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

Vonnegut on Science Fiction, et al.
Excerpt from 1973's Playboy Interview

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?

Vonnegut: I dunno. I used to say I wasted eight years building model airplanes and jerking off but it was a little more complicated than that. I read science fiction, but it was conservative stuff -- H. G. Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson, who's easily forgotten, but he wrote Jekyll and Hyde.And I read George Bernard Shaw, who does an awful lot of extrapolating, particularly in his introductions. Back to Methuselah was science fiction enough for me.

Playboy: What do you think of it as a form? The standard critical appraisal is that it's low rent.

Vonnegut: Well, the rate of payment has always been very low compared with that for other forms of writing. And the people who set the tone for it were the pulp writers. There's an interesting thing: When IBM brought out an electric typewriter, they didn't know if they had a product or not. They really couldn't imagine that anybody was that discontented with the typewriter already. You know, the mechanical typewriter was a wonderful thing; I never heard of anybody's hands getting tired using one. So IBM was worried when they brought out electric typewriters, because they didn't know whether anybody would have any use for them. But the first sales were made to pulp writers, writers who wanted to go faster because they got paid so much a word. But they were going so fast that characterization didn't matter and dialog was wooden and all that-because it was always first draft. That's what you sold, because you couldn't afford to take the time to sharpen up the scenes. And so that persisted, and young people deciding to become science-fiction writers would use as models what was already being written.The quality was usually terrible, but in a way it was liberating, because you were able to put an awful lot of keen ideas into circulation fast.

Playboy: What attracted you to using the form yourself?

Vonnegut: I was working for General Electric at the time, right after World War Two, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines,gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that.This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by Little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.

Playboy: So science fiction seemed like the best way to write about your thoughts on the subject.

Vonnegut: There was no avoiding it, since the General Electric Company was science fiction. I cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Eugene Zamiatin's We.

From the 1973 Playboy interview (Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, 259-261)