Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, about a world where machines do the work and humans find little meaning in life.

Book Review: Player Piano is the rare novel that confronts the subject of work. Most novels, films, television ignore work. Usually the characters either somehow don't need to work at all or any work occurs offstage. Or its simply not mentioned. Even when set in the workplace, the day-to-day of work rarely intrudes. Yet for most people work is central to our lives, essential, consuming much of our time and energy. Many of us spend more waking hours with workmates than loved ones. Vonnegut's focus here is on the pride that workers, the craftsman and artisan, take in doing their work well. But while it has Vonnegut's usual charm, Player Piano seemed a bit dated. Science fiction of another time. Set in an unspecified near future America when technology has enabled computers and machines to run and produce everything. Humans are now relegated to: (1) an elite manager and engineer class, and (2) the masses who are generally unemployed and living on the dole. This very much reflects elements of the corporate gray flannel Fifties when conformity was king and there was a fear that technology would put everyone out of work and life would become meaningless. Work gave life meaning, after all; the "feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed." Existentialists Heidegger and Sartre had similar concerns about America at the time. Today, when technology is everyone's best friend, we have more entertainment than we can consume, and some workers successfully create more flexible and friendly working conditions, Player Piano isn't quite as scary a prognostication as it may've been in 1952. He does see clearly, however, the domination of consumer culture, professional college sports, limitations placed on women in the working world, and a president who'd gone directly from a television program to the White House. Interesting historically for what may have been a nightmare at the time and to see Vonnegut's beginning as a novelist. Although enjoyable and entertaining, Vonnegut's best was ahead of him.  [3½★]