Player Piano is a preview of American life after the third World War…. It is a country in which a man's station and future are totally controlled by a configuration of punched holes in a personnel card and men's minds have been ground down to a conformity as fine as our dust. That dust is occasionally stirred by ancient dreams and inchoate resentments, and such a stirring is taking place as the novel begins. But mostly America is a country in which life is intolerably dull.

That seems to be a quality shared by most versions of the future and it poses a very difficult problem for their creators: namely, how to write interestingly about a dull subject. Player Piano's stereotyped or amorphous characters, inept construction, blunderbuss satire, and pedestrian prose help matters not at all.

And yet these defects, however serious, might be pardoned in a novel of ideas if the ideas themselves were profound or at least provocative. Mr. Vonnegut's are not; they are, in fact, demonstrably erroneous…. Of course the author is talking about the future; but the future in his eyes is obviously an extrapolation of the present—that's what makes the novel "significant"—and there is, in the history of technological development, no support whatsoever for the situation which Mr. Vonnegut envisions.

More disappointing than the author's misconceptions, however, is his evasiveness. Having created a false issue, he lacks the courage to face up to it. The scientist-hero of Player Piano, after an abortive return-to-nature, lends himself to a Saturnalian uprising against the machine. As the novel ends he is seen sardonically yielding himself up to his executioners while the machine like the phoenix rises from the reeking ashes of its predecessor. Well now what does the author recommend? It may be objected that it is for the novel to propose problems not to answer them, but a work as doctrinaire and ill-natured as this one may reasonably be expected to offer some alternative to the evils it so grimly prophesies. Shall we return to brutalizing drudgery, to caste, to superstition? Shall we surrender our ease of movement, the spaciousness of our lives, in general—half our life-span for that matter. I'm sure the author would not seriously suggest that. Nor need he. Mechanization, blind and irresistible, can be directed if not resisted….

This novel, it seems to me, stems not so much from an intelligent apprehension as from the intellectual's sense of inferiority in the presence of the garage mechanic….