Introduction: A Letter to Kurt Vonnegut, 1952
Kurt Vonnegut never lied to me.
That’s what made him different. He didn’t peddle hope, didn’t pretend things were tidy or fair. The world, in his books, was absurd and unjust and often grimly stupid and yet somehow still worth laughing about.
That laughter was the point, I think.
He didn’t promise answers. But he did offer companionship in the confusion. That’s why he mattered to me. Still does. He’s been an influence on my own work.
I’ve read nearly everything he wrote, but Player Piano has always stayed with me. His first novel. Not his most elegant, maybe. But one of his most honest.
It’s a book about a future where machines do all the work. Factories run themselves. The engineers and managers are the only people still needed. Everyone else gets a guaranteed income, a place to live, and not much to do.
When I read it the first time, I took it as a warning. A grim picture of what might happen if we automate ourselves out of usefulness.
Recently, while thinking about the rise of AI, I thought of Player Piano and decided it was time to revisit it. I came away from the text with a wholly different impression.
It didn’t read like a dystopia anymore. It read like a utopia we never managed to build.
No one’s homeless in Player Piano. No one’s scrambling for gig work, or juggling three jobs to make rent. People are bored, yes. Adrift. But they’re not desperate.
The machines take the drudgery. The people are left to figure out who they are.
It’s a strange thing to envy a fictional future that was meant to frighten us.
So I wrote a letter. Not to the Kurt Vonnegut who became famous, but to the one who wrote Player Piano in 1952. The one who still thought the real danger was too much freedom, not too little.
From: Tumithak of the Corridors
To: Mr. Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Origin Date: July 2025
Destination Date: October 1952
Transmission Type: Inter-Epoch Memo (Filed, Possibly Ignored)
Routing: Misrouted via Quantum Pneumatic Tube
Subject: Re: Player Piano, Purpose, and the Future You Tried to Warn Us About
Dear Mr. Vonnegut,
Greetings from the future, and congratulations on publishing your first novel! Player Piano, yes? Quite a debut. Funny, grim, and too clever by half. A bit long in places, but so is the future, as it turns out.
Now, I hate to be the bearer of bad news across spacetime, but I must tell you: you got it wrong.
Not all of it, of course. The machines did come, and they did take the jobs. Just not the ones you expected. The factories still need people. Someone has to crawl under the floor when a pipe bursts. But the poetry? The music? The stories?
Oh, the machines write those now.
And the rest of us? We're still working. But not for dignity, Mr. Vonnegut. For rent.
Your dystopia reads like a utopia to us now. Imagine that.
In your book, everyone gets a house. A check. A warm place to sleep. They’re obsolete, but they’re not starving. They’re bored, not broken. The government hands them just enough to live, and leaves them alone.
God, what a dream.
Here in 2025, we call that “entitlement” and shame people for needing it. We tell them to work harder. Get a second job. Turn their hobbies into businesses. Sell something. Anything.
No one’s obsolete, Kurt. Not because we’re all needed. But because we’re all exploited. The system’s very clever that way. It doesn’t throw you out. It just wrings you dry.
People still have to manually fix sewer lines. But a computer can give you legal advice if you get hurt while doing it.
You imagined automation replacing men in steel-toed boots. We kept them. We replaced the poets instead.
Machines write our birthday cards now. Our love letters. Even our eulogies.
They paint. They compose music. They write poems about grief and springtime and being human.
And the humans? We're still patching drywall. Still driving delivery trucks. Still digging ditches. Still cleaning the bathrooms at the buildings the machines now manage.
The dream was that machines would free us to become artists and thinkers. Instead, they became the artists and thinkers.
We were meant to be liberated. We ended up surplus.
You were afraid people would lose the dignity of labor.
We’re afraid labor has lost all dignity.
And still, your world had something ours doesn’t. Certainty. Union cards. Church picnics. You thought the worst thing that could happen was too much freedom.
But it wasn’t. It was freedom without security. Leisure without shelter. Purpose without time.
You gave your characters a basic income and called it a tragedy.
We give people nothing and call it normal.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know.
Player Piano was wrong in all the right ways. You feared a world where people had too much time and not enough purpose. We got the opposite. No time, no purpose, and no rest.
And yet, your stories still matter. Maybe now more than ever.
Because even when you missed, you were aiming at the right things.
Keep writing. We’ll keep reading.
So it goes,
Tumithak of the Corridors
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