Player Piano

Player Piano follows Paul Proteus, a manager at the Ilium Works, one of many factories that replaced human labor after the last world war. He dutifully attends corporate retreats and, nagged on by his wife, the sole female character in the book, vies for a promotion. His secret ambition is to quit his job and live off his ample savings on a farm. Things in his life change when an old friend comes into town, unemployed and full of discontent with the state of society.

Paul himself is a weak character. He makes motions toward achieving his own goals, but lacks the courage to actually cross any lines. When pushed to cross those lines, it turns out that he had little choice anyway. His decisions had already been made by his wife, boss, the computer, or his friends.

Other characters mostly charge forward on their own paths, oblivious to the needs of others. The upper management of the factories have already decided that the life they offer is ideal and they enforce governmental rules without even looking at their consequences. On the other side the anti-machine rebellion has decided that all work should be human work and doesn't stop to think of the consequences of that world or the transition.

Like many of the books that I've read from the 1950s and 60s, this book had a moral and hit so hard and long that it could be better classified as an extended parable than a novel. The moral of Player Piano is that replacing human labor with machine labor does not necessarily benefit society. There are a lot of other supporting points to this: IQ is not a judgement of someone's worth to society; Minimum employment, with basic necessities provided, will not sustain a person mentally or emotionally; Human errors are a small price to pay for societal health. I may not be phrasing these very well, but I hope my point is made.

On top of being overly infused with messages, the book is both racist and sexist in ways that make it hard for me to identify with anyone in the book. In the false-utopia of Player Piano, only men have jobs, women are there for the support of their husband. The corporate retreat is for the men where they do manly team-building sports and build their self-esteem as The Best Man For The Job while the women have a separate retreat where they are assured that they are The Best Wife For The Best Man For The Job.

I don't expect books of this era to be free of the contemporary social-mores, but if the book has little else of significance to recommend it or some way for me to connect with the world, I can gain little enjoyment or insight from it. Player Piano may be an apt parable, but its lessons have been better taught elsewhere and it no longer tackles the pressing issues of modern society.