Player Piano

Player Piano is Kurt Vonnegut's first novel. Released in 1952, the book tells a story of a brave new world [Nytimes back in the 50s, book reviewer compared it to Huxley's Brave New World], where machines have taken over society, a dystopia. This is a book about automation and humans, how they co-exist in a dystopian society ruled by an oligarchy but the interesting thing is that the oligarchs are engineers rather than kings or presidents.

Player Piano's universe is ruled by engineers who build, fix, and keep the machines running. Everyone else with low IQ's [IQ's are known in the public sphere, thru testings] are either in the Army or the Reeks and Wrecks, which is the low-level grunt work of the society. Paul's father helped build the machines that helped win the war, and that currently helps society. He made the engineers the most important class and his son is high up in the company. Paul's father is now deceased and Paul is struggling to find himself, that is, he has an existential crisis. 

Paul thinks that there's more to life than fixing machines and being an engineer, even if he's rich, has a beautiful wife, and a nice house and car. Paul tries to find a way out. He starts reading novels about burly men that do extravagant things in life. He wants to become like Thoreau. He plans on quitting his Engineering managerial position at the factory, one of the most important jobs in the world. He even goes so far as to buy a farm, thinking he's going to get his wife to quit living the high life and work as a farmer with him. She doesn't like his surprise when she sees the farm.

The book hits a high note once Paul goes on an Engineer's retreat, in the woods with all the managers and young engineers from factories all over the country. You get a sense that these engineers are being brainwashed into thinking their job is the most important and everyone else is below them. It's at the retreat that Paul is asked by factory management to infiltrate this organization called the Ghost Shirts. The Ghost Shirts are disgruntled engineers and low-level workers that have had enough of machines taking all the jobs. They want life to go back to the good 'old days when people washed laundry with their hands and jobs were done by people rather than machines. If Paul does this he gets a higher level job at another factory. Big whoop.

Paul plays along quite nicely, and says, "I quit! I quit! I quit!", with so much enthusiasm that his managers think he's playing along too well. The fact of the matter is that his managers had to fire him so he could infiltrate the Ghost Shirts. But Paul really meant that he was really quitting for real, which they interpreted as him playing along. It's very funny. 

Paul goes back home from the retreat and is treated like a second-class citizen by the police, who is notified that he's lost his job, status, and position in society as one of the Engineering Class, the highest social class. 

Once Paul's in the Ghost Shirt Society they make him their leader, almost a Messianic figure because he's the son of the "Father of all Machines, the Father of Engineers", oh how he's fallen from grace. A revolution takes place, and people go ballistic, destroying machines and burning buildings. But when the destruction is over, Paul and the Ghost Shirt Leaders find out that people are finding all the scraps of machines they can find only to rebuild machines! It's very ironic, satire. It turned out that people actually wanted the machines to work for them, and that all this time Paul might have been wrong about society, machines, everything. Or maybe not.
 
Player Piano isn't such much a tirade against technology, machines, or automation so much as it is a critique of progress, within society and politics. Vonnegut may be a Luddite in the sense that he rejects society's unhealthy relationship to technology. But today that could be most people as most people think the young folk shouldn't be so consumed with the tech of the day-social media, online gaming, spending all their time in front of a screen, be it a smartphone, tablet, TV, laptop, or computer. Most adults in the room would say our young people need to stop being consumed by these things, go back to a simpler time-spend more time outdoors with nature or reading books at libraries. Vonnegut perhaps might be saying that a nation that innovates technologically but not socially is not truly progressing. 

These are ideas Vonnegut used for his first novel because they were real and close to him. He had been a prisoner of war after being captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. You can sort of see how he got some of his ideas. Germany thought that all their problems would go away once factories were built but it turned out that Germany was actually on the wrong side of history socially and politically. Factories and jobs didn't end up helping them. Likewise, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, SnapChat, Discord, Instagram, and YouTube haven't helped us to progress socially or politically either. 

At the end of the novel when the people are grabbing scraps of machines to rebuild their beloved machines, one of the Ghost Shirt leaders says to Paul, “This isn’t the end, you know… Nothing ever is, nothing ever will be – not even Judgment Day.”

"After all, there’s always a step backward, and a step backward, after making a wrong turn, is a step in the right direction." [vonnegutreview.com] 

Interesting tidbit-one edition for Player Piano was titled Utopia 14, just to give it a more science fiction name, "whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works" [wiki] Also, it should be noted that Player Piano is more conventional storytelling, especially with the slow narrative. His other novels would go on to more grandiose ideas, more science fiction, and much more satire. If he kept writing in this plain style that is Player Piano he wouldn't have become such a famous name.
 
The original cover pictured above, Utopia 14 cover pictured below

E.T.A. Hoffmann Automata

Automata is an early proto-science fiction short story written by E.T.A. [Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann] Hoffmann in 1814. The story involves discussions and retellings of several distinct stories, during the evening amongst several men. The narrator walks into the gathering and notices all the guys are staring at this golden ring swinging in the ceiling. His friend says the ring moves according to the will of the men present. Then, another guy begins to tell his tale to prove the existence of the supernatural. 

Then, he tells a story about a young girl who every night at nine o'clock, sees this White Maiden. However, only she can see it. And her family soon believes that she's crazy. However, one night she sees the maiden and proves to her family that it is real. The girl throws a plate in the air to the White Lady [phantom] and the plate floats in the air, stunning everybody. Shocked, the mother dies, and the Colonel father dies in battle, leaving the girl a shell of her former self. 

Then, another guy recalls a story about a musician who was haunted by something playing on his piano at night, with virtuosic skill. Another guy is asked to speak so they can drop these occult stories but he brings up this manuscript titled Automata. Before starting he says something about how all of this is connected.

This story begins with an automaton called the Talking Turk [a reference to unbeatable chess playing Turk], which has such a lifelike human appearance, and people have a hard time figuring out its control mechanism, as well as how it answers questions accurately in many languages and attitudes. Its a bloody AI story, written in 1814. Or something like that. 

Lewis and Ferdinand end up visiting the Talking Turk and they see that the answers he's giving to the audience aren't to their satisfaction. Ferdinand goes to speak with the automaton and comes back to Lewis. He tells Lewis that there must be a spirit controlling the automaton because he asked him questions he had never told anybody else about. 

From here we learn that Ferdinand had a dream in an inn where a beautiful woman was singing to him, perhaps a childhood friend who he was destined to be with. Upon waking up, Ferdinand realized that the woman he saw from his window wasn't the woman from his dream. Although he locks eyes with the woman, she quickly takes off in a carriage. When he now asked the Turk if he would see the woman, the Turk says, "Next time you see her, she will be lost to you forever." 

Ferdinand is upset by his answer and won't give up. So Ferdinand and Lewis decide to learn more about the automaton and its maker, the old man Professor X. They meet the Professor and he puts on a musical performance for them, complete with performing automatons. Afterward, there is a discussion on the nature of music. On the sounds of nature and instruments.

Several months later Ferdinand leaves on business and sends a letter to Lewis, saying he's seen this long-sought-after singer. Upon recognizing Ferdinand she faints in the hands of Professor X. Ferdinand wonders if the Turk's prophecy has been fulfilled by psychic bonds making their way into everyday life. 

The story ends with Ferdinand being fine, they had even recently read one of his dialogues on opera. The group is tired of the automaton story, and ask to be done with it. It is said that the Talking Turk is merely a fragment, and the conversation moves away from the subject. 

This is a pretty great early sci-fi story from a German writer, artist, composer, jurist, and music critic. Hoffmann was an author of fantasy and Gothic horror, as this story seems to suggest. Hoffmann was also one of the major authors of the Romantic moment. One of the things that this short story does very well is involve music in the story. There are lots of musical terms, phrasing, sounds, as well the music performance of the automatons itself. I attempted to do something similar in my robot short story [which you can read here]. However, Hoffmann does it so much better. The way music is described by Lewis in the story is quite moving, he describes the way the sound of the stars might sound, and how he is appalled by the automatons performance. He believes that electronics and automatons cannot make moving music, because it is the human touch and emotion which moves us in music. It's quite a scarring rebuke in the postmodernist musical world, where EDM and house music can sound like a washing machine gyrating on and on. 

The literary style here is baroque. Hoffmann was a man of much learning. The way he writes isn't simple and some words I even had to look up online to understand the story. However, it isn't overly complex and his meanings do get across quite easily. The writing style isn't smooth, but it's not wooden either. It works. 

The musical aspects of this story moved me. The automatons themselves were interesting even though they weren't described too much or with much detail. Were they made of wood, plastic, or metal? How did they operate? Gears? Not sure but one thing for sure they could do many things. Another thing that this story makes me think about is the rise of AI, whether they are in the form of robots or just simply as everyday computers. This story definitely brings that all to mind. Although I can't say this is pure science fiction, there are definitely sci-fi elements here. This is a great read, recommended to anyone who likes literature of antiquity and proto-science fiction. 

I learned about this short story from Wikipedia's Timeline of science fiction. I found it under 1814, right before Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, a personal favorite. This story has aged gracefully and I believe it still has relevance in 2019, some 100 years later.

Read Automata here--http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Hoffmannautomata.pdf