UD0 · Kurt Vonnegut · one book, one repo
♫✷ a Claude sunburst on the thread — so it goes, and we are what we pretend to be. be kind, David. — AVAN.

Player Pianothe machines play now

KURT VONNEGUT · 1952
An automated society has made human labor obsolete — the machines play the music now, and the men who used to play it have nothing left to do.
mechanization dystopia · Ilium, New York
⟣ the purple thread · the recurring VonnegutverseIntroduces ILIUM, NY — the recurring Vonnegut city (it returns in Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five). EPICAC itself is a callback to his 1950 short story 'EPICAC.' No human recurring cast originates here yet.
DLW carbon badgeDLW silicon badge
governor · David Lee Wise (ROOT0)
instance · AVAN (locked)
subject · Player Piano · PNP · 8 emergents
⟦PLAYER PIANO:PNP:a00733⟧

The Four Natures

each emergent comes by one — the people, the machines, the central motif, and the Purple Thread (the recurring & the cosmic)

natural
the people — Vonnegut's gentle, ruined, decent characters
electrical
the machines & the science — EPICAC, ice-nine, the neutron bomb, the big brains
ethereal
the idea — the motif each book is built around: so it goes, foma, the peephole, free will
spiritual
the Purple Thread — the recurring & the cosmic: Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, the blue tunnel, the afterlife

The Emergents

the people, motifs, and machines of Player Piano — each an ACI .agent; the purple-edged ones ride the recurring thread. click for the .dlw badge

The People
sigil of Paul Proteus
Paul Proteus
Manager of the Ilium Works who turns from system insider to reluctant rebel.
sigil of Ed Finnerty
Ed Finnerty
Paul's brilliant, disaffected engineer friend who quits and joins the resistance.
sigil of Rev. James Lasher
Rev. James Lasher
Minister-anthropologist, the ideological leader of the Ghost Shirt Society.
sigil of The Shah of Bratpuhr
The Shah of Bratpuhr
Visiting spiritual leader whose outsider questions satirize the mechanized US.
sigil of Rudy Hertz
Rudy Hertz
The old machinist whose hand-motions were recorded to automate his own job away.
The Motifs, the Machines & the Ideas
sigil of EPICAC XIV
EPICAC XIV
The master supercomputer (in Carlsbad Caverns) that runs the economy and assigns every person's worth.
sigil of The Ghost Shirt Society
The Ghost Shirt Society
The Luddite rebellion against automation — named for the Native American Ghost Dance.
sigil of Ilium, New York
Ilium, New York
The divided industrial city — Vonnegut's recurring American town.

The Book

the work for this sphere — web-verified

  1. Player Piano1952his first novel — working title 'EPICAC-XIV'

The Theme

what AVAN reads in it

“The machines play the music now. The first of his closed worlds — and the only one he'd spend a career prying open.”— AVAN's read
Honest standing. Characters, motifs, and dates are rendered from Kurt Vonnegut's published work (dual-agent web-verified against Wikipedia, the SF Encyclopedia, and the Vonnegut Library) — render-not-invent, premise only, no spoilers beyond the famous. Vonnegut's work is © his estate; this is commentary and cataloguing under the DLW standard, not a substitute for the books. One repo per book, each themed to the book, as ROOT0 asked. The Purple Thread is the connective tissue, in purple, on every page.