The Player Piano and Musico-Cybernetic Science Fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s: Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick

Magome, Kiyoko. {Magome Kiyoko (name as given at link);[1] on article: Kiyoko Magome; at Extrapolation on line, as we give it.} "The Player Piano and Musico-Cybernetic Science Fiction between the 1950s and the 1980s: Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick" Extrapolation 45.4 (2004): [370]-387. At Extrapolation on line as of 14 Feb. 2022, at link (one way or another, LUP will want the article paid for).[2]

Opening sentences:

Many of Kurt Vonnegut's and Philip K. Dick's novels written since the 1950s reveal their unusual obsession with the image of player pianos as an effective musico-cybernetic symbol. Since the 1890s, the player piano, the unique mechanical instrument, had greatly influenced Americans' home life, American society, and American literature, and in the 1950s, with the rise of cybernetics, such science fiction writers as Vonnegut and Dick became highly ambitious in dealing with player pianos as extremely rich symbols of hybridity between man and machine, between art and technology, between visual and auditory, and between original and copy. (p. 370)

Deals with Vonnegut's first published novel, Player Piano (1952) and at least in passing with

Marshall McLuhan on communication: The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951);[3] Norbert Weiner's The Human Uses of Human Beings (1950/54) and on cybernetics more generally, which Magome asserts had "great influence" on Vonnegut and Dick and their novels (Magome, p. 373).

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1971) as a "music-cybernetic novel" (Magome p. 377).

P. K. Dick's being deeply "influenced by cybernetics in the 1950s" and "strongly obsessed with the image of player pianos as a rich cybernetic symbol until his death in the early 1980s" — with We Can Build You, The Simulacra, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and VALIS as "the four important musico-literary texts in terms of the metamorphosing cybernetic image of player pianos, through which the relation between highly developed science/technology and man's psychology is revealed" (p. 379).

RDE, finishing, 18Jan22, 15Feb22