Player Piano

Also known as Utopia 14.

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.

The hero is Paul Proteus, an engineer in an America of the future where computers run everything and do everything, making people almost afterthoughts. Paul seems to be on his way up the ladder of success in this techno-utopia - a perfect wife, a fast-track position at the Ilium Works and a shot at a major promotion - but he is plagued with doubts about what modern life has become.

Alternate cover image (Utopia 14):