Player Piano

Player Piano is the first novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in 1952. It is a dystopia about automation, and it was partly inspired by the years he spent working for General Electric.

The setting is a country in which almost everything is done by machine. The upper class of engineers and managers keeps the system running, and the lower class has been left without the work that used to give it a purpose.

Paul Proteus is the engineer at the centre of it. His father was important in the same system, and he himself is successful in it, but he is finding it harder to believe in what he is doing, and the novel follows what he does about that.

The book uses irony and sentiment in a way that Vonnegut went on developing in his later novels, and it is one of the earliest of his books to describe the effect that technology can have on the quality of life of the people living with it.