Cat's Cradle - References or Allusions

References or Allusions

• Irving Langmuir came up with the idea of ice-nine as a way to entertain H.G. Wells who visited Schenectady in the 1930s.
• The town of Ilium alludes to the town of Troy, NY (Ilium being the Latinized form of Troy's Greek name, Ἴλιον). However, it is largely based on Schenectady, NY, where Vonnegut worked as a publicity man for General Electric after World War II. The locale appears in many of Vonnegut's works, such as in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as the hometown of Kilgore Trout.
• In The Recruit, the secret CIA program was called Ice-9 after the material found in the book.
• In Episode 4 of The Unusuals, "Crime Slut," Det. Delahoy reads this book, which he discovered while investigating a missing person.
• Joe Satriani's instrumental album Surfing With the Alien includes a track "Ice 9."
• A metalcore band based in Boston, Massachusetts is named Ice Nine Kills.
• The 70's Southern California rock band Ambrosia included Nice, Nice, Very Nice on their eponymous debut album, setting music to the words of Bokonon's 53rd Calypso. Vonnegut gets a songwriters' credit on the album which peaked on the US charts at #22 in 1975.
• In Episode 13 of Dead Like Me, in a flashback, Joy Lass finds and reads Cat's Cradle at the lake.
• The rock band the Grateful Dead set up a publishing company called Ice Nine (in tribute to Vonnegut's story).
• A discussion of Vonnegut and Cat's Cradle launches the student prank at the heart of the 2010 novel, Bashert by Lior Samson, pen name of software pioneer Larry Constantine
• In the 2012 The Amazing Spider-Man movie, the character Gwen Stacey is reading Cat's Cradle in her introduction scene. The movie also involves a threat similar to ice-nine, a biological agent released into the air via a sort of weather machine.