Kurt Vonnegut’s 1952 novel Player Piano is set in a future US where machines have replaced nearly all human labor. I want to call it a dystopian novel, but I don’t think it’s a dark dystopia like We or 1984. It’s a specfic future society, and the book keeps asking us readers to consider if this is really so bad, and then if this is dystopian and negative, then how is this any different from our own world.
The story is set in upstate New York, I think it’s meant to be Troy but called Illium now. It’s never explained when or why the name changed, or if this is just meant to be a fictional city set in the real-world Marathon, Ithaca, etc. It works to remind readers of the Illiad, which has got to be intentional. Plus, it’s the city of the Trojan Horse, which looks like a complicated, high-tech gift, but is actually full of dangerous men who sack the city.
I also really liked this aspect of the book personally — I just love the classical city names upstate. We go to a convention every year in Ithaca, NY, and I dramatically recite Ithaka to my husband when we encounter traffic or delays. (Major in classics, kids, you’ll never make any money but it’s fun.)
Illium has a river running through the middle, like Troy does, and on one side of the river, all the engineers and professors live. On the other side, all the workers live, only no one really needs any workers since machines do everything, so they’re mostly unemployed. The unemployed get a basic income that keeps their homes up to the national standard, and as the professional class like to remind them, their TVs are bigger now than when they were working, so what are they complaining about? It’s weirdly prescient, since so many current discussions of poverty insist that any household with a flatscreen TV is not struggling.
Sometimes it makes me sad to read older scifi when authors predicted that the future would require fewer hours of work, and imagined a world with universal basic income and healthcare, because obviously a society would take care of people. This concepts reminded me of Commune 2000, so I had to dig that up, too.
In the secondary plotline, the visiting Shah sees the unemployed working class and recognizes them as slaves. Of course, his American guides explain that those people aren’t slaves, they’re valued citizens but the Shah knows what he’s seeing, and calls them slaves for the rest of the novel.
On the other side of the river, the professional class live. There’s a moment of retro scifi-itis here, because in this specfic future, machines do all the labor, but it’s still the man’s job that determines social class. Wives just live where their husbands live. Women can work, sure, but when we see women working, it’s just Dr Katharine Finch, Paul’s secretary, even though she has a doctorate, too. There’s a reference to the wives on the workers’ side all trying to find work as dressmakers, just like their husbands are all trying to find work as mechanics, with way more citizens looking for work than there are cars or outfits.
Look, the main plot’s not unique (blah blah rebellion blah blah blah), and the B plot with the Shah is straight-up weird, but this world is so intriguing. This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking look at work and value. Each scene of Player Piano is only vaguely a scene of a story, it’s less about rising action and narrative conflict and so forth. It’s more thinking about stratified society and work and identity, and each scene is showing a different aspect of those thoughts.