Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut

Summary: The story takes place in a somewhat distant future where machines do many of the jobs once held by humans. More correctly, it's a 1950's view of such a future, so there's much importance placed on vacuum tubes and punch cards and no idea of gender equality. But that's not the point. The point is that machines are taking over all the jobs people had done previously. And there's a high premium placed on protocol.

Reaction: He's got a point, that progress for the sake of progress isn't necessarily a good thing and that one ought to actually, like, look at the system once in awhile to figure out who it's really helping and what kind of effects it's having on the people it's supposed to be helping. Whee, this time I can actually get a handle on what the point was. Some of his other books were mostly good for the "wtfwtfwtf aha" effect. Altho I guess Galapagos did have a definable point as well.

I think Galapagos was a bad place to start when it comes to getting a handle on what Vonnegut's writing is like because that one featured a narrator who knew everything that was going to happen and sometimes referred to it, but only gave the reader those facts on a need-to-know basis. It was a rather intreguing stream-of-conciousness that for the first some amount of the book raised more questions than it answered in any given paragraph. But that all is irrelevant.

I guess Player Piano isn't so good at the entertainment, altho it certainly made me want to find out how the various characters were going to react to things, but it certainly excells at making one think about the way things are going, even if vacuum tubes are pretty much a thing of the past.