Ok, 3 stars is not a bad review, it just means I think it’s good but neither great nor amazing.

This is his first novel from 1952, and I think it shows. It’s an interesting idea and interesting that it occurred to him we might lose our purpose the more automation takes over back then already. However, I think his imagining of what that might look like is quite short sighted.

Also, there was no thought behind what evolution women might have gone through in the time between his own culture and that of this book. We don’t know how much time passed, but it can’t have been long because women went from being home makers and the occasional secretary to being homemakers and the occasional secretary. But of course, the homemaker suffered under the rule of the machines too. What’s left to do, but watch tv if the machines do all the clothes and dishwashing, cooking and whatever else?

I’m glad I didn’t read this novel of Vonnegut’s first. I might have been put off. Putting all that aside, though, it is a good thought experiment on human enterprise.

The narrator was fantastic! Great subtle accents and a good speed, that one could accelerate manually without losing quality.

I started Player Piano twice in high school. Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite classic English class authors. Last year I read Welcome to the Monkey House over a period of months and really enjoyed it. Sure, there are dated references that root this book (and his other work) in the mid-twentieth century, but I can suspend my own perspective for a bit and enjoy this bit of fiction.

The novel is futuristic, dystopian, and all too possible; set in the New York manufacturing city of Ilium, Player Piano follows a disenchanted high-level engineer Paul Proteus as he disconnects from the public works slight socialism that groups all regular intelligence citizens on one side of the city, essentially devoid of jobs and economy except for the Reeks and Wrecks cleaning and maintenance crews, and sequesters the few engineers on the other, alongside the constant hum of machines. The machines themselves are quite adorable and slightly Jetsons in that it is what an author from the 1950s would envision as top-level technology. For example, Vonnegut discusses instant meals and convection ovens a good deal, but in this day and age, people are more interested in using future tech for meal delivery and meal kits than instant food.

Paul is dissatisfied with his role at Ilium Works, his boring marriage to Anita, and whatever ennui comes alongside being a high achiever in a stratified society. He is apathetic at the idea of a promotion and wrestles with quitting until he is falsely labeled as a saboteur and then instructed to infiltrate a secret society. I doubt Paul was ever really going to quit; he reminds me of a usual basic protagonist somewhat like This Side of Paradise. Also, the lengthy comparisons to Indians, the Shah, and Anita's descriptions are obviously dated. Yet, I appreciate this book for what it is, and I look forward to reading more Vonnegut in the coming years.

Considering the age of this debut novel by the great Kurt Vonnegut Jr there are certain parallels to this modern life.

The major theme is that modern technology is taking over industry to the point that it leaves many of a certain skill set without a role in society. Vonnegut Jr being a brilliant satirist has made an occasional laugh out loud satire that though showing its age in terms of using the then known machineries seemed to me to have a relevance to the modern use of AI as just one example.

One of the more interesting events in the tale told is that rioters were smashing all the machines up and that the engineers behind the revolt pleaded for them to stop as they had to decide what machines were kept and what were to be destroyed. The rioters took no notice and were even destroying bakeries, for example. What to eat now was the obvious question. Hence, Vonnegut Jr asks the reader the question, if machinery makes for a dull life what do we do without it anyway? The definitive double bind for the opposition to modern technology? One could argue so.


Highly recommended to all Takaru.

P.S
I read a lot of Vonnegut Jr in my youth though the only stand-out to this day is Slaughter-House Five, so with that I have decided to read his oeuvre from the first to the last. This will take time, but so be it. This has come about for 2 reasons. Backlisted covered Galápagos and I have not read that. I need to. Also, a conversation with a well-read neighbour about Vonnegut Jr. I concluded I needed to read him out.

"The most beautiful peonies I ever saw," said Paul, "Were grown in almost pure cat excrement" (300).

Awesome...

I began to read this book the week SOL (an acronym Vonnegut would have loved.... like his EPICAC computer mainframe...) testing commenced at the high school I teach at... a full week, in other words, of licensed teachers getting paid to STARE at children take standardized computer-based examinations. These are the tests that apparently establish competence or confirm mental infirmity. The description of Player Piano on the dust jacket made my decision to read the book that much more poignant:

"Want the computer to solve all your problems? Want machines to give you everything you need? Want to be taken care of from cradle to grave by an industrial society that knows what is best for you? Want to find out what hell is really like?"

Most of the students I teach (in spite of the best efforts of their teachers...) would answer in the affirmative to each of the above questions. And furthermore, hell, for my 9th and 11th grade students, would be a room without a wall socket, cellphone reception, or a WiFi password. Dystopia? Ha!!!

As a Vonnegut fan / fan of dystopian-themed lit in general, I enjoyed Player Piano. I would not, however, recommend this as an introduction to Vonnegut for new readers--it lacks the fluidity, perceived brevity, and good-humored irreverence other books of his (Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Timequake, Breakfast of Champions, etc.) possess. However, as a literary artifact--especially for devotees of Vonnegut's work--Player Piano is worth your time; evidence of his future philosophical meanderings and socio-political perspectives are (albeit in a primal state) embedded within.

Vonnegut's jabs at the higher education institutions of the future, in spite of the book's vintage (1952), read like prophesy. In the U.S., the plethora of hungry-for-profit universities, online PhD programs, "accelerated" degrees, and "Hollywood Upstairs Medical College-type" institutions (see The Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqImk...) tout the idea that "education = intelligence = respect = power", regardless of when/where/how said credentials are obtained. In Player Piano, protagonist Paul Proteus' realtor has a PhD in real estate, and he brags of his writing the "longest dissertation" of any real estate student at his university. Later in the book, a state dept. official is discredited and vocationally reclassified when his degree from Cornell is discovered incomplete (and therefore useless/meaningless) due to a mistakenly missing "physical education" credit. Education is the key, of course, but Vonnegut asks us to contemplate the practicality of the keys we choose to cut...

From page 150:

"Doctor Proteus--this is Mr. Haycox."
"How are you?" said Paul.
"'Dr.," said Mr. Haycox. "What kind of doctor?"
"Doctor of Science," said Paul.
Mr. Haycox seemed annoyed and disappointed. "Don't call that kind a doctor at all. Three kinds of doctors: dentists, vets, and physicians. You one of those?"
"No. Sorry."
"Then you ain't a doctor."

Later in the book, Vonnegut draws interesting (here comes that patented irreverence!) parallels between the waning Native American population of the 19th century U.S. frontier and humankind (imperfect, frail, inefficient, and "stupid"), in relation to the continued automation of industry and, well, of everything. Player Piano's rebellion, The "Ghost Shirt Society", is "...determined to disprove; that I'm no good, you're no good, that we're no good because we're human" (299). In a society where humans, their culture, and their potential contributions to the world are increasingly irrelevant in light of mechanical innovation, Paul Proteus comes to endorse a sort of philosophical luddism--not one rooted in techophobia but rather in necessity: "Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participating in such enterprises" (285).

I could have fun with this book, as a teacher, paired with some of my other favorite dystopian classics:

Fahrenheit 451,
Brave New World,
1984,
Heart of Darkness,
The Road.

Even though Player Piano isn't hitting on "all cylinders" in relation to some of Vonnegut's more complete works, there is early evidence of his poignant humor that seems absent in the other dystopian classics mentioned above. Give it a shot if you are a Vonnegut buff!

I can't really explain why I didn't like this one more than I did. I did some vigorous head-nodding with the message, and it's an at-least-decent showing for a first novel, and there are moments that seem downright prescient for something written 60 years ago. So why did I keep nodding off in the middle of it? Why did I entertain thoughts of abandoning it? It's a 2-star book with several 4-star moments, but not enough to average out to 3-stars. Not for me. Were my expectations too high? Was I spoiled by n  Slaughterhouse-Fiven and n  Breakfast of Championsn?

See also:
• http://www.accreditedonlinecolleges.c...

Image: Remington Rand’s UNIVAC computer, circa 1952. The computer, consisting of everything in the room minus the people, could store up to 1,000 12-letter words - that's only about one kb.

When Vonnegut wrote Player Piano in the early '50s, computers were room-sized machines with hundreds of vacuum tubes. They were primarily used for solving complex mathematics and not much more.

Vonnegut, prescient as ever, imagined a time where computers would outperform humans and replace us in almost every job field.

Today that is close to becoming a reality with an estimated 45 million Americans losing their job to AI automation (a quarter of the workforce) by 2030, according to some studies, and a billion people worldwide. AI will affect nearly every occupational group.

Whether Vonnegut believed that computers could ever perform so many jobs better than humans or if he wrote this book tongue in cheek, I do not know.

Regardless, it is hysterical. It is centered around Paul Proteus, one of the lucky few whose IQ is high enough to be given a managerial job by the government. He does not manage people but machines, and thus his job too is redundant.

However, in order to keep the economy going, enough people have to be paid to pump money into it and so the government has to create jobs, necessary or not. There are managers and there are army people and there are those in the "Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps". There might not be work but people still need to be employed.

For instance, Paul comes upon a road crew where, "three men were painting [lines on the road], twelve were directing traffic, and another twelve were resting." Apparently, some things never change.

The machines that have taken away jobs are over-the-top affairs, massive and consisting of numerous wires and lights and tubes that easily overheat. Memory was stored on tape reels, just as it was in the 1950s.

The amazing new technology people are blessed with consists of "electronic door openers, thermostatically controlled windows, radar range, electrostatic dust precipitators, ultrasonic clothes washer built in, forty-inch television screens in the master bedroom, guest room, living room, kitchen, and rumpus rooms, and twenty-inch screens in the maids’ rooms and the kiddies’ rooms".

The latter made me laugh, with 40" tv screens being almost obsolete, making way for ever larger screens.

Unfortunately, many people are unhappy with this new scheme of things, feeling they have little purpose in life. Paul is one of these people, finding himself ever more discontent and wondering if humans wouldn't be better off without any machines.

Here's the funny thing about me and Vonnegut: He's one of my favourite authors and yet I rarely enjoy reading him, at least not for most of the book. I find his novels tiresome while I'm reading them and have to force myself to concentrate.

But I know that I will be rewarded by the time I finish the book because it all comes together so perfectly. The conversations I found tedious to read are necessary to the book's message and build-up and I'm always amazed by how this happens.

I enjoy the last pages of the book and thinking about it afterwards. That is where the reward lies, not in the experience of reading but in thinking about the book.

This novel, Vonnegut's first, is no exception. It is funny. It is imaginative. It is satirical. It is absurd.

Vonnegut was brilliant.

Someday I'd like to reread this youthful work by that depressed epochal American writer Kurt Vonnegut, once again.

His hero is so much like I was - he is a minor bit player in the dirty game of life, trying to make sense of his semi-cybernetic world back in the sixties - armed only with a warmly human recalcitrance.

He works in a little office in smalltown upstate New York.

So it was for Vonnegut himself back then - wasn't his employer General Electric in Utica? - and so it was for me, a decade later, working in the school of hard knocks, towering in a steel, glass and cement monolith at the stagnant end of the Rideau Canal.

At an establishment brains trust: Delegate 'N Disappear. Like my colleague Charles did...

If anyone among his hoi polloi turned ugly, Charles cracked down on 'em. He could turn ugly too.

But I, like Vonnegut, fought the Big System and befriended my staff. If work was War, we were all in the Trenches together. Never mind if I fought an unreal Aspie War, like MARK Vonnegut, his son!

And, like it was to Vonnegut, so it was to young me too, beavering away as a file clerk under the shadow of the semi-automated macho aegis of faceless gods who cracked their whips and hollered "giddup" to a reluctant young Nemo under neuroleptics.

It was just an awful nightmare.

But Vonnegut saw even more bad news in it...

He saw the new stranglehold vice grip upon us wayward humans - it masquerades as informational freedom - that faceless corporate computers have now. And you know what’s worse?

They are now in Absolute Control of our Life.

Checkmate!

Don't believe me? Read the new book which just appeared this summer: Parker G. Brandt's The Secret Future.

It's quite inexpensive...

But it will scare you. And it will set you straight!

I laughed off this type of book back then in 1975, moronic tool of the System that I was, but was glad in those dire days of Vonegut's black humour, in an imaginary scenario that would never - I thought - assume the cold hard face of reality.

Yikes, was I wrong!

Now we're up to our armpits in AI alligators, and me?

I'm always naively backpedalling into a richer, near-extinct aboriginal humanity than that hard shrink-wrap world in which my more with-it contemporary, Charles, has his fun 'n games.

The pure garden soil of unabashed humanity is in my books, and with it I can freely germinate an old-fashioned feeling of Being Human - warm, caring and responsible…

But now the curse is upon us. A caring humanity is the only antidote.

Our books can show us the way back to openly human health.

Kurt, old buddy, you saw it ALL coming, didn't you?

For you, so used to being totally free with your human-too-human humour -

Saw the ghastly pall of a totally cybernetic inhumanity falling upon us all -

At the dire stroke of a New and Awful kinda Midnight.

I heard that Vonnegut was a fantastic writer and (what you'd know) it is true. Player Piano is a novel set in near future. It is a dystopian kind of future, set in USA. In this part of the word, most of the labour is done by machines, meaning that only a selected few get to have a real job. Others aren't exactly starving, the state feeds them but that's about it. They are depressed and lack a sense of purpose in their lives. The plot focused on a young engineer who is increasingly unhappy and frustrated in a society where the work force is composed primarily of managers and engineers. Why is he unhappy? He is young, successful and married. But not everything is as it seems. Our protagonist feels guilty and more than that, he is starting to realize something is terribly wrong with the society he lives in.

This novel is very relevant for today's world, especially if one takes a look at the number of unemployed young people. In the future, most work will be done by machines. Player Piano asks some really interesting questions, and it certainly got me thinking. Simply said, I was absolutely blown away by this book. I wrote a rather long review for it but unfortunately my laptop shot down in the middle of it and it was all lost. I don't have the time to rewrite that review, so a shorter one will do. Perhaps this little incident is a perfect metaphor for this novel. Technology influences our lives in ways we can't always predict.

I just remembered that I did not review Player Piano. I did not have the time to do it when I finished the novel one month ago and then I forgot.

I am not going to write a full review because I lost the momentum, but I have a few comments.

First of all, If you never read Kurt Vonnegut I would not start with this one. It is very good but I believe it would be better savored by readers that already enjoyed other works by the author. This is his first novel and his fragmented writing style and satire is not fully developed. The humor is more subtle and some of the plot is a bit dated. I started with Slaughterhouse 5 and continued with Th Cat's Cradle. That order was fine for me.

Player Piano imagines a world where most jobs became obsolete due to the extensive use of machines to replace the use of less productive humans. There are many important issues discussed here but the ones that seemed most in tone with the current world were about the corporate personality and about the pitfalls of standardizing the evaluation of people in schools/jobs or as human beings.

Kurt Vonnegut is gradually becoming one of my favorite writers. He was a genius.

Man created machines in his own image...

And man and machine alike were told to worship one deity: the CORPORATE PERSONALITY!

The 10 Commandments according to the Church Of Corporate Thinking:

1. Thou shalt believe in one corporation
2. Thou shalt have no other corporations beside the one you serve
3. Thou shalt honour all traditions and communal behaviours of your corporation
4. Thou shalt accept whatever the corporation tells you as truth
5. Thou shalt have no other truths except for corporate truth
6. Thou shalt lie, steal and kill to protect your corporation against enemies
7. Thou shalt not think outside the profitability and efficiency box
8. Thou shalt not covet any social change but the one that is good for the corporation
9. Thou shalt believe in the infallibility of the machines
10. Thou shalt not demand meaning in life, but entertainment and convenience

This is Vonnegut’s first novel, and the fifth I am reading. I have seen many reviews reflecting that his dark sarcasm is not fully developed yet, and that this is one of his weaker works linguistically as well. That may be. But it broke my heart. I am stunned, speechless, overwhelmed.

It felt similar to reading Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out after finishing her later novels. It is all there in the making, even though the narrative style still remains more “conventional” than in later experimental stages. Just like her first novel was full of the anxiety of a world on a disastrous voyage towards the Great War, Vonnegut’s first novel shows the horrible making of the post-modern human being - more robotic than the computers that are about to be invented. It is an act of rationalization that does not end until human life itself has become redundant in the world of technological perfection. Vonnegut, however, does not criticize technology or the development of science per se. His aim is to show the robotic majority of humankind's need to form exclusive groups with certain patterns, protected against the outside world through specific procedures of selection. To keep unity within the group, external enemies and propaganda are utilized effectively.

Vonnegut’s narrative mirrors Camus’ reflections on societies and rebellions in L'homme révolté, a pendulum movement between different corporations, eternally building new oppressive systems to support ideas that are taken for absolute truth, and weighed against other ideas, considered evil and thus to be destroyed with moral impunity.

As a hilarious contrast foil, and tribute to Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, where a Persian explains the function of the pope from the perspective of an outsider (“C'est une vielle idole qu'on encense par habitude”), the story is accompanied by sequences describing the travelling Sha of Bratpuhr, who carefully studies different aspects of society and insists on calling the robot-like Americans “Takaru”, meaning “slaves”. The annoyed interpreter deliberately mis-translates the Shah’s recurring exclamation “Takaru, Takaru” into “citizens”, thus showing the true colours of citizenship in a state of prescribed behaviour and commitment.

The overarching topic of the uselessness of modern human beings, as explored on a deeper level in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, receives no definite solution, as the pendulum between power and rebellion keeps moving.

I felt a shiver down my spine reading about corporate team-building: a camp for brainwashing highly intelligent people. It reminded me of some education conferences, where pedagogues are given formulas for teaching “critical thinking skills”, along with lesson plans, standardized assessments and documentation for the all-important accreditation processes of popular curriculum brands.

Bilious competitiveness within the organisation is lauded, as long as it follows prescribed rules, while search for personal freedom and creativity is punished, severely. Surveillance of every single step in a human’s life is taken for granted, and technology is embraced as the perfect spy on your private life and thoughts. Living in one of the most automatized countries in the world, I smiled at the primitive control functions in Vonnegut’s dystopian visions for the future. But it was a frozen smile, and it hurt.

Helpless, powerless, quixotic, main character Proteus goes from one collective organisation to the next: socialized to be one in a group, he has few weapons, and the message seems to be that as an individual, you are prey, alone, hiding in a world of brutal predators who justify their evil with the commandments of their corporation. Part of the organisation, they have no personal responsibility, and hence feel no guilt.

Nomen est omen.

Proteus’ name is indicating versatility, adaptability and flexibility, and he struggles to live up to the rigidity and immutability that is required in order to survive in a competitive group with a shared visionary dogma. His opponent, Shepherd, embraces the dogma and is thus perfectly suited to care for sheep.

When Eve ate the apple, she was the first one to break the rules of the corporation of the Garden Eden. She was expelled for it, and that is how the story goes, ever since: think for yourself, make your own decisions, speak up against illogical or inhumane rules and actions, and you are OUT!

And human! Not a takaru or citizen!

Congratulations!

Let’s fight the windmills of the corporate personality, for some magic to stay in the world.

For as long as we are here, our stories will go on, as Vonnegut brilliantly states in his closing lines:

“This isn’t the end, you know”, he said. “Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be - not even Judgment Day.”

Daily Vonnegut – Final Day.

It’s been quite the journey, and I am looking forward to the incubation period that will occur now. I get to let my experiences in life wash up against what I have gathered in Vonnegut and I get to see what remains after a few months, a year, a few years.

I found this book to be one of the most relevant works that Vonnegut has put out. Lots of pointed discussion on end states of corporate work forces, fantasies of being Thoreau, liberal activism that is in reality removed from any visceral feeling for the intended recipient, etc etc etc. Among all of these ideas, I thought that one stood out: the Third Revolution in Industry, so dubbed by Paul Proteus, our main character. This is the takeover of artificial intelligence, but not in the usual sense of “we are doomed because they will eventually kill us” – no, this is the takeover of AI as a result of us eventually ceasing to think in a critical and abstract manner. Written in 1952, all of Vonnegut’s concerns remain relevant. His first novel, and some of his most damning commentary on society.

So there it is. That’s the journey. I’ll give a top 5 ranking here and then a few more thoughts before calling it for this trip:

1. Slaughterhouse-Five
2. Mother Night
3. Cat’s Cradle
4. Player Piano
5. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Yes, I finished all of Vonnegut’s novels. No, it wasn’t always enjoyable. Yes, I continued, despite it being difficult to go on at times. Why?

Good question. For one, I like him as a person. Quite a bit. And I think that his main goal as a person was always the emission of positive and warm energy. So that’s as good a reason as any. If we dig a bit further… I suppose I was fascinated with his approach to the natural questions of life. At some point, your average human will come across this question:

“Why?”

So… Why has this happened? Why has this not happened? Why is X responsible? Why is Y the victim? Why A, B, C, D, E,....., X, Y, Z? Why why why why why? People point to Vonnegut’s “why” moment as Dresden, but I believe it’s much more complicated. I believe that his “why” moment would have come earlier, and it would have come with his experience with the listlessness of his father, the mental health (and thus affection) issues of his mother, and the trials and tribulations of his childhood. Then Dresden, of course. Being involved in the Battle of the Bulge is not fun, and I truly mean that without trying to be funny. So it makes sense to wonder why any of this was happening.

After this question, I believe that some sort of resolution is formed, but not before another half-vague question:

“What now?”

What do we do? What to do? What direction do I move in? What does it all mean? In coming to answer these questions, there is an initial acknowledgment that the answer will be bleak at times. Afterward, one more step remains. How do you respond? Vonnegut has his choice of response to the bleak absurdity that life can present at every corner. Allen mentions it: “using humour as a chief defence against despair”. Humour, satire, bitter irony. Most everything (with the exception of some prefaces to certain books) is written with an irreverence that I find both amusing and slightly nauseating. Not annoying, but nauseating, because I tend to share the same views as DFW on the constant use of irony to get to the bottom of life. I believe that the pure wielding of irony as a scythe through the tall grass of life will lead us to a massive tree, a plaque on which reads “Meaning”. We climb it high up, edge our way out on a slightly flimsy branch, and start to use the same scythe to cut the branch. No matter what the undercurrent of our intentions is, the results may not be what we intend.

Either way, it is clear that Vonnegut takes up a fundamental portion of many people’s developmental journey into literature, philosophy, politics, and discussion of ideas in general. Through a variety of circumstances, I never encountered him in these formative years, and while a part of me is happy that that is the case, a bigger part is experiencing faux-nostalgia for what could have been.

Rather better than I expected it to be. Vonnegut envisages a post World War 3 world in the throes of a 3rd industrial revolution. The 1st being the augmentation of manpower with machines to massively increase output. The 2nd is actually one we're already engaged in, where production is increasingly automated, removing the requirement for people on production lines. The 3rd is one that's currently underway where increasingly jobs requiring any sort of human involvement are replaced by ever more autonomous machines.

Dr Paul Proteus, a senior engineer has become disillusioned with how whole swathes of the population are effectively thrown on the scrapheap as being of no use to the system.

This debut novel already has his mordant satirical humour and humanist concerns