Player Piano
Encyclopedia
Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's
first novel
, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia
of automation
and capitalism
, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life
. The
story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in later works.
In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World
, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
."
is a modified piano that "plays itself". The piano keys move according to a pattern of holes punched in an unwinding scroll. Unlike a music synthesizer, the instrument actually produces the sound itself, with the keys moving up and down, driving hammers that strike the strings. Like its counterpart, a player piano can be played by hand as well. When a scroll is run through the ghost-operated instrument, the movement of its keys produce the illusion that an invisible performer is playing the instrument.
Vonnegut uses the player piano as a metaphor to represent how the novel's imaginary society is run by machines instead of people. Early in the book, Paul's friend and future member of the Ghost Shirt
Society, Ed Finnerty, is shown playing a player piano, suggesting the idea of humans regaining control from the machines.
and the big corporation
s, which discussed arguments very topical in the post-war capitalist United States, was instead advertised by the publisher with the more innocuous and marketable label of "science fiction
", a genre that was booming in mass popular culture
in the 1950s.
Player Piano was later released by Bantam Books
in 1954 under the title Utopia 14 in an effort to drive sales with readers of Science Fiction
.
Anita
Kroner
Ed Finnerty
Dr. Shepherd
Rev. James J. Lasher
The Shah of Bratpuhr
s was a crucial technological breakthrough in the post-war 1950s. In that period:
declared it "a biting, vividly alive and very effectively understated anti-Utopia." Boucher
and McComas
named it to their "year's best" list, describing it as "Human, satirical, and excisting; . . . by far the most successful of the recent attempts to graft science fiction onto the serious 'straight' novel." They praised Vonnegut for "blending skilfully a psychological study of the persistent human problems in a mechanistically 'ideal' society, a vigorous melodramatic story-line, and a sharp Voltairean
satire.
produced an audio version of Player Piano, narrated by Christian Rummel, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
first novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
of automation
Automation
Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...
and capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life
Quality of life
The term quality of life is used to evaluate the general well-being of individuals and societies. The term is used in a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, and politics. Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of...
. The
story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. This widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class—the engineers and managers who keep society running—and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become a hallmark developed further in later works.
Influences
In a 1973 interview Vonnegut discussed his inspiration to write the book:I was working for General ElectricGeneral ElectricGeneral Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
at the time, right after World War IIWorld War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engineJet engineA jet engine is a reaction engine that discharges a fast moving jet to generate thrust by jet propulsion and in accordance with Newton's laws of motion. This broad definition of jet engines includes turbojets, turbofans, rockets, ramjets, pulse jets...
s, gas turbineGas turbineA gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of internal combustion engine. It has an upstream rotating compressor coupled to a downstream turbine, and a combustion chamber in-between....
s. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.
In the same interview he acknowledges that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World
Brave New World
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's fifth novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 , the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of...
, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
We (novel)
We is a dystopian novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin completed in 1921. It was written in response to the author's personal experiences during the Russian revolution of 1905, the Russian revolution of 1917, his life in the Newcastle suburb of Jesmond, and his work in the Tyne shipyards during the First...
."
Title
A player pianoPlayer piano
A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...
is a modified piano that "plays itself". The piano keys move according to a pattern of holes punched in an unwinding scroll. Unlike a music synthesizer, the instrument actually produces the sound itself, with the keys moving up and down, driving hammers that strike the strings. Like its counterpart, a player piano can be played by hand as well. When a scroll is run through the ghost-operated instrument, the movement of its keys produce the illusion that an invisible performer is playing the instrument.
Vonnegut uses the player piano as a metaphor to represent how the novel's imaginary society is run by machines instead of people. Early in the book, Paul's friend and future member of the Ghost Shirt
Ghost Shirts
Ghost shirts were vests held sacred by certain factions of the Lakota Sioux that were supposed to guard against bullets through spiritual power. Contrary to popular belief, Jack Wilson opposed rebellion against the white settlers...
Society, Ed Finnerty, is shown playing a player piano, suggesting the idea of humans regaining control from the machines.
Science fiction branding
This satirical take on industrialization and the rhetoric of General ElectricGeneral Electric
General Electric Company , or GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in Schenectady, New York and headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, United States...
and the big corporation
Corporation
A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
s, which discussed arguments very topical in the post-war capitalist United States, was instead advertised by the publisher with the more innocuous and marketable label of "science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
", a genre that was booming in mass popular culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
in the 1950s.
Player Piano was later released by Bantam Books
Bantam Books
Bantam Books is an American publishing house owned entirely by Random House, the German media corporation subsidiary of Bertelsmann; it is an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. It was formed in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine...
in 1954 under the title Utopia 14 in an effort to drive sales with readers of Science Fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
.
Summary
Player Piano is set in the future after a fictional third world war. During the war, while most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation’s managers and engineers developed ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few workers. The novel begins ten years after the war, when most factory workers have been replaced by machines. Player Piano develops two parallel plot lines that converge only briefly, at the beginning and the end of the novel. The most important plot line tells of Dr. Paul Proteus, an intelligent, thirty-five-year-old factory manager. The second plot line describes the American tour of the Shah of Barpuhr, spiritual leader of six million residents of a distant, under-developed nation. Proteus lives and works within the system, but the Shah is a visitor from a very different culture. Despite Paul's good fortune in society, he is vaguely dissatisfied with the industrial system and his place in it. Throughout the novel, he considers alternatives, but the system is so large and complex that there are few opportunities to live outside of it. Ed Finnerty, an old friend, shows up at Paul's door and informs him he has quit his important engineer job in Washington D.C., and he intends to live outside the system, just as Paul had dreamed of doing. Paul and Finnerty visit a bar in the "Homestead" section of town, where workers who have been displaced by machines live out their meaningless lives in shoddy, mass-produced houses. There they meet an Episcopal minister with an M.A. in anthropology named Lasher who puts into words the unfairness of the system that the two engineers have only vaguely sensed. They soon learn that Lasher is the leader of a rebel group known as the "Ghost Shirt Society", and Finnerty instantly takes up with him. Paul is not bold enough to make a clean break, as Finnerty has done, until his superiors ask him to betray Finnerty and Lasher. He quits his job and is captured by the "Ghost Shirt Society" and is forced to join as their leader, but only in name. Paul's father was the first “National, Industrial, Commercial Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director”. As his lengthy title suggests, Dr. George Proetus has almost complete control over the nation’s economy and was more powerful than the President of the United States. Through his father's success, Paul's name is famous among the citizens, so the organization intends to use his name to their advantage by making him the false 'leader' to gain publicity.Characters
Paul Proteus- Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, is the head of industry in Ilium, New York. He is caught in the middle of the conflict, forced to choose whether to continue his work and move on to a future of fame and success, or become the figurehead leader of a rebellion against the machine society. His father was an influential and important figure in the transition to an automated society and thus Paul finds himself in an interesting position. He is to be given a big promotion: to head Engineer at the PittsburghPittsburgh, PennsylvaniaPittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
plant, the biggest center of productionProduction, costs, and pricingThe following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to industrial organization:Industrial organization – describes the behavior of firms in the marketplace with regard to production, pricing, employment and other decisions...
in the Eastern United StatesEastern United StatesThe Eastern United States, the American East, or simply the East is traditionally defined as the states east of the Mississippi River. The first two tiers of states west of the Mississippi have traditionally been considered part of the West, but can be included in the East today; usually in...
. His boss, Kroner, knew his father and had always groomed Paul for success, which complicates matters for Paul as his father died when he was young and he does not want to disappoint the father figure who is trying to help him.
Anita
- Anita is Paul's wife. "Of all the people on the north side of the river [the rich ones], Anita was the only one whose contempt for those in Homestead [the poor side of the river] was laced with active hatred. She was also the only wife on the north side who had never been to college at all. [...] If Paul were ever moved to be extremely cruel to her, the cruelest thing he could do, he knew, would be to point out to her why she hated [Homesteaders] as she did: if he hadn't married her, this was where she'd be, what she'd be." She is described as an attractive woman with a desire for her husband's career advancement, to a fault. She cannot bear children, although she and Paul married quickly when it seemed she was pregnant.
Kroner
- Kroner is Paul's boss and one of the most important men in the country. He treats all of his underlings as if they are his children and he even refers to his wife as "Mom" when speaking of her to Paul. His VictorianVictorian architectureThe term Victorian architecture refers collectively to several architectural styles employed predominantly during the middle and late 19th century. The period that it indicates may slightly overlap the actual reign, 20 June 1837 – 22 January 1901, of Queen Victoria. This represents the British and...
mansionMansionA mansion is a very large dwelling house. U.S. real estate brokers define a mansion as a dwelling of over . A traditional European mansion was defined as a house which contained a ballroom and tens of bedrooms...
was "one more affirmation of Kroner's belief that nothing of value changed; that what was once true is always true; that truths were few and simple; and that a man needed no knowledge beyond these truths to deal wisely and justly with any problem whatsoever." He's overtly sexist and believes with every fiber of his being the system of automationAutomationAutomation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...
in place is the best thing for the country.
Ed Finnerty
- Ed Finnerty is Paul's old best friend. They had come up through the Engineering ranks together and they had grown close. Their friendship waned when Finnerty took a high ranking position in Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and they lost touch. Finnerty had always been somewhat of a nut, never caring what others thought of him in the least, and his poor hygiene is discussed at length in the start of the book. It is Finnerty that first plants the seeds of revolution in Paul's mind.
Dr. Shepherd
- Shepherd was once Paul's friend with Finnerty when all three were young engineers. However, when the book begins, Shepherd is jealous of Paul's success, since Paul is his boss. Shepherd constantly treats Paul as a rival, though Paul never considers him to be a threat. Interestingly enough, Anita turns to him later in the book when it appears as though Paul's career is over.
Rev. James J. Lasher
- Lasher was in a bar that Paul happened to go into to buy Irish whiskey and struck up a conversation. Lasher is the secret head of the Ghost Shirt organization.
The Shah of Bratpuhr
- The ShahShahShāh is the title of the ruler of certain Southwest Asian and Central Asian countries, especially Persia , and derives from the Persian word shah, meaning "king".-History:...
is the spiritual leader of the Kolhouri, a sect with six million adherents. He is led on a tour of the United States in a minor subplot to learn from the most powerful nation in the world how to improve the lives of the people in his mountain kingdom. He has trouble understanding the American culture, as the closest equivalent to working men in his nation are takaru, or slaves. The Shah is assisted by an interpreter named Khashdrahr Miasma.
Arguments against capitalism
The book discusses how the increases in worker's productivity, by way of more advanced machinery or organizational changes, impact the lives of workers themselves. The increase in the number of vacuum tubeVacuum tube
In electronics, a vacuum tube, electron tube , or thermionic valve , reduced to simply "tube" or "valve" in everyday parlance, is a device that relies on the flow of electric current through a vacuum...
s was a crucial technological breakthrough in the post-war 1950s. In that period:
Reception
Reviewing the novel for a genre science fiction audience, Groff ConklinGroff Conklin
Edward Groff Conklin was a leading science fiction anthologist. He edited 40 anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories , wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects as well as a published poet...
declared it "a biting, vividly alive and very effectively understated anti-Utopia." Boucher
Anthony Boucher
Anthony Boucher was an American science fiction editor and author of mystery novels and short stories. He was particularly influential as an editor. Between 1942 and 1947 he acted as reviewer of mostly mystery fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle...
and McComas
J. Francis McComas
Jesse Francis McComas was an American science fiction editor. McComas wrote several stories on his own in the 1950s using both his own name and the pseudonym Webb Marlowe....
named it to their "year's best" list, describing it as "Human, satirical, and excisting; . . . by far the most successful of the recent attempts to graft science fiction onto the serious 'straight' novel." They praised Vonnegut for "blending skilfully a psychological study of the persistent human problems in a mechanistically 'ideal' society, a vigorous melodramatic story-line, and a sharp Voltairean
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
satire.
Adaptations
In 2009, Audible.comAudible.com
Audible.com is an Internet provider of spoken audio entertainment, information, and educational programming.Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs, and audio versions of magazines and newspapers....
produced an audio version of Player Piano, narrated by Christian Rummel, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.