Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way wants to produce a movie of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle…cool. I have had the image of an Ice-Nine catastrophe — all of the world’s oceans, rivers and great lakes suddenly freezing solid in a massive chain-reaction — sitting in my head since reading Vonnegut’s novel 30-something years ago. Claude Brodesser’s Variety story describes the plot as being about “a race to recover the world’s most dangerous substance, Ice-Nine, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature.” Vonnegut’s book explains that Ice-Nine, created by a character named Felix Hoenikker, is capable of creating a chain reaction that would solidify all water and thus destroy all life on earth. Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell University and knew about various permutations of ice through his brother, Dr. Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), a former professor of atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. Garden variety ice (ice cubes, snowflakes) is called ice-one and has a familiar hexagon arrangement. Under different conditions, different chemical arrangements can occur. Ice-nine has not yet been created in a lab, but other permutations (ice-eleven and ice-twelve) have reportedly been cooked up….emphasis on the word “reportedly.”