One of the greatest tricks the great trickster Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. played on the world was convincing everyone he wasn’t a science fiction writer. Sure, lots of heads from our side claimed him as one of our own, but word somehow didn’t get out to the straight literary establishment. Lucky for him: it was probably hard enough coercing his cynical, anti-establishment (and yet lovingly perceptive) vision of the world into the canon.

Still, consider the facts. Classic, canonical Slaughterhouse-Five? Its protagonist is kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. Breakfast of Champions? A dark comedy about the machinations of a sci-fi writer, Kilgore Trout (whose name, incidentally, is based on that of OG science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon). The Sirens of Titan is about a Martian invasion and was nominated for a Hugo award. Ruptured timelines, atomic energy, questions of free will in a mechanized society, automata, apocalypse, alternate evolutionary histories…his themes could never be out of place in the landscape of science fiction. And yet Vonnegut was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, somehow free from the stigma of genre. Kudos, Kurt!

Player Piano is his first novel, and hence lacks the dark irreverence of his later works, which — dotted with bawdy illustrations and fourth wall-breaking asides — never seem to give much of a damn about anyone’s expectations. Player Piano, on the other hand, does: it is a very earnest little tale, a little too serious, not quite believable with its glib attacks on the idea of a mechanized, corporatized future society. It takes place in Ilium, New York, a manufacturing center among many; America’s workforce has become almost entirely automated, eliminating the need for any human laborers. Everyone with an IQ below a certain point is relegated to the army or a corps of make-work laborers who don’t do much other than dig holes and fill them; intellectual standards on punch-cards dictate men’s fates like hellish fortune cookies. The result is a profound socio-economic disparity between the “managers and engineers,” the elite class who design and maintain the machines, and the common folk, whose new leisure and convenience has cost them their sense of purpose in the world. With no place for their skills, no way to earn their living, the working class is set adrift — with no real passion left but to destroy the machines who have replaced them.

This is not so much of a tale about man vs. machine: there’s no sentient computer here, no singularity, no robotic despots. Humans are very much still in control. Rather, Player Piano is about the cost of efficiency — at a certain point, a totally efficient means of production leads to the displacement of an entire class of people, and destroys the human sense of accomplishment, of “job well done,” of manual craft. And idle hands etcetera. Of the novel’s premise, Vonnegut noted:

Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn’t a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.

Near the novel’s close, the protagonist Paul Proteus notes that the end result of this engineering — this creation of “more durable and efficient images” of man — can only result in “eliminat[ing] any justification at all for his own continued existence.” We design things to replace their designers, which is a fairly natural gesture for us as we are accustomed to producing children. Of course, kids aren’t lathe-cutters and vacuum tubes: they replace, but they don’t displace.

Of course, the other extreme — of reactionary Ludditism — is equally disastrous, and in Player Piano, the revolutionaries succeed, eventually, in “overthrowing” the machines, only to find that their simplistic us-vs-them rhetoric was overly ambitious. In a world with no modern conveniences, no standards, and the solid crutch of mechanized production kicked zealously out from beneath…well, nobody wants to be replaced by a machine — but, as it turns out, nobody wants to farm the land for sustenance, either. Maybe there’s no way to make a real compromise between efficiency and humanity; Vonnegut seems to suggest that once society started on such a path, there would be no way to prevent it from devolving into a nightmarish techno-dystopia. Small conveniences would lubricate the way for greater ones, for further and further detachment from the making of things, until production became an abstraction and the function of the proletariat would return to the root of that word: those who are capable only of producing proles, or offspring.

I may be crazy for thinking this, but I believe that two generations of kids fed on these kinds of storylines is all it takes for society to forever evade the Player Piano path. Those who read science fiction are not doomed to repeat it. Especially not the Vonnegut kind.