If Vonnegut’s deadpan dismantling of science and society in Cat’s Cradle—from Dr. Felix Hoenikker’s blithe invention of ice-nine to the farcical politics of San Lorenzo—made you grin, you’ll love Adams’s cosmic send‑up. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy opens by blowing up Earth as casually as Vonnegut topples civilization, then piles on delightfully bogus tech (the Infinite Improbability Drive) and bureaucratic cruelty (Vogon demolition orders) with the same straight-faced bite as Bokonon’s “foma.”

If the ice‑nine cataclysm and Bokonon’s cheerful cynicism made you cackle through the end times, Good Omens delivers that same irreverent vibe. Instead of Papa Monzano and San Lorenzo’s staged theatrics, you get an angel and a demon—Aziraphale and Crowley—fudging the paperwork of Armageddon, prophecies from Agnes Nutter as skewed as any Bokononist calypso, and an Antichrist whose whims upend everyone’s plans. It’s the apocalypse with a wink, much like Jonah’s deadpan chronicle of humanity’s folly.

If Cat’s Cradle hooked you with the uneasy question of what happens when indifferent curiosity births world‑ending tools—Hoenikker’s ice‑nine—Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven will hit that same nerve. Psychiatrist Dr. Haber exploits George Orr’s reality‑altering dreams to “improve” society, only to discover each fix spawns new disasters. Like Jonah tracing a karass toward catastrophe, you’ll watch small choices cascade into ethical quagmires, with wry, lucid prose that keeps the big ideas front and center.

If the cool horror of ice‑nine—the way one brilliant tinkerer unravels everything—stuck with you, Oryx and Crake is a natural next step. Through Snowman’s memories of Crake’s PARADICE project and the BlyssPluss pill, you’ll watch a gifted mind rationalize a beautiful, terrible solution with Hoenikker‑like detachment. It echoes Jonah’s investigation into how genius, commerce, and secrecy conspire toward ruin, but trades San Lorenzo’s pageantry for biotech labs and a chillingly plausible collapse.

If Bokononism’s ironic scriptures and San Lorenzo’s rituals fascinated you, A Canticle for Leibowitz explores belief’s knotty role after disaster. Monks preserve the relics of a fallen civilization—a grocer’s shopping list and a blueprint become sacred—while humanity trudges toward repeating its mistakes. As with Jonah’s chronicle from ice‑nine to fallout, you’ll get a sweeping, cyclical portrait of salvation and self‑destruction, with mordant humor and grave compassion in equal measure.