Why am I passionate about this?
My greatest passion? Human nature and the endless cycles we repeat, different on the surface yet identical at their core. We build systems, cultures, and rules, destroy them, then rebuild everything in remarkably similar forms, as though we possessed no memory of the past. I have studied human nature throughout my life, but this passion took shape at university through cultural anthropology and comparative theology. Over thirty years, it has guided my work in developing human potential and talent, and has been refined further through working with thousands of people from more than 200 countries and territories. It is now the lens through which I write speculative fiction.
Delenda's book list on how we build absurd societies and keep justifying them
Why Delenda loves this book
This book gave me two pleasures: following its story and discovering how ingeniously that story had been assembled.
Its 127 short chapters sometimes contain little more than an idea, a joke, or a shift in perspective. At first, they require some patience. A few may seem disconnected or even unnecessary, but gradually they build upon one another like pieces of a mosaic.
Vonnegut leaves me room to assemble the whole, connecting science, religion, politics, and catastrophe without explaining every link. The form made me an active reader rather than a passive one. Its compression creates space for me to participate while allowing every absurdity to land with greater force.
13 authors picked Cat's Cradle as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
One of America's greatest writers gives us his unique perspective on our fears of nuclear annihilation
Experiment.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it.
Solution.
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to…