Player Piano - America in the Coming Age of Electronics
First edition, 1952
Player Piano is Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, originally published in 1952. It depicts a dystopian America hollowed out by automation, where machines run nearly every aspect of life and ordinary workers are left without purpose or place. A sharp satire of technological overreach, it remains one of Vonnegut’s most prescient dystopian works.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth. New York: Scribners, 1952. #10399.
Fine in very good or better dust jacket with age-toning along spine and extremities.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, green cloth. New York: Scribners, 1952. #10399.
Fine in very good or better dust jacket with age-toning along spine and extremities.
Additional Details
Player Piano is set in Ilium, New York, sometime after a Third World War that accelerated the automation of American industry to its logical conclusion. The city is divided into three parts: the northwest quarter where the engineers and managers live, the northeast quarter where the machines are, and Homestead across the Iroquois River, where almost everyone else lives. The bridge between them is rarely crossed. Vonnegut drew on his time working as a publicist at General Electric in Schenectady.
At the center is Paul Proteus, manager of the Ilium Works, whose father was the nation's first National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director. Paul has inherited position, salary, and a Country Club membership, and has been quietly losing his conviction in all of them. His friend Ed Finnerty, a brilliant and deliberately self-destructive engineer, returns to Ilium and begins pulling at the threads Paul has been careful not to touch. Together they cross the bridge to Homestead and find a population that has been rendered not just unemployed but purposeless, sustained by the army, the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, or simply by nothing in particular.
Running parallel is the Shah of Bratpuhr, a spiritual leader from an undeveloped nation on a state tour of America, guided by a State Department handler named Halyard. The Shah's questions are a sustained comic instrument. He keeps asking, in various ways, whether the people he sees are Takaru, the word in his language for slaves, and no one can satisfactorily explain to him why they are not. These are some of the funniest scenes in the novel.
The Ghost Shirt Society, a resistance movement that takes its name from the Native American ritual that promised immunity from bullets, recruits Paul as its figurehead. The rebellion it launches destroys the machines of Ilium in a single night of chaos. The novel's ending, which finds the surviving rebels already tinkering with one of the destroyed machines to get it running again, is Vonnegut's clearest statement. The revolt accomplished nothing because the impulse that created the machines in the first place is the same impulse now reassembling them from the rubble.
Player Piano is Vonnegut's first novel, published by Scribners in 1952, and remains one of the sharper and more grounded works in the tradition of dystopian fiction about automation and human purpose. The first paperback edition, published by Bantam in 1954, retitled it Utopia 14, a title Vonnegut disliked. Mark Hillegas, in The Future as Nightmare, called it the best of the science fiction anti-utopias.
At the center is Paul Proteus, manager of the Ilium Works, whose father was the nation's first National Industrial, Commercial, Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director. Paul has inherited position, salary, and a Country Club membership, and has been quietly losing his conviction in all of them. His friend Ed Finnerty, a brilliant and deliberately self-destructive engineer, returns to Ilium and begins pulling at the threads Paul has been careful not to touch. Together they cross the bridge to Homestead and find a population that has been rendered not just unemployed but purposeless, sustained by the army, the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, or simply by nothing in particular.
Running parallel is the Shah of Bratpuhr, a spiritual leader from an undeveloped nation on a state tour of America, guided by a State Department handler named Halyard. The Shah's questions are a sustained comic instrument. He keeps asking, in various ways, whether the people he sees are Takaru, the word in his language for slaves, and no one can satisfactorily explain to him why they are not. These are some of the funniest scenes in the novel.
The Ghost Shirt Society, a resistance movement that takes its name from the Native American ritual that promised immunity from bullets, recruits Paul as its figurehead. The rebellion it launches destroys the machines of Ilium in a single night of chaos. The novel's ending, which finds the surviving rebels already tinkering with one of the destroyed machines to get it running again, is Vonnegut's clearest statement. The revolt accomplished nothing because the impulse that created the machines in the first place is the same impulse now reassembling them from the rubble.
Player Piano is Vonnegut's first novel, published by Scribners in 1952, and remains one of the sharper and more grounded works in the tradition of dystopian fiction about automation and human purpose. The first paperback edition, published by Bantam in 1954, retitled it Utopia 14, a title Vonnegut disliked. Mark Hillegas, in The Future as Nightmare, called it the best of the science fiction anti-utopias.
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