Paul had learned to listen with outward calm when Finnerty spoke of his morbid moments. When he was with Finnerty he liked to pretend that he shared the man's fantastic and alternately brilliant or black inner thoughts -- almost as though he were discontent with his own relative tranquility. Finnerty had spoken dispassionately of suicide often; but, seemingly, he did it because he got pleasure from savoring the idea. If he'd felt driven to kill himself, he would have been dead long ago.

''You think I'm insane?'' said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.

''You're still in touch. I guess that's the test.''

''Barely-- barely.''

''A psychiatrist could help. There's a good man in Albany.''

Finnerty shook his head. ''He'd pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.'' He nodded, ''Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first.''

Vonnegut on science fiction, Player Piano, and model airplanes from the 1973 Playboy interview (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, 259-261):

Vonnegut: The high school I went to had a daily paper, and has had since about1900. They had a printing course for the people who weren't going on to college, and they realized, ''My goodness, we've got the linotypes -- we could easily get out a paper.'' So they started getting out a paper everyday, called the Shortridge Echo. It was so old my parents had worked on it. And so, rather than writing for a teacher, which is what most people do, writing for an audience of one -- for Miss Green or Mr. Watson -- I started out writing for a large audience. And if I did a lousy job, I caught a lot of shit in twenty-four hours. It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people. Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else is having so much trouble doing it. In my case, it was writing. In my brother's case, it was mathematics and physics. In my sister's case, it was drawing and sculpting.

Playboy: Were you already into science fiction by then?

Vonnegut: Most of it was in the pulps, you know. I would read science-fiction pulps now and then, the same way I'd read sex pulps or airplane pulps or murder pulps. The majority of my contemporaries who are science-fiction writers now went absolutely bananas over science-fiction pulps when they were kids, spending all their money on them, collecting them, trading them,gloating over them, cheering on authors the straight world thought were hacks. I never did that, and I'm sorry. I'm shy around other science-fiction writers, because they want to talk about thousands of stories I never read.I didn't think the pulps were beneath me; I was just pissing away my life in other ways.

Playboy: Such as?

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Everybody's shaking in his boots, so don't be bluffed.''

''No,sir.''

''Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration.''

''Yes,sir.''

''Show me a specialist, and I'll show you a man who's so scared he's dug a hole for himself to hide in.''

''Yes,sir.''

''Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.''

''Yes,sir.''

''Want to be rich, Paul?''

''Yes,sir - I guess so. Yes, sir.''

''All right. I got rich, and I told you ninety per cent of what I know about it. The rest is decoration. All right?''

''Yes,sir.''

	Grab your very own copy of Player Piano from Amazon.com.
	1952 NY Times review of Player Piano by Granville Hicks
	Playboy interview with Vonnegut on high school, science fiction & General Electric
	Scholes interview with Vonnegut on technology & cheesy little religions
	Player Piano overview by Peter J. Reed
	Essay: ''Sensational Implications: Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano'' by Donald E. Morse
	1996 essay on Paul Proteus by Petr Kurfurst
	Vonnegut's 1965 N.Y. Times essay on science fiction

Originally published as
Player Piano
1952, Scribner

Published as
Utopia 14
1954, Bantam

Published under original title with new preface, 1966, Holt.

© Gale Research
Contemporary Authors, 49. ''Now lauded as one of America's most respected novelists, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was virtually ignored by critics at the beginning of his writing career. In Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary Fiction, Jerome Klinkowitz observes that 'Vonnegut's rise to eminence coincides precisely with the shift in taste which brought a whole new reading public - and eventually critical appreciation - to the e works of Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, and others. Ten years and several books their elder, Vonnegut by his long exile underground was well prepared to be the senior member of the new disruptive group, and the first of its number to be seriously considered for the Nobel Prize. By 1973,when Breakfast of Champions appeared..., there was little doubt that a fiction widely scorned only six years before was now a dominant mode in serious contemporary literature.'

''While such early works as Player Piano and Sirens of Titan were at first categorized as science fiction, Vonnegut's books go far beyond the realm of pure SF. Ernest W. Ranly explains in Commonweal:'Vonnegut at times adds fantasy to his stories, whereas pure sci-fi permits only what is possible within a given scientific hypothesis. Vonnegut adds humor, a wild black humor, while most sci-fi is serious to the point of boredom. Vonnegut, generally, adds a distinctive sense and literary class. And, finally, Vonnegut seems pre-occupied with genuine human questions,about war, peace, technology, human happiness. He is even bitterly anti-machine,anti-technology, anti-science.'

''Well-- I think it's a grave mistake to put on public record everyone's I.Q. I think the first thing the revolutionaries would want to do is knock off everybody with an I.Q. over 110, say. If I were on your side of the river, I'd have the I.Q. books closed and the bridges mined.''

''Then the 100's would go after the 110's, the 90's after the 100's, and so on,'' said Finnerty.

''Maybe. Something like that. Things are certainly set up for a class war based on conveniently established lines of demarcation. And I must say that the basic assumption of the present setup is a grade-A incitement to violence:the smarter you are, the better you are. Used to be that the richer you were, the better you were. Either one is, you'll admit, pretty tough for the have-not's to take. The criterion of brains is better than the one of money, but'' -- he held his thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart- ''about that much better.''

''It's about as rigid a hierarchy as you can get,'' said Finnerty. ''How's somebody going to up his I.Q.?''

''Exactly,'' said Lasher. ''And it's built on more than just brain power -- it's built on a special kinds of brain power. Not only must a person be bright, he must bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management for engineering.''

''Or marry someone who's bright,'' said Finnerty.

The following is from Robert Scholes' sprawling interview excerpted from The Vonnegut Statement, (Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer, ed. New York: Delacort/Seymour Lawrence, 1973, 90-118.

Robert Scholes: . . . You started out to be a chemical engineer. Does that account, do you think, for the interest in technology that seems to run through your work?

KV: Well, it accounts for my familiarity with technology somewhat, and through what seemed misfortunes to me at the time I have learned something about physics, chemistry, and math and the sorts of people that are successful in those areas, so I have been able to take off on them with a fair amount of expertness. After the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology for three years, and then went to work for General Electric as a public-relations man, and because of all this background in science that I had had, they made me a flak, a publicity man for the research laboratory there, which is an excellent industrial research laboratory.

RS: I see.

KV: So I saw these people at work and knew them quite well and went to their parties and so forth and proceeded to hurt their feelings in my first book which was ...

RS: Player Piano.

KV: Yes.

RS: Yes, I've wondered about Player Piano. In particular one of the things that interested me was....

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BOOK:  Player Piano · NY Times Review Playboy Interview · Scholes Interview · Peter J. Reed's Overview RELATED:  Complete Writings · Critical Bibliography · Interviews

© 1997-2005 Chris Huber, Durham NC (USA)  ·  Last Updated 02/05/05

Also by Chris Huber: Whyaduck Productions  ·  Which Circle?