother watching our every move."

Microsoft is calling for the federal government to enact laws governing facial recognition technology that focus on issues like consent, third-party testing, fairness, and privacy to avoid a future "with tech companies forced to choose between social responsibility and market success."

"If we fail to think these things through, we run the risk that we're going to suddenly find ourselves in the year 2024 and our lives are going to look a little too much like they came out of the book '1984,'" Smith said.

But the onus isn't simply on regulators and law enforcement. The American Civil Liberties Union has repeatedly raised concerns about lawful implementations of facial recognition technology, calling out Amazon's software in particular.

Smith wants to see tech companies proactively adopting policies that prohibit abuse of the technology and he hopes to hold Microsoft up as an example. On Thursday, the Redmond, Wash., company announced it will adopt six principles for its facial recognition software: fairness, transparency, accountability, non-discrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance. During his remarks, Smith said Microsoft has turned down several deals because the company was concerned about how the technology would be implemented.

"The world will get better if people can put this technology to work but there are new risks and new challenges so, once again, we should think about the world we want to create before we move forward," he said.

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Could '1984' become reality by 2024? Microsoft's Brad Smith calls for regulation of facial recognition

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Microsoft President Brad Smith is optimistic about the potential of facial recognition technology to solve a range of societal issues, like finding missing children and diagnosing diseases. But he also has serious concerns about a future in which facial recognition spreads without strong...

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Snowden says government spying worse than Orwellian

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Snowden says government spying worse than Orwellian

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. Set in a futuristic society where natural reproduction is replaced by artificial methods and people are conditioned for predetermined roles, the novel explores themes of individuality, freedom, and the dehumanizing effects of a highly controlled and pleasure-driven culture.

The story centers around Bernard Marx, an outsider in the conformist society, and John "the Savage," who was born outside the controlled environment and represents the clash between the dystopian world and the remnants of traditional values. Huxley's vision of a world where happiness is manufactured, emotions are suppressed, and conformity is prized provides a stark critique of the potential consequences of unchecked technological and societal advancements.

Brave New World remains relevant as a cautionary tale about the dangers of sacrificing individuality and critical thinking for the sake of stability and superficial happiness. The novel raises important ethical questions about the role of science, technology, and government in shaping human society. The enduring impact of Brave New World is reflected in its continued inclusion in literature curricula. In imagining a world that is pain-free but meaningless, Huxley borrows from Shakespeare's The Tempest. In turn, Brave New World heavily influenced George Orwell's and science-fiction in general.

Read the full plot summary, an in-depth analysis of Bernard Marx, and explanations of important quotes from Brave New World.

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Brave New World: Study Guide | SparkNotes

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From a general summary to chapter summaries to explanations of famous quotes, the SparkNotes Brave New World Study Guide has everything you need to ace quizzes, tests, and essays.

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Aldous Huxley, in full Aldous Leonard Huxley, (born July 26, 1894, Godalming, Surrey, England-died November 22, 1963, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), English novelist and critic gifted with an acute and far-ranging intelligence whose works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire. He remains best known for one novel, Brave New World (1932), a model for much dystopian science fiction that followed.

Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and was the third child of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley; his brothers included physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley and biologist Julian Huxley. He was educated at Eton, during which time he became partially blind because of keratitis. He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, and he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California.

Huxley established himself as a major author with his first two published novels, Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923); these are witty and malicious satires on the pretensions of the English literary and intellectual coteries of his day. Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) are works in a similar vein.

Brave New World (1932) marked a turning point in Huxley's career: like his earlier work, it is a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses Huxley's distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology. The novel presents a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State. The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to shoot barbs at the emptiness and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley's growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative. (Many of his subsequent works reflect this preoccupation, notably The Perennial Philosophy [1946].) In the novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), published soon after he moved to California, Huxley turned his attention to American culture.

Huxley's most important later works are The Devils of Loudun (1952), a detailed psychological study of a historical incident in which a group of 17th-century French nuns were allegedly the victims of demonic possession, and The Doors of Perception (1954), a book about Huxley's experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. His last novel, Island (1962), is a utopian vision of a Pacific Ocean society.

The author's lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century life, expressed most forcefully in Brave New World but also in one of his last essays, written for Encyclopædia Britannica's 1963 volume of The Great Ideas Today, about the conquest of space, make him one of the representative writers and intellectuals of that century.

J.E. Luebering.

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Aldous Huxley | Biography, Books, & Facts

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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), English writer best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). His works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire and for their ongoing exploration of the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century life.

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Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in

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Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in

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The Orwellian dystopia of Doublespeak is very much in vogue right now thanks to concerns over Trump's use of "alternative facts". But alternative facts are just the tip of a dystopian iceberg that owes more to the soft brainwashing technologies of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than it does to 1984's harsh Stalinist oppressions and propagandist trickery.

To grasp the Huxleyesque nature of current events we need see them as part of a culture increasingly pervaded by the ideas of neuroscience - what I have termed neuroculture.

The origins of neuroculture begin in early anatomical drawings and subsequent neuron doctrine in the late 1800s. This was the first time that the brain was understood as a discontinuous network of cells connected by what became known as synaptic gaps. Initially, scientists assumed these gaps were connected by electrical charges, but later revealed the existence of neurochemical transmissions. Brain researchers went on to discover more about brain functionality and subsequently started to intervene in underlying chemical processes.

On one hand, these chemical interventions point to possible inroads to understanding some crucial issues, relating to mental health, for example. But on the other, they warn of the potential of a looming dystopian future. Not, as we may think, defined by the forceful invasive probing of the brain in Room 101, but via much more subtle intermediations.

Soma

Huxley's Brave New World (1932) is about a dystopian society that is not controlled by fear, but rendered docile by happiness. The mantra of this society is "everybody's happy now". As Alex Hern argues in The Guardian, Huxley presents a more relevant authoritarian dystopia to that of 1984, one that can still be "pleasant to live in for the vast majority, sparking little mass resistance". The best dystopias are often dressed up as utopias.

Wikimedia Commons

It is Huxley's appeal to emotional conditioning that most significantly resonates with today's dystopian neurocultures. He noted the clear advantages of sidestepping intellectual engagement and instead appealing to emotional suggestibility to guide intentions and subdue nonconformity.

As such, to achieve its goal, the society of Brave New World combines two central modes of control. First, the widespread use of the joy-inducing pharmaceutical, Soma, and second, a hypnotic media propaganda machine that works less on reason than it does through "feely" encounters.

Today's neurocultures correspond to these technologies in conspicuous ways. To begin with, the rise of neuro-pharmaceuticals, like Prozac, have drawn attention to a growing societal need for self-medicated happiness. But equally alarming is the rise in prescriptions for ADHD treatments, like Ritalin, which control attention while simultaneously subduing difficult behaviour. The ADHD child's mental state is a kind of paradoxical docile attentiveness.

The College of Emotional Engineering

Comparisons can also be made between Huxley's College of Emotional Engineering and contemporary social media. In his book, the college is an important academic institution found in the same building as the Bureaux of Propaganda, with a unique focus on emotional suggestibility. This is where the feely scenarios, emotional slogans and hypnopedic rhymes are written. This kind of propaganda is for mass media consumption, but today's emotional engineering takes place in far more intimate and contagious arenas of social media.

For example, in 2014, Facebook took part in an experiment designed to make positive and negative emotions go viral. Researchers manipulated the news feeds of over 600,000 users in an attempt to make them pass on positive and negative emotions to others in their network.

rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com

The idea that social media acts as a vector for both positive and negative emotional contagions might help us to rethink Trump's ability to seemingly tap into certain negative feelings of disillusioned US voters. Certainly, the contagion of fake news is typically a poisonous concoction of fear and hate. But much of the populist appeal of Trump (and Brexit) has perhaps played on more joyful encounters with celebrity politicians than those experienced with the dry intellectual elites of conventional politics.

Roses or orchids?

The pervasiveness of today's neuroculture started with the neuroscientific emotional turn in the 1990s. Scientists realised that emotions are not distinct from pure reason, but enmeshed in the very networks of cognition. The way we think and behave is now assumed to be greatly determined by how we feel.

The seismic influence of this profound shift has extended beyond science to economic theories concerned with the neurochemicals that are supposed to affect decision making processes. It also underpins new models of consumer choice focused on the "buying brain". The advent of neuroeconomics, followed by neuromarketing, has resulted in further spin-offs in product design and branding informed by emotional brain processing. The consumer experience of a brand is now measured according to the frequency of brainwaves correlated with certain attentive and emotional states.

Perhaps there's nothing new in neuroculture. Advertisers have been trying to infect feelings since the advent of advertisements. Similarly, politicians have been kissing babies for affect since the age of the crowd. Maybe my idea of neuroculture is an example of what has been cynically termed neuro-speculation. But in an age hastened by social media and self-medication, there is a dystopic intensification of infected and manipulated feelings that cannot be ignored.

Not everyone agreed with Huxley's predictions of a neuroscientific dictatorship. One literary critic once compared him to a rabbit going down a hole only to think all the world was dark.

But it was the attention he received from scientists that should alert us to the profundity of his dystopia. In particular, the 20th century scientist Joseph Needham argued that scientific knowledge is not immune to political interferences. Needham called Huxley's Brave New World an "orchid garden" - a demonstration that scientific knowledge does not always lead to a bed of roses. Huxley, he noted, helps us to "see clearly what lies at the far end of certain inviting paths".

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Brave New World: the pill-popping, social media obsessed dystopia we live in

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The Orwellian dystopia of Doublespeak is very much in vogue right now thanks to concerns over Trump's use of "alternative facts". But alternative facts are just the tip of a dystopian iceberg that owes more to the soft brainwashing technologies of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than it does to 1984's harsh Stalinist oppressions and propagandist trickery.

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What "Orwellian" really means - Noah Tavlin

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Brave new world? Why the public might actually be ready for gene-edited babies

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Brave new world? Why the public might actually be ready for gene-edited babies

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Should we be able to genetically design our children before they are born - giving them the eye and hair color we prefer, deciding their sex and height, and even genetically manipulating their intelligence? Most, including top scientists and genetic counselors, say no. But what if the genetic manipulation was done in order to cure a debilitating or potentially fatal illness before the individual was even born? And what if this one genetic treatment could save the individual's descendants from inheriting the disorder, too? A recent meeting of non-scientists in Germany indicated that public opinion may be moving in the yes direction.

Though gene editing technology isn't yet at the point where we can genetically alter unborn individuals at the clinical level - by applying gene editing tools like CRISPR/Cas9 to embryos, sperm or egg cells - the technology is rapidly advancing.

Debate over the subject was rekindled Monday, when a Chinese researcher announced that he used CRISPR to create the world's first gene-edited babies. According to the Associated Press, He Jiankui said he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments. The treatment was designed to protect the children of an HIV-positive parent by disabling a gene that would have allowed the virus to enter their cells. The trial resulted in one pregnancy - twins who were born in November. According to the Associated Press, the researcher said:

I feel a strong responsibility that it's not just to make a first, but also make it an example. Society will decide what to do next.

The gene-editing community is grappling with the unexpected announcement, which has not been verified by independent review. The news, however, has not been well received by other researchers, with many of them condemning the action. Feng Zhang, one of the inventors of CRISPR, called for an immediate moratorium on gene-edited babies. Zhang wrote:

Not only do I see this as risky, but I am also deeply concerned about the lack of transparency surrounding this trial. All medical advances, gene editing or otherwise and particularly those that impact vulnerable populations, should be cautiously and thoughtfully tested, discussed openly with patients, physicians, scientists, and other community members, and implemented in an equitable way.

It's not unusual to see articles and reports in the media focusing on the worst possible scenarios when it comes to genome editing, as is often the case with new or particularly disruptive technologies. The mere mention of the topic tends to incite fears of a "New Eugenics" master race or exacerbation of medical inequalities along class lines - where the poor are barred from genetic interventions and the rich have easy access. Still others, such as some Catholic and Muslim groups, worry that genetic manipulation of any sort is interfering with divine plans.

These kinds of fears have been gradually loosening their hold on our imaginations, while the coolly-measured possibilities of gene editing - nothing more than a new and innovative medical tool - are winning over. And as with any new technology, it comes with a particular set of risks and benefits that must be taken into consideration. The slow change in public attitude toward gene editing is evident in groups such as Germany's Citizens' Delphi Germline Therapy project at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

After debating detailed information on the risks and benefits over the course of a few months, and undergoing a rigorous participation process that combined aspects of Citizens' Jury with the Delphi survey method, the group has called for the loosening of bans on germline gene editing research in Germany. Their final report was presented at Berlin Science Week in early November. And though their verdict only applies to the current ban in Germany, which includes a ban on basic research in germline cells, the group's decision could have an impact on regulations around the world. Indeed, the participants were keen on having Germany play a more active role in the development of international gene editing guidelines.

Regarding the Citizens' Jury and Delphi survey methods used, Ralf Grötker, who developed and carried out the project in collaboration with the Department of Science Communication at the Institute for German Studies at KIT, stated, "The process is geared towards working on a complex topic with a group of laypeople, empower them to make an informed judgment, and eventually reach recommendations for politicians." Though the group only consisted of 26 German citizens, the group was representative of the population, and the topic of gene editing was thoroughly investigated from a variety of angles.

The group acknowledged the risks of genome editing, such as unknown and off-target effects, but ultimately agreed that the way forward was to open the doors to germline gene editing research at the national and global levels. Their conclusions also echoed those made by genetics experts in a position statement published in the August 2017 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, which stated, "At this time, given the nature and number of unanswered scientific, ethical, and policy questions, it is inappropriate to perform germline gene editing that culminates in human pregnancy."

But to answer those scientific, ethical, and policy questions, basic research is crucial. And lines of communication need to be open between countries, and between scientists and non-scientists. Without these measures, misunderstandings and missed clinical opportunities will proliferate, along with the dangers of underground gene editing and gene editing tourism. Several governments around the world are grappling with heated and unresolved debates regarding germline gene editing, which in several cases appear to be impeding research.

Though a great deal of cooperation and knowledge exchange is taking place between countries, other nations have yet to move away from all-out bans on germline gene editing. Canada, for example, has criminalized germline gene editing under the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act. Penalties for the "crime" of germline gene tampering include a $500,000 CAD fine and up to 10 years of jail time.

Following a presentation at the annual Till & McCulloch Meetings of stem-cell and regenerative-medicine researchers, Bartha Knoppers, a health policy expert at McGill University in Montreal, said, Canada's "policy has simply shut down discussion (about gene editing). We need to start to talk." Some Canadian scientists worry that Canada is lagging behind in gene editing research, unable to fully participate in the global conversation taking place on this important subject.

At the other end of the spectrum are countries like Japan, where a proposal allowing for the use of gene editing tools in human embryos has been drafted. The new guidelines, set to be implemented in early 2019, would restrict manipulation of human embryos for reproduction, though this restriction would likely not be legally binding.

Though several countries have formal bans in place restricting germline gene editing, many of these same countries allow for somatic (or non-reproductive) gene editing applications, which is when gene editing tools are applied to adult cells. Somatic gene edits are not passed on to future generations, so there is less concern about the possible repercussions.
Kristen Hovet covers genetics, medical innovations, and the intersection of sociology and culture. Follow her on her website or Twitter @kristenhovet

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Brave new world? Why the public might actually be ready for gene-edited babies

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Should we be able to genetically design our children before they are born - giving them the eye and hair color we prefer, deciding their sex and height, and even genetically manipulating their intelligence? Most, including top scientists and genetic counselors , say no.

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’? (Published 2017)

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Which dystopian novel got it right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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History.com

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Contents

1. Henry Ford Invents the Model T Engine

2. Selling the Model T

3. A Publicity Stunt to the Top of a Scottish Mountain

4. Highland Park Assembles Model T's in Under 6 Hours

5. Origins of 'Tin Lizzie'

6. Anti-Semitic Newspaper Sold With Each Model T

7. Model T Ends, Model A Debuts

The Model T, sold by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927, was the earliest effort to make a car that most people could actually buy. Modern cars were first built in 1885 in Germany by Karl Benz, and the first American cars in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1893 by Charles and Frank Duryea. But just because they were available didn't mean that ordinary people could afford them.

The Model T was actually affordable and it became so popular at one point that a majority of Americans owned one, directly helping rural Americans become more connected with the rest of the country and leading to the numbered highway system. The manufacturing needs of the Model T went hand in hand with Ford's revolutionary modernization of the manufacturing process.

Henry Ford Invents the Model T Engine

By day he was chief engineer at Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit, but at night Henry Ford labored over a gasoline engine. He successfully tested one on Christmas Eve, 1893, with the help of his wife, Clara, taking a break from Christmas cooking. The engine worked for 30 seconds, long enough to confirm for Ford that he was on the right track.

Three years later, Ford developed the Quadcycle, a self-propelled vehicle. After two failed business ventures, the Ford Motor Company was born on June 16, 1903.

Did you know? Between 1913 and 1927, Ford factories produced more than 15 million Model Ts.

The production of the Model T was preceded by eight car models through which Ford developed various aspects that would eventually come together as the Model T.

Official Model T development began in January 1907, when Ford assembled a team comprised of engineer Childe Harold Wills, machinist C.J. Smith and draftsman Joseph Galamb in his small Detroit factory on Piquette Avenue.

Selling the Model T

Released on October 1, 1908, the Ford Model T was a self-starting vehicle with a left-sided steering wheel, featuring an enclosed four-cylinder engine with a detachable cylinder head and a one-piece cylinder block. Fashioned from vanadium alloy steel, it offered superior strength despite its light weight. It also featured a generous ground clearance that could take the worst roads, which made it particularly enticing to rural drivers. The Model T was the first Ford with all its parts built by the company itself.

Selling for $850, it was considered a reasonable value, though still slightly higher than the income of the average American worker. Ford's goal was to continue lowering prices.

After selling 10,607 Model Ts, Ford announced that the company would cease to sell the Model R or Model S cars, famously remarking that "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black."

A Publicity Stunt to the Top of a Scottish Mountain

Ford typically engineered publicity stunts to get his cars covered in British newspapers. In 1911, a Scottish car dealer proposed challenging his son Henry Alexander Jr. to drive a Model T to the summit of Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands, the highest mountain in the British Isles at 4,411 feet. The bet was that if he failed to reach the summit Alexander would lose his allowance.

Starting at nearby Fort William, the Model T drove over rocks, across bogs and through snow on a five-day journey. The car ascended to the summit using a zig-zag driving pattern.

After his descent, Alexander was greeted by a cheering crowd of hundreds, after which he made brake adjustments and drove the car back to his father's dealership in Edinburgh.

Following the publicity, over 14,000 Model Ts were sold in the UK. It was the last time Ford felt a publicity stunt was necessary to sell his cars there.

Highland Park Assembles Model T's in Under 6 Hours

By 1913, a new 60-acre factory was built in Highland Park to churn out Model Ts. At the time it was considered to be the biggest factory in the world, and the number of Ford employees more than doubled.

For this plant, Ford worked to improve the assembly line of the manufacturing process. On April 1 tests were run, an attempt to assemble a flywheel magneto for the Model T. This was the first moving assembly line ever, utilizing conveyor belts inspired by Chicago meatpacking plants.

Each aspect of assembly was transformed into moving assembly, which improved efficiency and cut manufacturing time. In six months the time to build a Model T was reduced from nine hours and fifty-four minutes for one motor to five hours and fifty-six minutes.

The factory was divided into sections, each assembling a single part of the car in an incremental building process. The Highland Park factory eventually featured 500 of these departments in its assembly line.

Origins of 'Tin Lizzie'

The nickname "Tin Lizzie" is often applied to the Model T, though its origin is unknown.

One tradition claims Lizzie was a generic name given to horses and was passed onto the Model T. Later, a San Antonio car dealer complained to the factory about ill-fitting doors on the car and asked if cars could be shipped without doors but include a tool kit for purchasers to cut their own, reminiscent of a tin can opener.

Another claim says that during a 1922 race at Pikes Peak, Colorado, participant Noel Bullock named his Model T "Old Liz," but its unkempt state made people compare it to a tin can, earning it the "Tin Lizzie" moniker. Unexpectedly, Bullock's car won and the nickname stuck to all Model Ts.

Anti-Semitic Newspaper Sold With Each Model T

Ford began to adopt anti-Semitic views and the Model T was used to spread them.

Ford's anti-Semitism was mainly expressed through the Dearborn Independent, which he purchased in 1919.

Also known as the Ford International Weekly, dealers were required to sell a subscription with each Model T, helping it reach a circulation topped only by the New York Post. Many dealers, unhappy with this arrangement, complained and tried to circumvent the policy.

The final Model T went down the assembly line on May 26, 1927. By December, the Dearborn Independent folded as well.

Model T Ends, Model A Debuts

Competition arose in the mid-1920s giving consumers about 10 times more choices of touring car models than a decade earlier. The Model T tried to compete, but sales dropped and it became considered old fashioned and was the frequent butt of popular jokes.

After much hesitation by Ford, it was announced in 1927 that Model Ts would no longer be manufactured. The new Ford called Model A debuted in December after having to scrap 40 thousand tools that could only be used to build Model Ts.

Sources

My Life and Work by Henry Ford, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, Page & Co., 1922

I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford, by Richard Snow, Scribner, May 2014

Why a Model T was driven to the top of Ben Nevis, by Steven McKenzie, BBC, May 17, 2018

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Model T: The First Car That Most People Could Afford to Buy

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The Model T, sold by the Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927, was the earliest effort to make a car that most people could actually buy. It became so popular at one point that a majority of Americans owned one, directly helping rural Americans become more connected with the rest of the country and leading to the numbered highway system.

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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Which Dystopian Novel Got It Right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’? (Published 2017)

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Which dystopian novel got it right: Orwell’s ‘1984’ or Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’?

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Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920. By the time he was eleven, he had already begun writing his own stories on butcher paper. His family moved fairly frequently, and he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. He had no further formal education, but he studied on his own at the library and continued to write. For several years, he earned money by selling newspapers on street corners. His first published story was "Hollerbochen's Dilemma," which appeared in 1938 in Imagination!, a magazine for amateur writers. In 1942 he was published in Weird Tales, the legendary pulp science-fiction magazine that fostered such luminaries of the genre as H. P. Lovecraft. Bradbury honed his sci-fi sensibility writing for popular television shows, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. He also ventured into screenplay writing (he wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1953 film Moby Dick). His book The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, established his reputation as a leading American writer of science fiction.

In the spring of 1950, while living with his family in a humble home in Venice, California, Bradbury began writing what was to become Fahrenheit 451 on pay-by-the-hour typewriters in the University of California at Los Angeles library basement. He finished the first draft, a shorter version called The Fireman, in just nine days. Following in the futuristic-dustpan tradition of George Orwell's 1984, Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953 and became Bradbury's most popular and widely read work of fiction. He produced a stage version of the novel at the Studio Theatre Playhouse in Los Angeles. The seminal French New Wave director François Truffaut also made a critically acclaimed film adaptation in 1967.

Bradbury has received many awards for his writing and has been honored in numerous ways. Most notably, Apollo astronauts named the Dandelion Crater on the moon after his novel Dandelion Wine. In addition to his novels, screenplays, and scripts for television, Bradbury has written two musicals, co-written two "space-age cantatas," collaborated on an Academy Award-nominated animation short called Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and started his own television series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre. Bradbury, who still lives in California, continues to write and is acknowledged as one of the masters of the science-fiction genre. Although he is recognized primarily for his ideas and sometimes denigrated for his writing style (which some find alternately dry and maudlin), Bradbury nonetheless retains his place among important literary science-fiction talents and visionaries like Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, George Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick.

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Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451 Background | SparkNotes

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Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920. By the time he was eleven, he had already begun writing his own stories on butcher paper. His family moved fairly frequently, and he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938.

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World War II

The politics of the period helped shape Fahrenheit 451. The novel was written less than a decade after the end of World War II in 1945. Before and during the war Germany's Nazi regime waged a campaign of intense censorship that included book burning and exerted broad control over media, including radio, film, and print. The totalitarian government of Soviet Russia under Joseph Stalin, who led its Community Party from 1929 to 1953, spread propaganda and destroyed and censored books to control information and eliminate opposition.

Nuclear War

Science fiction in the 1950s often focused on the possibilities and aftermath of nuclear war. Atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, just eight years before the publication of Fahrenheit 451. The possibility of annihilation by nuclear weapons led to the Cold War-a political standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, both of whom had nuclear capabilities-and created a state of tension between the countries that lasted for decades. The possibility that life on Earth could come to an end was a powerful stimulus to Ray Bradbury's imagination. During the period in which Bradbury revised "The Fireman," an earlier version of Fahrenheit 451, the United States tested the hydrogen bomb (1952). The Soviets, not to be outdone, exploded their version in 1953.

McCarthyism

Bradbury said he was not writing in direct response to Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign. However, McCarthy's activities coincided with the writing and publication of the novel, and many aspects of the senator's campaign dovetail with the novel's themes of censorship and conformity. Beginning with a speech in 1950, McCarthy used Americans' increasing fears of Soviet aggression to fuel an anti-Communist campaign that targeted government employees and public figures. He encouraged witnesses to name other "Communists" to show that they were no longer affiliated with the party, and his influence was so strong that many politicians and media figures were unwilling to criticize him for fear of becoming targets of "McCarthyism." McCarthy continued to zealously pursue suspected Communists as chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a post he assumed in 1953. His targets included the Voice of America, a government-run overseas radio broadcasting program; the State Department's international libraries, whose librarians were forced to remove thousands of books from their shelves; and the U.S. Army, against which his tactics were so aggressive that popular opinion finally turned against him.

Rise of Television

The narcotic influence of television is emphasized in Fahrenheit 451. Television was invented in 1927, but commercial television broadcasting only became available in 1947. Within a decade, the popularity of television exploded, and it grew from a rarity to a common feature in many American homes. TV Guide, for example, was the best-selling magazine in the 1950s.

Television quickly became a dominant force in American culture, and it helped reshape America from a collection of regional cultures to a more unified national culture. With television came more advertising, as the ability of television to reach a mass audience created the opportunity for businesses to persuade more people than ever to buy their products. In Fahrenheit 451 a family's affluence is measured by how many wall-sized screens dominate the parlor. Television has destroyed the public's interest in reading, and individual choice is eclipsed by social conformity.

Dystopian Fiction

Dystopian works constitute a genre within science fiction. Presenting the world at its worst, these cautionary tales portray the negative consequences of events, technologies, and ideological shifts that are initially accepted as beneficial by characters in the texts. Earlier examples include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which appeared in 1932, and George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949. Both works imagine worlds under dictatorships focused on repressing individual choice and expression.

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The politics of the period helped shape Fahrenheit 451. The novel was written less than a decade after the end of World War II in 1945. Before and during the war Germany's Nazi regime waged a campaign of intense censorship that included book burning and exerted broad control over media, including radio, film, and print.

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Fahrenheit 451 is based on a short story called “The Fireman” written by Bradbury in 1951 and later expanded into a full novel in 1953. The Fahrenheit 451 study guide contains a biography of Ray Br...

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Fahrenheit 451 (2018) Official Trailer ft. Michael B. Jordan & Michael Shannon | HBO

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Photo: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images

Quick Facts "I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention. I never question. I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count.""I don't write science fiction. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal.""If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.""I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it."

Who Was Ray Bradbury?

Ray Bradbury was an American fantasy and horror author who rejected being categorized as a science fiction author, claiming that his work was based on the fantastical and unreal. His best known novel is Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian study of future American society in which critical thought is outlawed. He is also remembered for several other popular works, including The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury won the Pulitzer in 2007, and is one of the most celebrated authors of the 21st century.

Early Life

Author Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a lineman for power and telephone utilities, and Ester Moberg Bradbury, a Swedish immigrant. Bradbury enjoyed a relatively idyllic childhood in Waukegan, which he later incorporated into several semi-autobiographical novels and short stories. As a child, he was a huge fan of magicians, and a voracious reader of adventure and fantasy fiction - especially L. Frank Baum, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Bradbury decided to become a writer at about age 12 or 13. He later said that he made the decision in hopes of emulating his heroes, and to "live forever" through his fiction.

Bradbury's family moved to Los Angeles, California in 1934. As a teenager, he participated in his school's drama club and occasionally befriended Hollywood celebrities. His first official pay as a writer came for contributing a joke to George Burns' Burns & Allen Show. After graduation from high school in 1938, Bradbury couldn't afford to go to college, so he went to the local library instead. "Libraries raised me," he later said. "I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression, and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

Books and Short Stories

To support himself while he wrote, Bradbury sold newspapers. He published his first short story in a fan magazine in 1938, the same year he graduated from high school. The next year, he published four issues of his own fan magazine, Futuria Fantasia. Nearly every piece in the magazine was written by Bradbury himself; he used a variety of pseudonyms to try to hide the fact that the magazine was a virtual one-man show. "I was still years away from writing my first good short story," he later said, "but I could see my future. I knew where I wanted to go."

Bradbury sold his first professional piece, the story "Pendulum," in November 1941, just a month before the United States entered World War II, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Ruled ineligible for military service by his local draft board because of his vision problems, Bradbury became a full-time writer by early 1943. His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.

That same year, he married Marguerite "Maggie" McClure, whom he met while she was working as a clerk at a bookstore. McClure was the breadwinner in the early days of their marriage, supporting Bradbury as he worked on his writing for little to no pay. The couple had four daughters, Susan (1949), Ramona (1951), Bettina (1955) and Alexandra (1958).

In 1950, Bradbury published his first major work, The Martian Chronicles, which detailed the conflict between humans colonizing the red planet and the native Martians they encountered there. While taken by many to be a work of science fiction, Bradbury himself considered it to be fantasy. "I don't write science fiction," he said. "Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?" Television and comic book adaptations of Bradbury's short stories began to appear in 1951, introducing him to a wider audience.

Bradbury's best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, became an instant classic in the era of McCarthyism for its exploration of themes of censorship and conformity. In 2007 Bradbury himself disputed that censorship was the main theme of Fahrenheit 451, instead explaining the book as a story about how television drives away interest in reading: "Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was."

Despite his apparent distaste for television, Bradbury advocated for film adaptations of his work. He wrote numerous screenplays and treatments, including a 1956 take on Moby Dick. In 1986, Bradbury developed his own HBO television series, allowing him to produce adaptations of his short stories. The series ran until 1992.

Famously prolific, Bradbury wrote for several hours every day throughout his entire life, allowing him to publish more than 30 books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, screenplays and plays.

Though Bradbury won many honors and awards throughout his life, his favorite was perhaps being named "ideas consultant" for the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. "Can you imagine how excited I was?" he later said about the honor. "'Cause I'm changing lives, and that's the thing. If you can build a good museum, if you can make a good film, if you can build a good world's fair, if you can build a good mall, you're changing the future. You're influencing people, so that they'll get up in the morning and say, 'Hey, it's worthwhile going to work.' That's my function, and it should be the function of every science fiction writer around. To offer hope. To name the problem and then offer the solution. And I do, all the time."

Adaptation of 'Fahrenheit 451'

In 2018, HBO released a film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451, starring Michael Shannon and Michael B. Jordan, the latter also serving as executive producer on the project.

Death and Legacy

Bradbury wrote well into his 80s, dictating for three hours at a time to one of his daughters, who would transcribe his words to the page. Though curtailing much of his traveling and public appearances, he granted several interviews in his latter years and helped raise funds for his local library.

In 2007, Bradbury received a special citation from the Pulitzer board for his "distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy." In his final years, Bradbury felt content about his place in the annals of science fiction history, having achieved his childhood ambition of living forever through his work. "I don't need to be vindicated," he said, "and I don't want attention. I never question. I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count."

Bradbury died in Los Angeles on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91. He was survived by daughters Susan, Ramona, Bettina and Alexandra, as well as several grandchildren. An inspiration to writers, teachers and science-fiction enthusiasts, among countless others, Bradbury's fascinating works will be remembered for decades to come.

Fact Check

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Quick Facts "I don't need to be vindicated, and I don't want attention. I never question. I never ask anyone else's opinion. They don't count." "I don't write science fiction. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal."

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The Incendiary History Behind Book Burning and 'Fahrenheit 451'

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The HBO version of 'Fahrenheit 451' adds a modern twist to the centuries-long history of burning books-one in which the story plays a role

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"The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury (Short Story)

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"The Pedestrian" by Ray Bradbury (Short Story)

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Dreams of Ray Bradbury: Predictions That Came True

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Dreams of Ray Bradbury: Predictions That Came True

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The literary, tech and thinking worlds are mourning the loss of Ray Bradbury, the revered science-fiction writer who died Wednesday at age 91. Bradbury, best known for his 1953 novel "Fahrenheit 451," used his imagination to take a hard look at a world locked in a growing love affair with technology. His stories examined what humanity gained - and lost - by being plugged-in.

Here are some of Bradbury's more prescient predictions.

●The people in the "Fahrenheit 451" society sport " seashells" and " thimble radios," which bear a striking resemblance to earbuds and Bluetooth headsets.

●Members of that futuristic society are also as obsessed with their large, flat-screen televisions as are today's technophiles, and the viewing screens in Bradbury's stories often take up an entire wall.

●In fact, the novel mentions that people are talking to their friends through the digital wall - the same terminology that Facebook would use years later for the digital hub that enables friends to post and see messages.

●The loneliness that can come from constantly paying attention to the screens around you, rather than the life around you, is a prevalent theme in Bradbury's work. He explored it in his short story "The Pedestrian," in which protagonist Leonard Mead is arrested for the crimes of taking a walk and not owning a television.

Far ahead of the research and analyses that have spawned books on the effects of technology overload, such as Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together," Bradbury outlined how he feared that televisions would change the world.

In this passage, he compares a neighborhood of television-watchers to a tomb:

He "would see the cottages and homes with their dark windows, and it was not unequal to walking through a graveyard where only the faintest glimmers of firefly light appeared in flickers behind he windows. Sudden gray phantoms seemed to manifest upon inner room walls where a curtain was still undrawn against the night, or there were whisperings and murmurs where a window in a tomblike building was still open."

●"The Pedestrian" also features a self-driving - and self-thinking - car, which arrests and commits the protagonist to a mental hospital. While far less advanced and much less sinister, self-driving cars are on U.S. roads as part of a Google project. As of last month, Google's cars, which are clearly marked, can legally drive on Nevada's roads and highways as long as two people are in the vehicle during the tests.

●The idea of electronic surveillance also popped up in Bradbury's work way before closed-circuit television became a fixture in cities around the world. He was early in warning people about how surveillance could be abused - worries that echo today.

●Bradbury's criticism of the coverage of live media events in "Fahrenheit 451" is fodder for media critics' columns today. Bradbury disparaged constant, sensationalized news.

●Bradbury also envisioned automated banking machines in the novel. The machines bear a striking similarity to ATMs and provide 24-hour financial information to users.

●In "I Sing the Body Electric!" and other stories, Bradbury explored artificial intelligence and the philosophical implications of advancements in AI that could perhaps produce thinking, feeling machines.

●Books aren't banned - thank goodness - in today's society, but reading a paper-and-glue version of a story isn't as common as it once was. Bradbury loved physical books and did not allow "Fahrenheit 451" to be published as an e-book until November, London's Guardian reported.

Bradbury once said that e-books "smell like burned fuel," but he allowed his classic to be published digitally because it wouldn't be possible to have a new contract without e-book rights.

●Finally, Bradbury made an imprint on the future. In his story "Sound of Thunder," he portrayed how changing one small thing in history could have larger, unpredictable effects on what was to come. A man on a safari to the past steps on a butterfly, and the insect's death drastically changes the future.

After the story was published, its turning point entered the modern lexicon, referred to as the "butterfly effect."

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Dreams of Ray Bradbury: Predictions that came true

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The literary, tech and thinking worlds are mourning the loss of Ray Bradbury, the revered science-fiction writer who died Wednesday at age 91. Bradbury, best known for his 1953 novel "Fahrenheit 451," used his imagination to take a hard look at a world locked in a growing love affair with technology.

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When Was Fahrenheit 451 Written? - Historical Context - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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″Fahrenheit 451″ is a banned book depicting a dystopian future of banned books. Explore the historical context of this classic novel, including…

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In this next article in the series about authors and their stories, we talk about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and what inspired him to write the novel.

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ADVANCING YOUR POTENTIAL

Ayn Rand wrote volumes urging people to be selfish.

What? Aren't people already too selfish? Just do whatever you feel like, be a thoughtless jerk, and exploit people to get ahead. Easy, right? Except that acting thoughtlessly and victimizing others, Rand claims, is not in your self-interest.

What Rand advocates is an approach to life that's unlike anything you've ever heard before. Selfishness, in her philosophy, means:

Follow reason, not whims or faith.

Work hard to achieve a life of purpose and productiveness.

Earn genuine self-esteem.

Pursue your own happiness as your highest moral aim.

Prosper by treating others as individuals, trading value for value.

At the dawn of our lives, writes Rand, we "seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential." Rand's philosophy is that vision. Explore it for yourself.

Objectivism, a philosophy for living on earth.

Common Beliefs That Ayn Rand Challenges

"YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER'S KEEPER"

We're not born, Rand says, with inexplicable duties to serve God or society. We only have one life, and the good is to live it. Learn to pursue your own happiness by discovering the life-promoting values it requires. Think rationally and don't bow to authority. Join with other people when you have real values in common and go your separate way when you don't. Don't try to be your brother's keeper or to force him to be yours. Live independently.

"LOVE IS SELFLESS"

We love what we personally value and admire. A "selfless love" is a contradiction in terms: it would mean you have no personal stake in the object of your love. The truth is, romantic love is profoundly selfish: it's a union of mind and body that both people pursue for their own happiness. And it's profoundly demanding. To quote a famous line from The Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"

"MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL"

Life requires production. Today's standard of living, with our computers, cell phones and life-saving medicines, far outstrips the wildest dreams of the past. All this wealth had to be created by individuals - and money is what enables production. "Money is your means of survival," a character in Atlas Shrugged warns. "The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life."

Essentials of Objectivism

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

- AYN RAND, "Brief Summary," The Objectivist

WHAT DID AYN RAND SAY ABOUT:

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Ayn Rand wrote volumes urging people to be selfish. What? Aren't people already too selfish? Just do whatever you feel like, be a thoughtless jerk, and exploit people to get ahead. Easy, right? Except that acting thoughtlessly and victimizing others, Rand claims, is not in your self-interest.

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Ayn Rand, original name Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, (born February 2, 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia-died March 6, 1982, New York, New York, U.S.), Russian-born American writer whose commercially successful novels promoting individualism and laissez-faire capitalism were influential among conservatives and libertarians and popular among generations of young people in the United States from the mid-20th century.

Who was Ayn Rand?

Where is Ayn Rand from?

What is Ayn Rand's real name?

When did Ayn Rand begin writing?

What are Ayn Rand's most famous works?

How did Ayn Rand die?

Early life and career

Her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was a prosperous pharmacist. After being tutored at home, Alissa Rosenbaum, the eldest of three children, was enrolled in a progressive school, where she excelled academically but was socially isolated. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, her father's shop was confiscated by communist authorities, an event she deeply resented. As a student at Leningrad State University, she studied history and became acquainted with the works of Plato and Aristotle. After graduating in 1924, she enrolled in the State Institute for Cinematography, hoping to become a screenwriter.

The arrival of a letter from cousins in Chicago gave her an opportunity to leave the country on the pretext of gaining expertise that she could apply in the Soviet film industry. Upon her arrival in the United States in 1926, she changed her name to Ayn Rand. (The first name, which rhymes with "pine," was inspired by the name of a Finnish writer, whom she never identified, and the surname she described as an abbreviation of Rosenbaum.) After six months in Chicago she moved to Hollywood, where a fortuitous encounter with the producer Cecil B. DeMille led to work as a movie extra and eventually to a job as a screenwriter. In 1929 she married the actor Frank O'Connor. Soon hired as a filing clerk in the wardrobe department of RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she rose to head of the department within a year, meanwhile writing stories, plays, and film scenarios in her spare time. She became an American citizen in 1931.

Rand's first successful play, Night of January 16th (1933; originally titled Penthouse Legend), was a paean to individualism in the form of a courtroom drama. In 1934 she and O'Connor moved to New York City so that she could oversee the play's production on Broadway. That year she also wrote Ideal, about a self-centred film star on the run from the law, first as a novel and then as a play. However, she shelved both versions. The play was not produced until 1989, and the novel was not published until 2015. Her first published novel, We the Living (1936), was a romantic tragedy in which Soviet totalitarianism epitomized the inherent evils of collectivism, which she understood as the subordination of individual interests to those of the state. A subsequent novella, Anthem (1938), portrayed a future collectivist dystopia in which the concept of the self and even the word "I" have been lost.

Rand spent more than seven years working on her first major work, The Fountainhead (1943), the story of a handsome architectural genius whose individualism and integrity are evinced in his principled dedication to his own happiness. The hero, Howard Roark, blows up a public housing project he had designed after it is altered against his wishes by government bureaucrats. On trial for his crime, he delivers a lengthy speech in his own defense in which he argues for individualism over collectivism and egoism over altruism ("the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self"). The jury votes unanimously to acquit him. Despite generally bad reviews, the book attracted readers through word of mouth and eventually became a best seller. Rand sold it to Warner Brothers studio and wrote the screenplay for the film, which was released in 1949.

Having returned to Los Angeles with O'Connor to work on the script for The Fountainhead, Rand signed a contract to work six months a year as a screenwriter for the independent producer Hal Wallis. In 1945 she began sketches for her next novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957; film part 1, 2011, part 2, 2012, part 3, 2014), which is generally considered her masterpiece. The book depicts a future United States on the verge of economic collapse after years of collectivist misrule, under which productive and creative citizens (primarily industrialists, scientists, and artists) have been exploited to benefit an undeserving population of moochers and incompetents. The hero, John Galt, a handsome and supremely self-interested physicist and inventor, leads a band of elite producers and creators in a "strike" designed to deprive the economy of their leadership and thereby force the government to respect their economic freedom. From their redoubt in Colorado, "Galt's Gulch," they watch as the national economy and the collectivist social system are destroyed. As the elite emerge from the Gulch in the novel's final scene, Galt raises his hand "over the desolate earth and...trace[s] in space the sign of the dollar."

Atlas Shrugged was notable for making explicit the philosophical assumptions that underlay The Fountainhead, which Rand described as "only an overture" to the later work. In an appendix to Atlas Shrugged, Rand described her systematic philosophy, which she called objectivism, as "in essence...the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Although the book was attacked by critics from across the political spectrum for its perceived immorality and misanthropy and its overt hostility to religion (Rand was an atheist), it was an instant best seller. It was especially well received by business leaders, many of whom were impressed by its moral justification of capitalism and delighted to think of their occupations as noble and virtuous. Like The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged also appealed widely to young people through its extreme romanticism, its accessible and comprehensive philosophy, its rejection of traditional authority and convention, and its implicit invitation to the reader to join the ranks of the elite by modeling himself on the story's hero.

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Ayn Rand, original name Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, (born February 2, 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia-died March 6, 1982, New York, New York, U.S.), Russian-born American writer whose commercially successful novels promoting individualism and laissez-faire capitalism were influential among conservatives and libertarians and popular among generations of young people in the United States from the mid-20th century.

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Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1905, and grew up in Russia during one of the country's most tumultuous periods. Socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy in 1905, and in 1906 the first Duma, the new Russian congress, convened. Several different socialist groups emerged after the revolution of 1905, chief among them the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Several groups of revolutionaries fell to infighting, especially during World War I, in which the Bolsheviks urged an international civil war to bring about the rule of the proletariat, or governance by the working class. The country fell into a bitter civil war. The Bolsheviks, under Lenin, eventually emerged as the preeminent party, and the group later became the Communist Party.

In 1917, when she was twelve, Rand witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks took control of the Soviet government, ushering in the Communist era in Russia. Her family lost its business and was reduced to a state of extreme poverty during the new regime. Rand despaired of the corrupt Communist system, which claimed to subjugate the needs of the individual to the needs of the many, but was ultimately manipulated by a few greedy and tyrannical leaders, with disastrous consequences for Russia's economy and people.

Rand completed high school in the Crimea, where she had fled to escape the civil war. She returned to St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), where she attended the University of Petrograd, and she graduated in 1924 with a degree in philosophy and history. She also studied screenwriting at the State Institute for Cinema Arts.

After Joseph Stalin ascended to power in the early 1920s, a disillusioned and disgusted Rand escaped to Chicago in 1926. She then moved to Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter. In Hollywood, she met her husband-to-be, actor Frank O'Connor, whom she married in 1929. Rand and O'Connor remained married until his death fifty years later. In 1932, Rand sold her first screenplay, Red Pawn, and her first stage play was produced on Broadway. The play, Night of January 16th, was a largely autobiographical account of the Soviet Union just after the revolution. She completed her first novel, We the Living, in 1933, and it was first published in 1936.

Anthem, Rand's second work of fiction, was first published in Great Britain in 1938. She later revised the novella and, in 1946, published it in the United States. According to the preface she wrote for the American edition, the only differences between the two editions were stylistic. In the American version, Rand sought to eliminate poetic and flowery language and to simplify and clarify the themes she laid out.

Rand is best known for her two longest works of fiction, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). She began work on The Fountainhead in 1935, at the same time she was working on Anthem. Both works introduce her theory of objectivism, or egoism, the idea that an individual's worth comes from him- or herself and not from what he or she contributes to society or to mankind. Objectivism is, as both The Fountainhead and Anthem make explicit, a wholesale rejection of the collectivist theories and tactics that Rand believed were at the center of the brutalities visited on Russia during the early part of the twentieth century. While The Fountainhead is the fictional embodiment of objectivism, Anthem is Rand's political manifesto. It takes the form of an allegory, a fictional story whose purpose is to present a philosophical idea. Anthem describes a dystopia, a nightmarish imaginary world through which Rand speculates on the eventual result of society's negative aspects. Rand uses the dystopia to show what she believes will happen when a nation or society embraces collectivism and community ideals.

The novella largely mirrors the state of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist terror, during which Stalin ordered purges of all those who opposed him, especially independent thinkers and intellectuals. In her novels, Rand idealizes those of the sort Stalin executed and exalts her hero, a vibrant, intelligent, and physically beautiful youth, who fights his way through the nameless, faceless mass of society that seeks to use him for its own ends while draining him of all vitality and vigor. She rejects religion and group identity in favor of ego and self-determination.

Many consider Atlas Shrugged, which Rand began in 1946 and first published in 1957, to be her greatest accomplishment as a fiction writer. It is her longest and most elaborate novel, and it was her last fictional work. In the novel, she traces the lives of several individuals who are involved in big business in the United States, exalting their will to succeed and self-centered egoism. Atlas Shrugged fleshes out the philosophy Rand had been developing all her life, the beginnings of which are introduced in the concluding chapters of Anthem. The world depicted in Atlas Shrugged is modeled closely on America in the 1890s, during the height of free markets and governmental nonintervention in business.

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote and lectured on objectivism. She died on March 6, 1982. Her books have garnered her a cult following of philosophers and thinkers, who continue her pursuit of objectivism and egoism in the form of foundations and think tanks devoted to her work.

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Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1905, and grew up in Russia during one of the country's most tumultuous periods. Socialist revolutionaries overthrew the monarchy in 1905, and in 1906 the first Duma, the new Russian congress, convened.

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Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), also called (1925-52) All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Russian Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza, or Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya Partiya (Bolshevikov), the major political party of Russia and the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution of October 1917 to 1991.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union arose from the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP). The Bolsheviks, organized in 1903, were led by Vladimir I. Lenin, and they argued for a tightly disciplined organization of professional revolutionaries who were governed by democratic centralism and were dedicated to achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1917 they formally broke with the right, or Menshevik, wing of the RSDWP. In 1918, when the Bolsheviks became the ruling party of Russia, they changed their organization's name to the All-Russian Communist Party; it was renamed the All-Union Communist Party in 1925 after the founding of the U.S.S.R. and finally to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1952.

The Communist Party arose in opposition to both capitalism and the socialists of the Second International who had supported their capitalist governments during World War I. The name communist was specifically taken to distinguish Lenin's followers in Russia and abroad from such socialists.

Following their victory in the Russian Civil War (1918-20), the Soviet communists followed a cautious policy of limited capitalism during the New Economic Program until Lenin's death in 1924. Then the powerful general secretary Joseph Stalin and leaders around him moved to assume the leadership of the party. The Stalin group easily defeated such rival leaders as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev. Then, in the late 1920s, opposition arose from Stalin's ally Nikolay Bukharin to the policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization. Stalin eliminated Bukharin from the leadership in 1929 and sought to eradicate the last remnants of opposition within the party by launching the Great Purge (1934-38), in which many thousands of his real or assumed opponents were executed as traitors and millions more were imprisoned or sent to forced-labour camps. During Stalin's years in power the party's size expanded from about 470,000 members (1924) to several million from the 1930s on. Following victory in World War II, Stalin faced no further challenges within the party, but discontent with his tyranny and arbitrariness smoldered among the party leadership. Following Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began a rapid rise and in 1956 repudiated Stalin's tyrannical excesses in his famous "Secret Speech" at the 20th party congress. The next year he decisively defeated his rivals Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, and others of the "anti-party group" and became the party's undisputed leader. Khrushchev ended the practice of bloody purges of the party membership, but his impulsive rule aroused dissatisfaction among the other party leaders, who ousted him in 1964. Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him and was general secretary until his death in 1982, being in turn succeeded by Yury Andropov. After Andropov's death in 1984, Konstantin Chernenko became party leader, and after Chernenko's death in 1985 the leadership went to Mikhail Gorbachev, who attempted to liberalize and democratize the party and-more largely-the U.S.S.R.

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Internationally the CPSU dominated the Communist International (the Comintern) and its successor, the Cominform, from the 1920s on. But the very spread and success of communist parties worldwide brought challenges to the CPSU's hegemony, first from the Yugoslavs in 1948 and then from the Chinese in the late 1950s and early '60s. The CPSU continued to serve as the model for the Soviet-dominated states of eastern Europe, however, until 1989, at which time the communist parties of eastern Europe either disintegrated or transformed themselves into Western-style socialist (or social democratic) parties.

From 1918 through the 1980s the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a monolithic, monopolistic ruling party that dominated the political, economic, social, and cultural life of the U.S.S.R. The constitution and other legal documents that supposedly ordered and regulated the government of the Soviet Union were in fact subordinate to the policies of the CPSU and its leadership. Constitutionally, the Soviet government and the CPSU were separate bodies, but virtually all high government officials were party members, and it was this system of interlocking dual membership in party and governmental bodies that enabled the CPSU to both make policy and see that it was enforced by the government.

But by 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to restructure the Soviet Union's economy and democratize its political system had eroded both the CPSU's unity and its monopolistic hold on power. In 1990 the CPSU voted to surrender its constitutionally guaranteed monopoly of power, thereby permitting opposition parties to flourish legally in the Soviet Union. The holding of free (and in some cases multiparty) elections in various union republics hastened the decline in the party's membership and enabled defectors from its ranks (such as Boris Yeltsin) to rise to positions of power in republic governments.

Despite these changes, the party remained the principal obstacle to Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet economy along free-market lines. A failed coup by communist hard-liners against Gorbachev in August 1991 discredited the CPSU and greatly hastened its decline. In subsequent months the party was stripped of its physical assets; its control of the Soviet government, internal-security agencies, and armed forces was broken; and the party's activities were suspended. The dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991, into a group of sovereign republics headed by democratically elected governments marked the CPSU's formal demise, though the party's former members retained much of their control over economic and political decision making in the new republics.

The basic unit of the CPSU was the primary party organization, which was a feature in all factories, government offices, schools, and collective farms and any other body of any importance whatsoever. At the party's peak size in the early 1980s, there were about 390,000 primary party organizations, and above this lowest level there were district, city, regional, and republic committees. At its height the CPSU had some 19 million members.

Nominally, the supreme body in the CPSU was the party congress, which usually met every five years and was attended by several thousand delegates. The party congress nominally elected the 300 or so members of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which met at least twice a year to perform the work of the party in between congresses. In its turn the Central Committee elected the members of various party committees, two of which, the Politburo and the Secretariat, were the actual centres of ultimate power and authority in the Soviet Union. The Politburo, with about 24 full members, was the supreme policy-making body in the country and exercised power over every aspect of public policy, both domestic and foreign. The Secretariat was responsible for the day-to-day administrative work of the party machine. The membership of these bodies, though nominally determined by the Central Committee, was in fact self-perpetuating and was largely determined by those bodies' members themselves.

The training ground for future candidates and members of the party was the All-Union Lenin League of Communist Youth, known as the Komsomol. The principal publications of the party were the daily newspaper Pravda and the monthly theoretical journal Kommunist.

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Communist Party of the Soviet Union | History, Beliefs, Leaders, & Facts

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Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the major political party of Russia and the Soviet Union from the Russian Revolution of October 1917 to 1991. It arose from the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party that broke off from the right-wing Menshevik group.

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Those who haven't yet picked up Ayn Rand's 1957 classic novel Atlas Shruggedmay be wondering why so many people are invoking the book in discussions of today's events.

Well, the short answer is: because today's world is strikingly similar to the world of Atlas Shrugged.

Consider the government's affordable housing crusade, in which lenders were forced to make loans to subprime borrowers who allegedly "needed" to own homes.

"We must not let vulgar difficulties obstruct our feeling that it's a noble plan motivated solely by the public welfare. It's for the good of the people. The people need it. Need comes first..."

Those might sound like the words of Barney Frank, but in fact they belong to Eugene Lawson, a banker in Atlas Shrugged who went bankrupt giving loans to people on the basis of their "need" rather than their ability to repay. In the quoted scene, Lawson is urging his politically powerful friends to pass a law restricting economic freedom for the "public good"--long-range consequences be damned.

Or consider this cry from Atlas Shrugged villain Wesley Mouch, head of the "Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources":

"Freedom has been given a chance and failed. Therefore, more stringent controls are necessary. . . . I need wider powers!"

This mirrors the incessant claims by today's politicians and bureaucrats that all our problems would disappear if only they had more power. They tell us that health care is expensive and ineffective-not because the government has its tentacles in every part of it and forces usto pay for other people's unlimited medical-care wants and needs--but because there is no bureaucrat forcing us to buy insurance and dictating which tests and treatments are "necessary." They tell us that American auto companies failed to compete-not because they were hamstrung by pro-union laws and fuel efficiency standards-but because there was o government auto czar. They tell us that we are reeling from a financial crisis-not as a result of massive, decades-long government intrusion in the financial and housing markets-but because the intrusion wasn't big enough; we didn't have a single, all-powerful "systemic risk" regulator.

Atlas Shrugged shows us an all-too-familiar pattern: Washington do-gooders blaming the problems they've created on the free market, and using them as a pretext for expanding their power. And more: it provides the fundamental explanation for why the government gets away with continually increasing its control over the economy and our lives. The explanation, according to Atlas, is to be found in the moral precepts we've heard all our lives.

From the time we're young we are taught that the essence of morality is to sacrifice one's own interests for the sake of others, and that to focus on one's own interests is immoral and destructive. As a result, we want the government to protect us from doctors and businessmen out for their own profit. We want the government to redistribute wealth from the successful to the unsuccessful. We want the government to ensure that those in need are given "free" health care, cheap housing, guaranteed retirement pay, and a job they can never lose. We want the government to take these and many other anti-freedom measures because virtually everyone today believes that they are moral imperatives.

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Her influence over the Reagan White House is legendary and now her ideas are again front and center as a new White House faces its this current economic crisis. Earlier this year in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal editorial, a writer said basically everything you need to know about how to fight a recession can be found in Rand's novel, "Atlas Shrugged."

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s they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

It is a timely decision because Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism - the advocate of a philosophy she called " the virtue of selfishness" - Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand's gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom). The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron's adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with "mine") turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same.

Not to be left out, Britain's small-staters have devised their own ways of worshipping at the shrine of Ayn. Communities secretary Sajid Javid reads the courtroom scene in Rand's The Fountainhead twice a year and has done so throughout his adult life. As a student, he read that bit aloud to the woman who is now his wife, though the exercise proved to be a one-off. As Javid recently confessed to the Spectator, she told him that if he tried that again, he would get dumped. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP many see as the intellectual architect of Brexit, keeps a photograph of Rand on his Brussels desk.

Sajid Javid: the communities secretary boasts of reading Rand's novel The Fountainhead twice a year throughout his adult life. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

So the devotion of Toryboys, in both their UK and US incarnations, is not new. But Rand's philosophy of rugged, uncompromising individualism - of contempt for both the state and the lazy, conformist world of the corporate boardroom - now has a follower in the White House. What is more, there is a new legion of devotees, one whose influence over our daily lives dwarfs that of most politicians. They are the titans of tech.

So who is this new entrant on the A-level syllabus, the woman hailed by one biographer as the goddess of the market? Born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, she saw her father impoverished and her family driven to the brink of starvation by the Soviet revolution, an experience that forged her contempt for all notions of the collective good and, especially, for the state as a mechanism for ensuring equality.

An obsessive cinemagoer, she fled to the US in 1926, swiftly making her way to Hollywood. She paid her way through a series of odd jobs, including a stint in the costume department of RKO Pictures, and landed a role as an extra in Cecil B DeMille's The King of Kings. But writing was her passion. Broadway plays and movie scripts followed, until the breakthrough came with a novel: The Fountainhead.

Published in 1943, it tells the story of Howard Roark, an architect dedicated to the pursuit of his own vision - a man who would rather see his buildings dynamited than compromise on the perfection of his designs. All around him are mediocrities, representing either the dead hand of the state, bureaucrats serving some notional collective good, or "second handers" - corporate parasites who profit from the work and vision of others.

Then, in 1957, came Atlas Shrugged, whose Penguin Classic edition stretches to 1,184 pages. Here Roark gives way to John Galt, another capitalist genius, who leads a strike by the "men of talent" and drive, thereby depriving society of "the motor of the world".

In those novels, and in the essays and lectures she turned to afterwards, Rand expounded - at great and repetitive length - her philosophy, soon to be taught to A-level students alongside Hobbes and Burke. Objectivism, she called it, distilled by her as the belief that "man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself". She had lots to say about everything else too - an avowed atheist, she was dismissive of any knowledge that was not rooted in what you could see in front of your eyes. She had no patience for "instinct" or "'intuition' ... or any form of 'just knowing'".

Kent Smith and Gary Cooper in the 1949 film of Rand's novel The Fountainhead. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

The Fountainhead was serially rejected and published to ambivalent reviews, but it became a word-of-mouth hit. Over the coming years, a cult following arose around Rand (as well as something very close to an actual cult among her inner circle, known, no doubt ironically, as the Collective). Her works struck a chord with a particular kind of reader: adolescent, male and thirsting for an ideology brimming with moral certainty. As the New Yorker said in 2009: "Most readers make their first and last trip to Galt's Gulch - the hidden-valley paradise of born-again capitalists featured in Atlas Shrugged, its solid-gold dollar sign standing like a maypole - sometime between leaving Middle-earth and packing for college."

But for some, objectivism stuck. Perhaps her most significant early follower was Alan Greenspan, later to serve as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for 19 years. In the 1950s, Greenspan was one of the Collective, and he would be among the mourners at her funeral in 1982, where one floral wreath was fashioned into that same 6ft dollar sign, now understood to be the logo of Randism.

Greenspan is the link between the original Rand cult and what we might think of as the second age of Rand: the Thatcher-Reagan years, when the laissez-faire, free-market philosophy went from the crankish obsession of rightwing economists to the governing credo of Anglo-American capitalism. Greenspan, appointed as the US's central banker by Ronald Reagan in 1987, firmly believed that market forces, unimpeded, were the best mechanism for the management and distribution of a society's resources. That view - which Greenspan would rethink after the crash of 2008-9 - rested on the assumption that economic actors behave rationally, always acting in their own self-interest. The primacy of self-interest, rather than altruism or any other nonmaterial motive, was, of course, a central tenet of Randian thought.

Put more baldly, the reason why Republicans and British Conservatives started giving each other copies of Atlas Shrugged in the 80s was that Rand seemed to grant intellectual heft to the prevailing ethos of the time. Her insistence on the "morality of rational self-interest" and "the virtue of selfishness" sounded like an upmarket version of the slogan, derived from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, that defined the era: greed is good. Rand was Gordon Gekko with A-levels.

Alan Greenspan: the former chairman of the Federal Reserve was a longtime member of Rand's inner circle. Photograph: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The third age of Rand came with the financial crash and the presidency of Barack Obama that followed. Spooked by the fear that Obama was bent on expanding the state, the Tea Party and others returned to the old-time religion of rolling back government. As Rand biographer Jennifer Burns told Quartz: "In moments of liberal dominance, people turn to her because they see Atlas Shrugged as a prophecy as to what's going to happen if the government is given too much power."

In that context, it seemed only natural that one of the success stories of the 2012 presidential campaign was a bid for the Republican nomination by the ultra-libertarian and Rand-admiring Texas congressman Ron Paul, father of Senator Rand Paul, whose insurgent movement was a forerunner for much of what would unfold in 2016. Paul offered a radical downsizing of the federal government. Like Ayn Rand, he believed the state's role should be limited to providing an army, a police force, a court system - and not much else.

But Rand presented a problem for US Republicans otherwise keen to embrace her legacy. She was a devout atheist, withering in her disdain for the nonobjectivist mysticism of religion. Yet, inside the Republican party, those with libertarian leanings have only been able to make headway by riding pillion with social conservatives and, specifically, white evangelical Christians. The dilemma was embodied by Paul Ryan, named as Mitt Romney's running mate in the 2012 contest. Ryan moved fast to play down the Rand influence, preferring to say his philosophy was inspired by St Thomas Aquinas.

What of the current moment, shaping up to be the fourth age of Rand? The Randian politicians are still in place: Ryan is now boosted by a cabinet crammed with objectivists. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson named Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book, while Donald Trump's first choice (later dropped) as labor secretary, Andy Puzder, is the CEO of a restaurant chain owned by Roark Capital Group - a private equity fund named after the hero of The Fountainhead. CIA director Mike Pompeo is another conservative who says Atlas Shrugged "really had an impact on me".

Of course, this merely makes these men like their boss. Trump is notoriously no reader of books: he has only ever spoken about liking three works of fiction. But, inevitably, one of them was The Fountainhead. "It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to ... everything," he said last year.

Rand scholars find this affinity of Trump's puzzling. Not least because Trump's offer to the electorate in 2016 was not a promise of an unfettered free market. It was a pledge to make the US government an active meddler in the market, negotiating trade deals, bringing back jobs. His public bullying of big companies - pressing Ford or the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier to keep their factories in the US - was precisely the kind of big government intrusion upon the natural rhythms of capitalism that appalled Rand.

So why does Trump claim to be inspired by her? The answer, surely, is that Rand lionises the alpha male capitalist entrepreneur, the man of action who towers over the little people and the pettifogging bureaucrats - and gets things done. As Jennifer Burns puts it: "For a long time, she has been beloved by disruptors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people who see themselves as shaping the future, taking risky bets, moving out in front of everyone else, relying only on their own instincts, intuition and knowledge, and going against the grain."

The acolytes: Republicans Rand Paul and Paul Ryan, and the late Steve Jobs of Apple. Composite: Getty Images

Which brings us to the new wave of Randians, outside both politics and conventional conservatism. They are the princes of Silicon Valley, the masters of the start-up, a cadre of young Roarks and Galts, driven by their own genius to remake the world and damn the consequences.

So it should be no surprise that when Vanity Fair surveyed these tycoons of the digital age, many of them pointed to a single guiding star. Rand, the magazine suggested, might just be "the most influential figure in the industry". When the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, had to choose an avatar for his Twitter account in 2015, he opted for the cover of The Fountainhead. Peter Thiel, Facebook's first major investor and a rare example of a man who straddles both Silicon Valley and Trumpworld, is a Randian. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs is said by his Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, to have regarded Atlas Shrugged as one of his "guides in life".

Among these new masters of the universe, the Rand influence is manifest less in party political libertarianism than in a single-minded determination to follow a personal vision, regardless of the impact. No wonder the tech companies don't mind destroying, say, the taxi business or the traditional news media. Such concerns are beneath the young, powerful men at the top: even to listen to such concerns would be to betray the singularity of their own pure vision. It would be to break Rand's golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others.

So Rand, dead 35 years, lives again, her hand guiding the rulers of our age in both Washington and San Francisco. Hers is an ideology that denounces altruism, elevates individualism into a faith and gives a spurious moral licence to raw selfishness. That it is having a moment now is no shock. Such an ideology will find a ready audience for as long as there are human beings who feel the rush of greed and the lure of unchecked power, longing to succumb to both without guilt. Which is to say: for ever.

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The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

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s they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend.

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video first interview cormac mccarthy the road

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Oprah's Exclusive Interview with Cormac McCarthy Video

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He's never talked on camera before. Now, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy sits down with Oprah.

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I can chart the progress of my life through the types of apocalypse I have feared. As a child, the endings I imagined were natural, even cosmic: the land swallowed by the sea, the sun swallowing the earth. When I was an adolescent the man-made came to the fore, as I searched for mushroom shapes in clouds and imagined the exact moment of an explosion: would I know it was happening, I wondered, or would there only be after; dimness, blood, confusion.

As a young adult, I would visualize the carcasses of the planes I traveled on, post-crash, the way their bellies would be lifted from the sea with a winch, spun around like part of a whale. This was a smaller-scale disaster, but I could also imagine all the planes falling from the sky at once, dropping in a synchronized movement to the land below.

When I had my first child, my visions took on a new realism: the key dates of climate change no longer had a vague, post-death strangeness to them. They were the likely years of my son's life. Now, I imagined him walking through a world too hot to exist in, or living in a city that had become a new Atlantis, its underwater streets swum through by fishes, its buildings draped in seaweed.

As a writer, I might have a particularly dramatic or florid set of scenarios at my disposal, but I am far from alone in having an apocalyptic imagination. Even the briefest of glimpses at recent books published or movies made shows that these nightmares are part of our collective consciousness, a near-universal sense that the world might, at any moment, be about to tip into oblivion.

Etymologically, the word apocalypse contains the meanings to uncover, to transform, and to reveal, rather than simply denoting the end of things. Its origins in Judeo-Christian religious traditions mean that the endings it originally described always contained a beginning: the destruction of the world heralded the arrival of a new-holy-era. Even in its modern usage, the term post-apocalyptic contains within it an implication that even in the worst of circumstances, some form of life continues. There is, perhaps surprisingly, an afterwards, a world for humans to inhabit, and books to be written about them.

The most recent flourishing of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction-genres that have been popular for a long time-could be associated with the particularly depressing state of our current politics. In the midst of a rise in intolerance and inhumanity, we look for books that will reflect our realities. Such is the degradation of our society, the most realistic fictions are those that speculate about (previously) inconceivable situations. The control of women's bodies in a world ravaged by toxicity is recognizable enough for women to take to the streets dressed as Offred and Ofglen, for The Handmaid's Tale to come to the fore of literary and televisual culture 30 years after it was published. Prominent post-apocalyptic books of the last decade depict a variety of scenarios, each more detailed and prescient than the most vivid anxiety dream. America is devastated by violence and climate change in Omar El Akkad's American War, illness wipes out (nearly all of) humanity in Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven, a father and son walk through nothingness in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. But despite its popularity, the genre has its detractors; Slavoj Žižek has remarked on its conservatism, whilst Jill Lepore in the New Yorker recently described contemporary dystopian literature as the "fiction of submission," in which "cowardice suffices." For its critics, post-apocalyptic fiction amounts to little more than a wail in the darkness, a pessimistic resignation to the worst in human nature.

Another perspective could take as its starting point the original meaning of apocalypse, trying to see how fiction in these genres uncovers or reveals the ways in which our society dreams-however darkly-of being changed. As ever, dystopian and utopian visions are closer together than we might imagine: in Station Eleven the plague reveals a world that still, despite its collapse, holds on to the importance of art. In The Handmaids Tale, a birth is now a communal female event, in which women support each other rather than laboring alone, or being instructed by male doctors. As Atwood writes: "You wanted a women's culture. Well, now there is one." This is not to say that either scenario depicts a good or desirable society-only that the bleakest of narratives can still reveal ways in which we want our world to change, and the nature of our future priorities.

Just as science fiction television programs set in space can't help but mimic the fashions and haircuts of their contemporary moment on earth, dystopian fictions say more about the times of their production than a distant date. They are often particularly revelatory of the things that are still deemed to matter after everything else has been destroyed, of the most basic and essential components of human life. Indeed, it could be said the emotional impulse behind much post-apocalyptic fiction is not despair but hope, the will to identify what persists in the face of devastation. Alongside a fear of destruction, there is also a certain longing for the simplicity and clarity of a life lived without modern comforts and distractions; dystopian fiction both meets this longing and undermines it, by reminding the reader that such an existence is often a dangerous struggle for survival.

Of course, cataclysmic visions of the future of humanity are not new. Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) is often cited as the first post-apocalyptic novel, but apocalypse was a prominent theme in literature long before this, with imagery of the last judgement and its aftermath adapted from Jewish and Christian eschatological writings. But neither did it begin there; many of the earliest myths of the world's creation contain within them the prediction of its demise, as well as a striking lack of pedantic certainty. One West African narrative begins with the moon bearing stars, the children of the sun, and ends with the sun devouring his own progeny. Afterwards, the speaker is asked of the tribe's fate, and answers with a sigh: "Who knows? Who knows? I do not know."

In the midst of uncertainty we want to envisage how we will react to the scenarios of the future, and if these reactions hold any trace of hope for a different outcome. When I had my son, at the same time as absorbing the new closeness of the dates of possible cataclysmic change-2.6 degrees hotter by 2050, 88 centimetres wetter by 2100-I was struck by how much the state of motherhood mirrored my apocalyptic imaginings: the sense of complete newness, of a total re-appraisal of the world. I began to speculate on how someone like me would actually cope if her worst fears came true, and the new reality of motherhood was mirrored in the actual disintegration of the physical world. I began to think about the limits of maternal love, which seemed boundless but also held in such a tight space between the members of a nuclear family. And amidst the guilt of having children at all in a world on the brink, there was a new, forceful presence of the future: a being that walked and talked, that developed whatever my fears might be. Somehow, it was more difficult to be completely pessimistic about the future in its living and breathing presence, in the mystery of its unfolding.

The continued openness of history to change is at the root of our greatest hopes as much as our greatest fears. In presenting worst-case scenarios for our future, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction can be seen to be opening up possibilities for a re-imagining of our response to devastation. If a novel is being written, people are still present, living their complex, difficult lives. Fiction seems to me an ideal medium for processing our anxious visions into a more creative test of the limits of our imaginations, and of the world's capacity for transformation. As the philosopher Ernst Bloch has written, "The most tragic form of loss isn't the loss of security; it's the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different."

It is often said that we live in an anxious time, both at the personal and political level: rates of anxiety and depression continue to rise, and we find our inner state reflected in the world around us. Our fears can lead us to resist change and long for the status quo, and it is famously easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But in fiction the former usually entails the latter, and in the strongest dystopian narratives life does not return to normal at the end of the story: it is changed forever. In the act of writing-and reading-altered worlds into being we transmute anxiety into something more powerful. In these changed places, a radically different future has already arrived, revealing the provocative nature of even the darkest of our daydreams.

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Seeing the Hopeful Side of Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

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I can chart the progress of my life through the types of apocalypse I have feared. As a child, the endings I imagined were natural, even cosmic: the land swallowed by the sea, the sun swallowing the earth.

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The Future of Post-apocalyptic Literature

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The Future of Post-apocalyptic Literature

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Does Post-Apocalyptic Literature Have A (Non-Dystopian) Future?

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Store shelves and libraries are packed with post-apocalyptic, dystopian novels right now. Critic Jason Heller has some suggestions to help you wade through the floods. And the fires. And the fallout.

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Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is the third of six children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters). Originally named Charles (after his father), he renamed himself Cormac after the Irish King (another source says that McCarthy's family was responsible for legally changing his name to the Gaelic equivalent of "son of Charles").

In 1937, when he was four, the family moved to Knoxville, and his father became a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority (legal staff 1934-67; chief counsel 1958-67). In 1967, the McCarthys moved from Knoxville to Washington, D.C., where Charles was the principal attorney in a law firm until his retirement.

Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.

From 1957-59, McCarthy returned to the university, where he published two stories, "A Drowning Incident" and "Wake for Susan" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, calling himself C. J. McCarthy, Jr. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

McCarthy left the university again, this time for good. He went to Chicago, where he worked, apparently as an auto mechanic, while writing his first novel. He later married Lee Holleman, who had been a student at the University of Tennessee, and the couple settled in Sevier County, Tennessee. They had one son, Cullen. Some time later, their marriage ended. (Lee McCarthy is the author of several books of poetry, including [amazon_link id="093425785X" target="_blank" container="" container_class="" ]Desire's Door[/amazon_link].)

Before his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published (1965-McCarthy's editor at Random House was Faulkner's long-time editor, Albert Erskine), McCarthy had received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1965, using this money, he left America on the liner Sylvania, intending to visit the home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle). While on the trip, he met Anne DeLisle, a young English singer/dancer working on the ship; they were married in England in 1966. Another grant was given McCarthy in 1966, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68). He and Anne toured southern England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Then they settled on the island of Ibiza, which was a kind of artist's colony at the time. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of Outer Dark.

In 1967, though, possibly at Anne's urging, the McCarthys returned to America. They moved to Rockford, Tennessee, a town near Knoxville. According to Anne, the McCarthys lived in a rented house ($50 per month-to live at a pig farm). Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968. The reviews were again good, as they had been for The Orchard Keeper.

1969 saw the arrival of another fellowship, this time the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He and his wife moved into a barn near Louisville, Tennessee. McCarthy renovated the barn himself-entirely. Anne states that he added, among other things, a stone room and chimney. All the stones he gathered, all the wood he cut and kiln dried himself. Additionally, for his new fireplace, McCarthy salvaged bricks from the boyhood home of James Agee, which was being leveled to make way for downtown urban renewal in Knoxville.

Child of God was published in 1973. Inspired by actual events in Sevier County, it garnered mixed reviews, some praising it as great, while others found it despicable.

From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in January 1977. This screenplay, too, was based on actual historical events; the locale was South Carolina. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.

Anne DeLisle and Cormac McCarthy were separated in 1976 (no children), and McCarthy moved soon after to El Paso, Texas, where he lived for many years. They were divorced a few years later.

In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book which had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty or so years. It was said by many to be McCarthy's best work to date, and some critics still maintain that it is his finest novel. However, the book drew some negative reviews, too. At least one reviewer (who wrote for the Memphis Press Scimitar) was roundly rebuked in a letter to the editor written by novelist and historian Shelby Foote.

1981 brought another grant to McCarthy's door (or, more literally, to McCarthy's room in a motel run by a friend in Knoxville), this time a MacArthur Fellowship-one of their so-called genius grants. McCarthy used this money to live on while writing his next novel, an apocalyptic western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840s and based heavily on actual historical events.

Blood Meridian was published in 1985, but received little review attention at the time. Now, however, it is considered a turning point in his career. Some critics prefer his recent western writing, of which Blood Meridian was the first example. Others feel that he has strayed too far from his roots, that his westerns lack something. But Blood Meridian, followed closely by Suttree, is now generally regarded as McCarthy's finest work to date. McCarthy did extensive research for the novel. The author visited all the locales of the book and even learned Spanish to further his research.

After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf. There, under the editorial advisement of Gary Fisketjon, McCarthy began to get exposure. In connection with the book's publication and as a favor to his retiring editor Albert Erskine, he granted The New York Times Magazine the sole interview [link requires registration] to which (at that time) he had ever submitted. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. Unlike McCarthy's earlier books, this one became a publishing sensation, garnering many excellent reviews. It became a New York Times bestseller, and sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication. It finally gave McCarthy the wide readership that had eluded him for many years.

McCarthy used the money he had made from All the Pretty Horses to buy a new pickup truck. He kept on writing.

McCarthy edited and revised a play he had written in the mid-1970s, which was published in the summer of 1994 by Ecco Press. Called The Stonemason, the tragedy explores the fortunes of three generations of a black family in Kentucky. Shortly after the publication of The Stonemason, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing. It began life with a first printing of 200,000 copies, a large printing for a work of literary fiction. Sales were brisk enough to justify the second printing of 25,000 more copies before the end of the first month after publication. The book features the tale of Billy Parham's attempt to return a trapped she-wolf to its home in the northern Mexican mountains and the tragic consequences of his adventure.

The third volume of The Border Trilogy was published in 1998; Cities of the Plain unites John Grady Cole, the main character of All the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing's Billy Parham, and centers on Cole's doomed relationship with a Mexican prostitute. Not as well-received by critics as the first two books in the Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain is nonetheless notable for its epilogue, which reaches back to Suttree in its imagery and simultaneously casts the entire Border Trilogy in a new and fascinating light, unifying the previous two volumes of the trilogy.

Sometime around the publication of Cities of the Plain, McCarthy married for a third time; he and his wife Jennifer Winkley have one child, John Francis, born 1999. The McCarthys have also moved from El Paso; they now reside in Tesque, New Mexico, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. McCarthy has taken a position as writer in residence with the Santa Fe Institute.

2005 brought the publication of No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an award-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen.

In 2006, Alfred A. Knopf published The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. McCarthy granted an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen The Road for her Book Club. The Road was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

The Sunset Limited arrived in 2006. Commissioned by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, it premiered in May, with publication thereafter. The play takes place in a shabby tenement apartment, where Black (a former convict) and White (a university professor) discuss "big questions" about God, faith, life, and death following Black's saving White, who had attempted to commit suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming subway train. HBO subsequently produced a successful adaptation of The Sunset Limited starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones (directed by Jones).

Early 2013 brought the announcement that McCarthy had penned an original screenplay, The Counselor. Little is currently known about the screenplay, but Ridley Scott directed, and the film is slated for U.S. release in October of 2013. The story apparently deals with territory and themes similar to that explored in No Country for Old Men.

Except for a few odds and ends (his favorite novel is Melville's Moby-Dick; he doesn't care for the work of Henry James, he doesn't like to talk about writing, etc.), that's more or less what we know about Cormac McCarthy.

The Cormac McCarthy Society respects the author's clearly expressed desire for privacy. If you wish to contact him, please write to Mr. McCarthy care of his agent:

c/o Amanda Urban
International Creative Management
730 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY 10019
(212) 556-5600

Updated 4 August 2013

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Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is the third of six children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters).

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As Orwell's 1984 Turns 70 It Predicted Much Of Today's Surveillance Society

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As Orwell's 1984 Turns 70 It Predicted Much Of Today's Surveillance Society

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Forbes.com

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George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old next month. Looking back on its predictions and the state of the world today, how much did it get right in its predictions of a dystopian surveillance state where every word is monitored, unacceptable speech is deleted, history is rewritten or deleted altogether and individuals can become "unpersons" for holding views disliked by those in power? It turns out Orwell's predictions were frighteningly accurate.

In 1984, it was the state that determined what constituted acceptable speech in keeping society orderly.

In 2019, it is a small cadre of private companies in Silicon Valley and their executives that wield absolute power over what we are permitted to see and say online.

In 1984, there were just a few countries to which most of the world's citizens belonged.

In 2019, there are just a few social media empires to which most of the world's netizens belong.

In 1984, it was the state that conducted surveillance and censored speech.

In 2019, social media companies deploy vast armies of human and algorithmic moderators that surveil their users 24/7, flagging those that commit thoughtcrimes and deleting their violations from existence. Those that commit too many thoughtcrimes are banished to "unperson" status by these same private companies, without any intervention or even in contradiction with the will of the state and without any right to appeal.

In 1984, those who committed particularly egregious thoughtcrimes or had histories of them were banished into nonexistence, all traces of them deleted.

In 2019, social media companies can ban anyone at any time for any reason. Those banished from social's walled gardens can have every post they've ever written wiped away, every record of their existence banished into the memory hole. Those that dare to mention the name of the digitally departed or criticize their banishment can themselves face being banished and their concerns deleted, ensuring the "unperson" truly ceases to exist.

In 1984, the government constantly rewrites and deletes history that has become inconvenient.

In 2019, governments quietly rewrite press releases to remove past statements that proved wrong or to add statements to support their present assertions. Meanwhile the European Union's "Right to be Forgotten" grants ordinary citizens the ability to wipe clean society's memories of their past, allowing them to be "reborn" without the burden of their past transgressions.

In 1984, ever-present "telescreens" act as both information conveyor and surveillance device and saturate both public and private spaces with cameras and microphones monitored by the government.

In 2019, smartphones take on this role, acting as both our window to the digital world and the means through which myriad private companies from data brokers to social media companies themselves surveil our every action. Yet, our world goes far beyond the one imagined by Orwell in which every device from our watches to our refrigerators, our thermostats to our toasters, are increasingly Internet-connected and streaming a realtime documentary of our lives back to these private surveillance empires.

In 1984, it was the state that made use of its vast surveillance empire to maintain order.

In 2019, a landscape of private companies so large it is almost uncountable, monitors, monetizes and manipulates us.

In 1984, the government uses its surveillance state to nudge each member of its citizenry towards a desired state.

In 2019, private companies do the same, building up vast behavioral and interest profiles on each individual user that they then use to nudge them towards the most monetizable behaviors.

In 1984, the government funded the vast empire of equipment and personnel needed to maintain constant surveillance of its citizens.

In 2019, the public themselves fund the great surveillance empire that monitors, monetizes and manipulates them. Citizens purchase the latest digital devices, upgrade and maintain them at regular intervals, pay for the power and internet services needed to connect them and grant unlimited rights to their most intimate information to private companies.

In 1984, the ultimate goal of the massive surveillance empire is to sustain and entrench the power of the state.

In 2019, the ultimate goal of the online world's massive surveillance empire is to sustain and entrench the power of social media companies.

Indeed, the similarities are nearly as endless as the words of the book.

Putting this all together, 70 years after 1984's publication, it seems nearly every aspect of Orwell's commentary on the surveillance state has come true. The only difference is that Orwell saw surveillance and control as the domain of the state, whereas in reality the surveillance world we have come to know is one of private companies monitoring, monetizing and manipulating society for nothing more than commercial gain.

In the end, as we rush towards an ever more Orwellian world of surveillance and censorship, perhaps we might all take the time to reread 1984 in order to better understand the world we are rushing towards.

... Read More

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As Orwell's 1984 Turns 70 It Predicted Much Of Today's Surveillance Society

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George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four turns 70 years old next month. Looking back on its predictions and the state of the world today, how much did it get right in its predictions of a dystopian surveillance state where every word is monitored, unacceptable speech is deleted, history is rewritten or deleted altogether and individuals can become "unpersons" for holding views disliked by those in power?

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"Things are opening up": Non-monogamy is more common than you'd think

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"Things are opening up": Non-monogamy is more common than you'd think

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/ CBS News

Watch the CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly: Non-monogamy," in the video player above.
More Americans than you might think are openly involved with multiple sexual or romantic partners at the same time. How is this different from cheating? It's all above board.

It's estimated that 4% to 5% of people living in the U.S. are currently participating in what's known as consensual or ethical non-monogamy, a practice in which partners maintain more than one sexual or romantic relationship with each others' knowledge and consent. For comparison, that means non-monogamy is about as prevalent as the number of Americans who identify as LGBTQ, which is estimated to be about 4.5% of the American population.

"What's unusual today is that in open relationships, people are transparent," Helen Fisher, a New York-based biological anthropologist who studies human sexuality, says in the CBSN Originals documentary, "Non-monogamy."

According to a 2016 study in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, about 20% of single U.S. adults reported that they have engaged in consensual non-monogamy at some point in their life. And if you imagine it's only young, liberal, city-dwellers taking part - think again. It's a cross-section of all types of people. That same study found that age, education level, income, religion, region of the country, political affiliation, and race did not impact the likelihood that someone would engage in consensual non-monogamy.

Consensual or ethical non-monogamy is the umbrella term for many different arrangements partners can have besides monogamy. Unlike swinging or casual sex, consensual non-monogamy is typically a long-term lifestyle with committed partners that requires its own set of rules.

Some people may practice polyamory - having multiple steady partners at once. Others may go for open relationships - a committed relationship where sex with other people is allowed. Others might form triads or quads - committed relationships among three or four people.

"I think of it almost like a menu, a relationship menu," said Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, author of "The Polyamorists Next Door." "Serial monogamy is at the top of the menu, and probably the most popular dish that people order. But there's all these other things that people can order now. And they are."

Bridget and Alex, a couple in Brooklyn, New York, have been together for eight years and married for one. They decided to open up their relationship three years ago. (The couple asked that their last names not be used.)

It started, nervously, with one couple they found. The two pairs went out for a "boozy brunch," and Bridget and Alex ended up going home with them. It was the first time they had engaged with anyone sexually outside their relationship. When Bridget and Alex left the apartment and were waiting for the elevator, they high-fived - the "bro-iest thing ever," they laughed at the memory.

"There was always a point where I felt a little constricted, or like I was curious about other people while still knowing I loved somebody else," Bridget said. "So the fact that we were able to do it, and then we felt so good afterwards, was, yeah, it really had felt like I had just gotten a work-around."

Bridget now has a boyfriend outside of their marriage, and Alex has a girlfriend. They all know each other.

"The way maybe our parents were brought up, monogamy felt like it was necessary. It was just the way culture accepted you. It was the way everyone accepted you," Alex said. "Now things are a little different, things are opening up."

But non-monogamy is still shrouded in stigma by much of society. In a 2016 Pew poll of nine countries, the United States had the highest disapproval of adultery, with 84% of Americans disapproving.

These relationships can also be hard on family members, even if they're working for the partners involved.

"For me, my generation, that was called the 'free pass' or cheating," said Lisa, a mother in New York City who learned that her 25-year-old daughter was in an open relationship through her Facebook page.

"I was worried about somebody forgetting to use protection and bringing disease into her life. I also worried that relationships are difficult and giving somebody an out may give them an excuse to have a permanent out and leave her hurt."

She draws a line at the idea of a triad raising her future grandchildren one day - something that happens with some polyamorous families.

"There will be no raising a child with a third person unless it's me there as the grandma," she said.

Those who have made non-monogamy work for them say it's widely misunderstood. Contrary to the popular imagination, it doesn't make life one big orgy. Non-monogamous partners say these relationships require lots of planning, honesty, and above all, open communication.

At a tidy suburban house in Kansas City, CJ George, his wife Brandi George, and Brooke Houston have maintained a polyamorous relationship for more than a year.

"It's a triad monogamous relationship," CJ explained. "We do have the three of us, but, yeah, we don't date anybody else. We don't see anybody else. It's not necessarily an open relationship."

It's a subject of curiosity when people find out. "I've got all kinds of people asking me, 'How do you guys sleep?' and, 'What do you do for dinner?' and all that other stuff," CJ said.

"We eat food," Brooke deadpans. "That's what we eat for dinner."

"We're not here to just wreck the world and burn it down," said Kalyn, a woman in Durham, North Carolina, who said she has one local partner along with partners in other cities who have been in her life for years.

"I had a weird understanding of polyamory, honestly, because you have all these rom-coms and Disney movies and everything that tells you what you are supposed to aim for in life. I thought that's what I also wanted," she said.

Yet her attempts at monogamy brought her nothing but pain - her previous partners could not handle her feelings for other people, and took it as a sign of cheating and deception. She said that in her last monogamous relationship she was "the most depressed and danger to myself that I had been in my whole life."

"So after many attempts after that, we just dissolved that, and I've fully committed to the idea that if you're going to date me, you're going to understand that I'm going to be polyamorous," she said.

There are signs that attitudes toward more open relationships are changing. A 2016 YouGov survey found that only 51% of people under 30 reported their ideal relationship would be completely monogamous.

"None of us are all suited to one thing. So, if monogamy suits you well, great. But find your own way within that," says Mahdy, a Brooklyn man who has been in a triad for more than seven years.

"Create your own rules, your own way of being. You don't have to follow, you know, this religious model or that social model. You can create what works best for you."

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"Things are opening up": Non-monogamy is more common than you'd think

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CBS News Watch the CBSN Originals documentary, "Speaking Frankly: Non-monogamy," in the video player above. More Americans than you might think are openly involved with multiple sexual or romantic partners at the same time. How is this different from cheating? It's all above board. It's estimated that 4% to 5% of people living in the U.S.

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The controller states that all human emotion or feeling can be seen in the same way as a pipe that carries water. Once the pipe has been lanced, water spurts out..... but if the pipe is pierced multiple times, each hole only leaks a small amount...

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In the 1946 reprint of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley adds a foreword in which he discusses his novel. Huxley feels that a major defect in the work was that he limited the Savage to only two choices at the end, an insane life in Utopia or the life...

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The controller states that all human emotion or feeling can be seen in the same way as a pipe that carries water. Once the pipe has been lanced, water spurts out..... but if the pipe is pierced multiple times, each hole only leaks a small amount...

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Like the paintings, Offred feels she is like "objects not in use." She is an object and she is board. She wonders if men find this submissive act of indifference erotic.
But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

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https://www.gradesaver.com/the-handmaids-tale/study-guide/themes

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Like the paintings, Offred feels she is like "objects not in use." She is an object and she is board. She wonders if men find this submissive act of indifference erotic. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

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Anthem study guide contains a biography of Ayn Rand, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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JOHN NAISH fears advancing science is bringing the prospect of 'designer' babies ever closer to reality

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JOHN NAISH fears advancing science is bringing the prospect of 'designer' babies ever closer to reality

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When my mother was born at the end of the Twenties, the novelist Aldous Huxley was writing of his Brave New World - a world in which human embryos were scientifically tested, selected and rejected on the basis of their genetic make-up.

No doubt he was influenced by his brother, the biologist Julian, a leading thinker of that time, who predicted that pre-birth health and IQ testing would drive the future of reproductive technology.

Yet if such antenatal tests had been available back then, my mother might never have been born.

At the time, eugenics, the fascistic doctrine of breeding a genetically pure race, was in vogue in Europe and the U.S.

Her parents - my grandparents - would have been warned, after testing, of their unborn daughter's susceptibility to developing breast cancer as an adult, and might have opted to terminate her life.

She would never have had the chance to have a career in Fleet Street, to marry and raise two boys, and to enjoy life into her 70s - despite being stricken by breast cancer twice.

And my life, of course, would never have begun.

I was reminded of this when reading recently about a controversial new 'tool' that would screen embryos for future risk of heart attacks, diabetes and cancer.

Yet again, the spectre of widespread pre-birth genetic testing and selection is being raised, and with it the prospect of 'designer' babies.

This time it is not science fiction but science fact, thanks to an American company that is lobbying to have its system adopted in the UK.

Scientists from Genomic Prediction say they have already tested embryos for susceptibility to diabetes, high blood pressure and skin cancer.

Now it has been reported that the company has asked CARE, one of the largest fertility clinics in the UK, to apply to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to consider the use of the technology, initially to test embryos for breast cancer risk by identifying several different genes.

Genetic screening is permitted in the UK, but only for high-risk 'single gene' illnesses such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anaemia (couples opting for IVF can use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to ensure their child will not have the disease).

Screening for the single 'BRCA' gene mutations that put women at high risk of developing cancers of the breast and ovaries is also sanctioned.

These tests alone balance us on the razor's edge of ethical peril. But they do at least predict the odds of future disease quite accurately, so parents can make an agonisingly considered decision about their child's future on the basis of statistical likelihood.

There are, however, only a very few known single genes that can directly cause illnesses on their own.

It seems that Genomic Prediction wants to lead us into infinitely hazier territory, by screening embryos for multiple different genes that might somehow interact at some unspecifiable time to cause future common illnesses.

This is a little more than a bookmaker's game of long-odds betting: it is highly likely those disparate genes will never actually be sparked into interacting to cause illness.

How and why multiple genes can be caused to interact dangerously is unknown. The factors, be they biological, environmental or social, are so vastly complex as to be beyond our current powers of computation.

Genomic Prediction aims to go further still, with plans to develop tests for multiple genes that might possibly predispose unborn babies to developing far less genetically explicable conditions such as autism, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia in the future.

And chillingly, beyond this, the company says it is looking to screen embryos for 'intellectual disabilities'.

I find this terrifying.

This is commercialised science vastly overreaching itself. It potentially opens a Pan-dora's Box of moral horrors.

Eugenics and racial purity remained popular until World War II revealed the true horror of its twisted creed, with the Nazis pursuing the ideal of 'perfect' humans to its inevitable murderous conclusion.

Nowadays, eugenics has withered into a mere sideshow for cranks - but I wonder whether we are staring into the abyss once more.

You may think I am being alarmist, but I believe the idea of 'designer' babies could prove highly seductive to some young parents-to-be.

Today, we have a far more insidious social factor that will fuel gene-testing's popularity. It is called consumerism.

People can now 'buy' all the physical attributes they are persuaded to consider desirable: plump lips, tight faces, gleaming teeth, Kim Kardashian-style derrieres -the list lengthens every month.

Take that promise just a little farther and we face the prospect of babies born to order, guaranteed to be delivered disease-free and devoid of mental frailties.

The obvious next step is for genetically enhanced children: taller, brighter, better.

And of course, this would largely be a preserve of the rich (as well as those aspirant types who will take out a second mortgage to keep up with the genetic Joneses).

Genomic Prediction's alluring promise leads us inevitably towards the world that Aldous Huxley foresaw, of children born genetically predestined to be either elite-class enhanced, or sentenced to a miserable existence at the bottom of the DNA ladder.

It also changes our attitude towards new human life.

No longer would babies be welcomed as marvellous miraculous gifts, with the blessing of a life unmapped, full of hope and challenge.

Instead, they would be transformed into another consumer item, an accessory labelled for life with a genetic price-tag before they have even been able to draw their first breath.

Or simply discarded beforehand as 'defective' embryos.

The game of multiple-gene meddling that Genomic Prediction seeks to introduce is liable to go horribly wrong, as often as not.

To return to my mother's case, for example, the new tool might have identified her in the womb as a multiple-gene cancer risk. But she can't have had the inherited single-gene BRCA peril, because none of the other females in her family has ever developed breast or ovarian cancer.

So her life might have been terminated on the basis of multiple 'maybe' genes. So, for that matter, might the life of her sister, who never suffered from cancer in her 93 years.

It seems Mum's cancer was the kind of genetic chance that can't truthfully be predicted.

The course of life will always remain mysterious, its miracles and tragedies unpredictable. Indeed, what chance would the embryonic future scientist Stephen Hawking have had under the cold glare of the DNA-assaying machine?

Companies such as Genomic Prediction are paving our way to Hell with their presumably good intentions. For humanity's sake, pre-birth DNA testing must stop at single-gene tests.

If it is allowed to go further, the miracle of childbirth will be replaced by a genetic lottery that allows consumers to dispose of their embryos for the most minutely 'undesirable' reasons, just as though they had no greater moral value than cheap fast-fashion.

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JOHN NAISH fears science is bringing 'designer' babies ever closer

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When my mother was born at the end of the Twenties, the novelist Aldous Huxley was writing of his Brave New World - a world in which human embryos were scientifically tested, selected and rejected on the basis of their genetic make-up.

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Brave New World TV Series Coming to NBCU's Peacock Streaming Service

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Brave New World TV Series Coming to NBCU's Peacock Streaming Service

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Brave New World, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's seminal sci-fi novel, is coming to NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service. The series was originally set for USA Network, where it received a straight-to-series order for a 10-episode inaugural season by the NBCU-owned cable outlet.

The network is sticking with the writer/showrunner it appointed last year - as part of a writer's room - in David Wiener, who brings writing and executive producer experience from Amazon's Homecoming, CBS All Access's Strange Angel, AMC's Fear the Walking Dead and Starz's Flesh and Bone. Serving as director for the pilot episode is Owen Harris (Black Mirror: San Junipero).

Huxley first published Brave New World in 1931 - originally intended as a parody of H.G. Wells's dystopian efforts - depicting a far-future (in approximately 2540 AD,) in which even the most miniscule aspects of civilization and its inhabitants are controlled; a world in which genetically engineered people are born from artificial wombs, divided into castes, prohibited from privacy and families, and have designated roles in life. However, despite the strictness of this existence, people are mollified through the encouragement of a hedonistic lifestyle centered around loose consumption, abundant sex and, most importantly, a happiness-inducing drug called Soma.

The series order represents the culmination of a developmental process for the Brave New World project several years in the making, stemming back to May 2015 with its initial arrival on NBCU's slate for its other cable outlet, Syfy. The project originally appointed Les Bohem as writer, subsequently replacing him with Grant Morrison and Brian Taylor the following year. However, Wiener will now work with Morrison and Taylor, both of which remain executive producers for the pilot.

Here's everything else we know about the series:

Brave New World TV Series Release Date

Brave New World has yet to announce a release date, but a shoot in the U.K. is imminent. Peacock is launching on April 2020, with a planned rollout of the service's original programming to begin next fall.

Brave New World TV Series Cast

Alden Ehrenreich was cast for a lead role in USA's Brave New World, reported Variety. The solo acquisition will headline the series as John the Savage, a product of both the World State from which his mother fled and the Savage Reservation on which he was raised, though he's kind of an outsider amongst the natives there as well. However, the young man - raised on the works of Shakespeare, notably The Tempest, which contains the story's title line - will have his life forever changed when New London exiles Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne show up at his reservation.

Harry Lloyd (Game of Thrones) co-stars as Bernard Marx, a denizen of the micro-managed future urban dystopia of New London, who, joined by Lenina Crowne, leaves the city behind for a life-changing vacation in the Savage Lands.

Demi Moore has been announced for the cast of USA Network's Brave New World for the recurring role of Linda, "the brash, hard-living mother" of John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich).

Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey) will play the crucial role of Lenina Crowne, who, along with fellow future dystopian denizen Bernard Marx (Lloyd), embarks on a revelatory journey into the wild.

Kylie Bunbury (Game Night, Pitch) will play Frannie, "Lenina's best friend, a Beta Plus who embraces her conditioning and New London's social order."

Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp, Killjoys) will play Wilhelmina "Helm" Watson, "a hedonistic artist and New London's premier maker of Feelies."

Sen Mitsuji (Altered Carbon Season 2, Origin) will play Henry Foster, "an Alpha Plus in every way, who works alongside Bernard as a counselor at The Bureau of Stability."

Joseph Morgan (The Originals, The Vampire Diaries) will play CJack60, "an Epsilon relegated to physical, tedious jobs, who is deeply impacted after witnessing a horrifying incident."

Nina Sosanya (Good Omens, Killing Eve) will play Mustafa Mond, "a World Controller who is responsible for maintaining New London's social structure and utopian promise."

Brave New World TV Series Story

As the official Brave New World logline reads:

As citizens of New London, Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne have only ever known a rigid social order, a perfect pharmaceutical called Soma, and a culture of instant gratification and ubiquitous sex. Curious to explore life beyond the strictures of their society, the two New Worlders embark on a vacation to the Savage Lands, where they become embroiled in a harrowing and violent rebellion. Bernard and Lenina are rescued by John the Savage, who escapes with them back to New London. John's arrival in the New World soon threatens to disrupt its utopian harmony, leaving Bernard and Lenina to grapple with the repercussions. The three become entwined in a fraught relationship that awakens them to the dangers of their own conditioning.

Joseph Baxter is a contributor for Den of Geek and Syfy Wire. You can find his work here. Follow him on Twitter @josbaxter.

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Brave New World TV Series Coming to NBCU's Peacock Streaming Service

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brave New World , an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's seminal sci-fi novel, is coming to NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service. The series was originally set for USA Network, where it received a straight-to-series order for a 10-episode inaugural season by the NBCU-owned cable outlet.