Review: Player Piano

"These are dangerous times—more dangerous than you’d suspect from the surface. But it’s also the Golden Age…"

"Is he starving?"
"Of course not. Nobody starves."
"And he’s got a place to live and warm clothes. He has what he’d have if he were running a stupid machine, swearing at it, making mistakes, striking every year, fighting with the foreman, coming in with hangovers."
"You’re right, you’re right." He held up his hands. "Of course you’re right. It’s just a hell of a time to be alive, is all — just this goddamn messy business of people having to get used to new ideas. And people just don’t, that’s all. I wish this were a hundred years from now, with everybody used to the change."

Now you people have engineered them out of their part in the economy, in the market place, and they’re finding out — most of them — that what’s left is just about zero… What do you expect? … For generations they’ve been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men — and boom! it’s all yanked out from under them. They can’t participate, can’t be useful any more. Their whole culture is shot to hell.
… Things, gentlemen, are ripe for a phony Messiah, and when he comes, it’s sure to be a bloody business.
… Sooner or later someone’s going to catch the imagination of these people with some new magic. At the bottom of it will be a promise of regaining the feeling of participation, the feeling of being needed on earth — hell, dignity.
… Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarcation.

"…he had gone directly from a three-hour television program to the White House."

The break had done anything but teach him humility. He took it as evidence that his money and name could beat the system any time and, paraphrased, he’d said as much. … Paul supposed, gloomily, that beaters of systems had always been admired by the conventional.

"…Paul drove up to his office building. He went up the steps two at a time — his only exercise…"

…a postwar development of three thousand dream houses for three thousand families with presumably identical dreams.

If we plot man hours worked against the number of vacuum tubes in use, the man hours worked drop as the tubes increase. And dope addiction, alcoholism, and suicide went up proportionately.

Paul wondered at what thorough believers in mechanization most Americans were, even when their lives had been badly damaged by mechanization. The conductor’s plaint, like the lament of so many, wasn’t that it was unjust to take jobs from men and give them to machines, but that the machines didn’t do nearly as many human things as good designers could have made them do.

The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don’t apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines.

"A lot different from my day," said Halyard. "By gosh, we had to get up every morning bright and early, climb the hill in all kinds of weather, and sit there and listen to some of the dullest lectures you ever heard of. And, of course, some poor fish would have to get up in front of us and talk every day of the week, and chances are he wasn’t much of a speaker, and anyway no showman."
"Yes, the professional actors and the television circuits are a big improvement, sir," said Buck.
"And the exams!" said Halyard. "Pretty cute, you know, punching out the answers, and then finding out right off if you passed or flunked. Boy, believe me, we used to have to write our arms off, and then we’d have to wait weeks for a prof to grade the exams. And plenty of times they made bad mistakes on the grades."

"Call yourself a doctor, too, do you?" said Mr. Haycox.
… "[You’re a] real-estate salesman," said Mr. Haycox. He looked back and forth between Paul and Doctor Pond, waiting for them to say something worth his attention. When they’d failed to rally after twenty seconds, he turned to go. "I’m doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit," he said. "When you doctors figure out what you want, you’ll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis."

Roseberry frowned. "Well—there’s some pretty stiff rulings about that. You can’t play college football, and go to school. They tried that once, and you know what a silly mess that was."

Those who couldn’t compete economically with machines had their choice, if they had no source of income, of the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps.

"Shah says, if these not slaves, how do you get them to do what they do?"
"Patriotism," said General of the Armies Bromley sternly.

"That’s all," said the police sergeant. He dropped the card into a slot, and the card went racing through a system of switches and sidings, until it came to rest against a thick pile of similar cards.
"What does that mean?" said Paul.
The sergeant looked at the pile without interest. "Potential saboteurs."
Wait a minute—what’s going on here? Who says I am?"
"No reflection on you," said the sergeant patiently.
"Nobody’s said you are. It’s all automatic. The machines do it."
"What right have they got to say that about me?"
"Oh, they know, they know," said the sergeant. "They’ve been around. They do that with anybody who’s got more’n four years of college and no job." He studied Paul through narrowed lids. "And you’d be surprised, Doc, how right they are."

Looking up, they saw a robot helicopter in the sky, its belly and blades reddened by the fires below. "People of Ilium, lay down your arms," said its loudspeaker.