Player Piano

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Player Piano (vt Utopia 14). New York: Scribner's, 1952. New York: Dell, 1974.

The near-future world of PP is run by machines and a technocratic elite, most especially, industrial jobs are done by automated machines. Discussed in Clockwork Worlds in the essays by T. Hoffman and L. Broer (q.v. under Literary Criticism).[1] See for a relatively early work expressing fear of what would be realized in the use of robots and robotics later in the 20th century and into the 21st, expressed by Kurt Vonnegut, who would go on to become a major US author, and one who suggested "the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts," with artists warning of impending dangers.[2]

Discussed in "The Player Piano and Musico-Cybernetic Science Fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s: Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick," which see.

Significantly not mentioned explicitly, nor is the title nor "Vonnegut" listed in the Index; but you have in chapter 23, "Computers and Art" in O. B. Hardison's Disappearing Through the Skylight: Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century an observation that parallels a key point in the trial scene in Player Piano: "A definition of what it is to be human is thus an unexpected but provocative by-product of computer art: 'To err is human.' What distinguishes man from machine is the tendency to make mistakes" (Hardison, p. 217).

RDE, initial; finishing, 18Jan22, 26Feb22