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Player piano

Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society.

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alternateName

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  • "Player piano"@it
  • "Player piano"@ja
  • "Player piano"@pl

author

contributor

creator

description

http://schema.org/description

  • "Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society."
  • "Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a super computer and run completely by machines. His rebellion is a wildly funny, darkly satirical look at modern society."@en
  • "Describes a future America in which computers solve all your problems, machines give you everything you need, and you are taken care of from cradle to grave by an industrial society."@en
  • "Funny, savage appraisal of a totally automated American society of the future."@en
  • "A tough, tightly written book of a brave new world to come, which in its projection offers a tantalizing problem as well as an imaginative invention reminiscent of the early Huxley. Dr. Paul Proteus, a super engineer in a super-mechanized society, finds his life lacking in significance although he is on the eve of a spectacular promotion as the manager of the Pittsburgh works. Urged on by his sterile wife, he nonetheless finds himself listening to his iconoclastic friend Finnerty. The two spend a drunken and revealing evening among the reeks and wrecks (the common people) where they meet Lasher, a self-styled preacher who converts Finnerty and jells his resolve to break the system. Dr. Proteus wavers in a divided loyalty but when the Pittsburgh job is offered him only at the price of his betrayal of Finnerty, his Protean change is completed and he joins forces with the opposition ... The automatic checker player that is beaten when crossed wires overheat it, a talking helicopter, a monstrous machine with a tape recorder memory, all these absurdly ingenious machines give the book its special quality and fascination. And this new performance on the player piano of western civilization is worthy of more thoughtful attention."@en
  • "Ten years after the Second Industrial Revolution the electronics age is in full swing. Millions of vacuum tubes hummed, millions of machines clicked as they spewed forth the requisite number of prefabricated houses and ultrasonic dishwashers, the answers to governmental and industrial questions, and impeccably correct selections of books, football teams and civil servants. Very few people actually worked."@en
  • "Kurt Vonnegut?s first novel Player Piano, published in 1952, heralded the beginning of one of the most diverting and provocative adventures in modern American fiction. Vonnegut went on to write novels that perhaps had greater formal skill and technique, but Player Piano is a tour de force of imaginative insight into modern life and a shrewd satire of American progress."@en
  • "Première tentative non avouée comme telle de cet auteur américain désormais célèbre dans le domaine de la science-fiction. Livre foisonnant, dont le ton satirique et virulent attaque déjà la mécanisation avec une éloquence réquisitorielle dont l'allure fait songer au ##Meilleur des mondes## de Huxley."
  • "Kurt Vonnegut?s first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul?s rebellion is vintage Vonnegut?wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.From the Trade Paperback edition."@en
  • "Player Piano (1952), Vonnegut's first novel, embeds and foreshadows themes which are to be parsed and dramatized by academians for centuries to come. His future society--a marginal extrapolation, Vonnegut wrote, of the situation he observed as an employee of General Electric in which machines were replacing people increasingly and without any regard for their fate--is mechanistic and cruel, indifferent to human consequence, almost in a state of merriment as human wreckage accumulates. Paul Proteus, the novel's protagonist, is an engineer at Ilium Works and first observes with horror and then struggles to reverse the displacement of human labor by machines.Ilium Works and Paul's struggles are a deliberately cartoon version of labor's historic and escalating struggle to give dignity and purpose to workers. The novel embodies all of Vonenegut's concerns and what he takes to be the great dilemma of the technologically overpowered century: the spiritual needs of the population in no way serve the economies of technology and post-technology. Vonnegut overlies this grotesque comedy over tragedy, disguising his novel in the trappings of goofiness.Not published--at Vonnegut's insistence--as science fiction, the novel was nonetheless recognized and praised by the science fiction community which understood it far better than a more general readership, a dilemma which Vonnegut resentfully faced throughout his career. Bernard Wolfe's dystopian Limbo and Player Pianowere published in the same year to roughly similar receptions; two "outsiders" had apotheosized technophobia as forcefully as any writer within the field. Throughout his career, Vonnegut was forced to struggle with his ambivalence about science fiction and his own equivocal relationship with its readers."

genre

http://schema.org/genre

  • "Translations"
  • "Vědecko-fantastické romány"
  • "Black humor"
  • "American fiction"
  • "Electronic books"
  • "Electronic books"@en
  • "Fiction"@en
  • "Fiction"
  • "Review copies (Publishing)"@en
  • "Satires (Literature)"
  • "Science fiction"@en
  • "Science fiction"
  • "Americké romány"
  • "Tekstuitgave"
  • "Translations - 20th century"
  • "Text omissions (Printing)"
  • "Advance copies (Publishing)"@en
  • "Powieść amerykańska"
  • "Powieść amerykańska"@pl
  • "Presentation inscriptions (Provenance)"

name

http://schema.org/name

  • "Piano meccanico"@it
  • "Piano meccanico"
  • "La pianiste déchaîné : roman"
  • "Klavirski avtomat"@sl
  • "Player piano"@en
  • "Player piano"
  • "Ho Pianistas"
  • "Das Höllische system : Utopischer roman"
  • "Mechanické piano"
  • "Pianul mecanic"
  • "Player Piano. [A novel.]"@en
  • "Player Piano. [A novel.]"
  • "Pureiyā piano"
  • "Pureiyā piano"@ja
  • "Mechanichý klavír"
  • "Le pianiste déchaîné : roman"
  • "Player Piano"
  • "Revolução no futuro"
  • "Sähköpiano"@fi
  • "Sähköpiano"
  • "La Pianola"
  • "Mehanički pijanino"
  • "La pianola"
  • "La pianola"@es
  • "Le Pianiste déchaîné : roman"
  • "Das Höllische System : Roman"
  • "プレイヤー・ピアノ"
  • "Distruggete le macchine"@it
  • "Distruggete le macchine"
  • "Pianomaskinen"
  • "Player piano : [a novel]"
  • "Утопия 14 : Курт Воннегут ; Перевод с англ. М. Брухнова"
  • "Le Pianiste déchaîné"
  • "Player piano : a novel"@en
  • "Player piano [by] Kurt Vonnegut"@en
  • "Das höllische System : Utopischer Roman"
  • "De grote pianola"
  • "Le pianiste déchaîné"
  • "Das höllische System Utop. Roman"
  • "Player piano; "A Seymour Laurence Book.""@en
  • "<&gt"@ru
  • "Das höllische System : utopischer Roman"
  • "Otomatik piyano"
  • "Das höllische System Roman"
  • "Pianola"
  • "Pianola"@pl

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