Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

This month’s selection is a pair of books that plot out future American dystopias as envisioned in 1952. I think it’s an interesting time, in that even in heyday of the American capitalist mythology, a few authors were still frustrated enough to offer up prescient criticisms of it, and these books were chosen to reinforce my growing suspicion that the American skill of consuming ourselves into subjugation has been going on longer than is normally credited. In other words, Mom and Dad are bullshitting you when they tell you that in their day, everybody was debt-conscious and responsible. They spent it all on gewgaws and mortgages too. They were among the first generations that, on a widespread basis, could.

1952 might have also been an advanced point in the golden age of science fiction (in a way that’s similarly colored by nostalgia), which had graduated from confinement in terrible pulps into better-quality magazine publications and novels some years before. The devices that it uses have been thrown around for the purposes of social criticism for much longer than that, however. Kurt Vonnegut never liked to be put in the science fiction bin, in part because he didn’t feel he shared the pulp legacy, but he easily belongs in the same family as sf ancestors such as Verne, Mary Shelly, Wells, and (especially) Swift, and ultimately, will probably be remembered as an heir to that crowd. Pohl and Kornbluth did (and Pohl still does) come from a modern sci-fi tradition, into which they consciously tried to inject social criticism. The Space Merchants does well among those luminaries too. In a time when uttering the C-word in a positive way was un-American enough to demand congressional action, these three authors delivered hilarious satirical condemnations of U.S. capitalist society.

In the near future of Player Piano, automation has removed the need for human labor in manufacturing, leaving people at large with nothing much to do, nothing much to be proud of. Vonnegut has claimed that he got the idea from watching, on his return from the war, an automated milling machine at work and extrapolating some logical conclusions. The operator’s added value had vanished, he realized, leaving only the management and design as the useful human elements in the production chain. In a plot outline he says he cribbed from Brave New World, Vonnegut pulls the reader from the upper-echelon management class to the world of the moron and the savage, where a revolution may be brewing. It’s a fun ride, not short on the biting truths and heartbreaking wit you expect from Vonnegut.

And arguably, this is how manufacturing went down in the half century that followed Player Piano. The American shift from an industrial economy rides on the fact that the manufacturing staff could be automated out of existence, leaving behind underemployed engineers and a management in love with its own culture. A competitive skill set that developed overseas also rocked the boat, but the development of better tools has, by and large, obviated the need for bodies for rote machine tasks, and devalued the skilled hands that used to demand (with no small effort) better pay and more prestige. Vonnegut imagined lengthy and pointless higher education to absorb the non-demand for workers, and a segregated society of haves and have-nots based on incompletely-measured intellectual ability, or on nepotism that’s pretending to be merit. Competing with slaves, a character proclaims, makes workers slaves too. He meant machines, and perhaps that turned out half right.

A lot of the black humor comes out at the expense of managers and engineers. (As a member of one of these groups, I’ll greedily accept half of this bias, and cautiously consider the other. I think Vonnegut is sympathetic: he paints engineering curiosity as the nobler human flaw.) The most amusing part of the story takes the protagonist, one Paul Proteus, upstate to a management retreat, where he’s stuffed with corporate platitudes, as vacuous 50 years ago as today, at a summer camp full of grown men, complete with sports, singalongs, and fake Indian legends. (And yeah, that’s “grown men.” Vonnegut picks up on his country’s culture of managerial sexism, which in America may have actually moved past the 1950s vision, but the satire of the unruly boys club is still uncomfortably resonant. Even if they took down the sign, there’s still the same treehouse.) Even with all the high-status knowledge workers, the economy still basically runs itself, and even the gifted and lucky just march along with it.

Player Piano isn’t quite a polemic against progress though, more a statement about the inevitability of it. The faux naturalism of the managers’ retreat is perhaps telling, and the main character similarly flirts with a throwback lifestyle–Proteus is charmed with the idea of farm life–and rejects it. It’s not lost on the reader that “we might need the bakery,” and the flush toilets (and the medicine, education, wine, public order, roads, and the fresh water system). The Indian theme gets pulled out at the end again, as the revolting holdouts against automation at last get the stage. The rebellion is as doomed, unavoidable, and as pointlessly noble as anything the Native Americans did to turn the tide against the Europeans, and history, it keeps rolling. The knowledge economy is on the brink of the cliff too, turns out. So it goes.

Vonnegut’s automation is of a quaint, clockwork kind, driven by tape reels and punch cards and vacuum tubes, displayed by blinking lights, a real old-fashioned future, but it’s wrong to over-emphasize accuracy of detail in a novel like this. The big picture is really more the point, and anyway, the details are kind of charming. Unseen data handling is used to predict citizen preference, and to plot a life of moderately satisfying consumption, even as the rage of the unfulfilled boils just under the surface. I wondered about all of this dissatisfaction, and I think it’s a spot where Vonnegut fell short in a more substantive way. The proles seemed to be kept in line by some sort of institutional depression, with minor make-work duties, and some dreary social functions (endless parades, sports) as moribund in their way as a summer camp for grownups. I think there needed to be a better mechanism to make them feel indebted to the system, or maybe the psychology needed to be less subtle. With that many people unhappy and, more importantly, bored, the shit would surely have hit the fan years before. There’s no equivalent service economy to take a passionate hold, and the street economy is unconvincingly tired and underpopulated.

The Space Merchants gets this better, dwelling at hilarious and uncomfortable length on consumer debt spirals and on product addiction and on diversion of the public to idiot drama and drudgery. The novel is a monumental piss-take on the American consumer culture of its time, and half of what was meant as outrageous satire in 1952 looks like documentary today (what remains still looks like it’s coming right around the corner). The plot is similar enough to Player Piano, all aboard for the American tour, with the action centered more closely on a protagonist who is a little more successfully proactive about his fate than Paul Proteus. Here we follow the fall and the redemption of the smooth-talking advertising executive Mitch Courtenay, who trips through a future culture of overwhelming pollution, depleted resources, and overpopulation. It’s a future as ambiguously successful, but Pohl and Kornbluth don’t forget to show off the filth, and as mentioned above, take some pleasure in spelling the mechanism of hopelessness, the soullessness of a society whose number one product, and number one culture, is marketing. The authors get major points for all the stuff (big picture and details) they got right, including addictive products misleadingly marketed, the “philosophical problem” of political representation by voting per person vs. per dollar, marketing to neuroses (and creating neuroses by marketing), outsourcing actual production to India and South America and creating an American economy of only advertisers and consumers, government services made monumentally inefficient through privatization, smearing political opponents as hippies and conservationists, horrifying synthetic food, paid insurance that doesn’t insure, a government run by lobbyists, and, of course, reverence for the power of the CEO. In one of the funnier bits, Courtenay is thrust into a disgusting job in food production–the life of a typical consumer–and his servitude is ensured as he trades off debt for a slightly less indecent life, and to satisfy his corporate-ensured addictions. The Space Merchants does what satire does best: it spots the bullshit with laser accuracy, and makes fun of it. It’s a great book.

Pohl and Kornbluth are more progressive in terms of women’s roles too, not that it helps improve society much. They write in an element of contention between Mitch and his wife, who are both serious professionals (a physician and an advertiser), as they balance their lives as domestic partners and as successful individuals. It doesn’t seem like a controversial prophesy from 2008, but I can’t imagine my grandfather taking to it, and my parent’s generation struggled through that wall.

Pohl’s and Kornbluth’s style is serviceable. It’s not the badly written adventure-tale pulpy prose by any means, but it still uses a booze-and-cigarettes vintage that I associate with too many sf short stories from those days. While I don’t like to put too undue merit on self-described serious literature, if Pohl’s and Kornbluth’s prose were a little more timeless (and if not for the vagaries of marketing), The Space Merchants would be put up on the shelves and discussed by students along with Orwell and Huxley. And maybe it still will. By comparison, when I’m reading a Vonnegut novel, I am surprised to catch him doing so much transparent writing, going through the usual efforts of developing character and plot just like any other author, with mere competence. It’s always the pith, the non-sequiturs, the bitter observations, the concision that I actually take home. Vonnegut is smart and funny, but that quiet, damning style is what pushes his novels to transcend classification.

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