Player Piano- Reaction to the Novel

Trying to keep this short, I'll say that I preferred this book over a few of the others read in class, primarily because of the wit and humor in the novel. I find the jokes, though dry, dark, and dreary, add a great deal of entertainment to the novel. The ironic twists and turns were well placed, and kept me interested to a greater extent than the other novels. And I will also say that this ending was one of the better ones in the sense that it did not just suddenly drop off with no hint of the future. It would certainly be better if the ending was a tad more hopeful, yet that not only isn't Vonnegut's style and would be terribly out of place, the novel still concludes slowly enough to wrap up all loose ends without simply dropping off as it did in Handmaid' Tale or ending abruptly as in We. It was pretty good, I feel.

It's also frighteningly accurate. There are so many different things that technology is capable of doing today that human effort is becoming unnecessary and the way of the past. Just about everything can be done without human beings, and eventually they won't be needed. ATM's, checkout lines, packaging and shipping, assembly lines...pretty soon the only thing people will be needed for is to fix a small kink in the system. Soon people may only be unnecessary beings wandering the earth with nothing to do. Even if you had all the time in your life to yourself, it'd get pretty darn boring. There'd be nothing to do. The only thing that makes vacations (say, for example, Christmas break in 2 weeks) so fun and wonderful is that you've been toiling away incessantly for an eternity. Now you want to enjoy yourself, and you can. This world would bore you eventually, and most likely sooner than you'd ever dream, and with nothing to do you'll spend most of your life in absolute boredom. It'll be Fahrenheit 451, only with books. Miserable.

However, there is one glimmer of hope: this sure won't happen in our lifetimes. Technology, I've found, is wonderfully unreliable. It'll take at least 20 years, more likely 25, to perfect computers. They always crash or catch cold or do something weird. It'll take longer than that for mankind to perfect systems for everything else. And by that time, there'll be some arrogant punk who's figured out some way to break the new toys with the push of a button, and the whole process of creating a system will begin again. There's a far better chance of us figuring out how to live on Mars rather than to make a completely automatized world. A TV show once detailed how in 50 years they'll have perfected hovercars and will have a networking system built into our body so someone can personally monitor our health every second of the day. Alternative fuel hasn't been completely figured out yet, much less put into action to a large degree, and I doubt the anti-gravity measures will be easily calculated. And considering how bad computers are, I highly doubt that super network in our body will ever run even half the time at 50% efficiency. We all think that such a world is possible, but I know from experience that things take a lot longer to do than originally intended. They're also a tad tougher. If we ever reach that stage where our lives are completely automated, I will be thoroughly shocked and impressed. I really don't think that it's possible to achieve such a level of automation so quickly. We're still only beginning to improve technology, and there's so much that we haven't even dreamed of doing yet. A number of these dreams are right in this book.