2023.06.24
It might seem strange that we waited until the penultimate entry to read Vonnegut's debut novel, but the reason is simple: it's just not as good. Compared to his later work, the style is unsteady and unformed, and it suffers from Debut Novel Syndrome, being about 25% longer than it needs to be.Having read it - well, in the years since that list was assembled the "prescient look at automation" rings strong than ever. It predates "Atlas Shrugged" and has a much much better moral stance, but there's that same kind of epic scale and theme to it, and of course the 50s era sense of decorum.
I'd honestly only recommend this to a huge fan looking to read it for completeness sake. While it's a prescient look at automation that still rings true today, those style problems drag it down.
One difference from today - the society Vonnegut paints has the same issue of "lots of people are cash poor but gadget rich" we have, and more and more people are displaced by machines, but at least here there's a National Recovery Association make-work that we lack - "The Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps" entertainingly called "The Reeks and Wrecks"
"It seemed very fresh to me--I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated. [...] Do you suppose there'll be a Third Industrial Revolution?"
"A third one? What would that be like?"
"I don't know exactly. The first and second ones must have been sort of inconceivable at one time."
"To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one's been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess--machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields."
"Uh-huh. First the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork."
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
I'm doctor of cowshit, pigshit, and chickenshit. When you doctors figure out what you want, you'll find me out in the barn shoveling my thesis.
"What have you got against machines?" said Buck.
"They're slaves."
"Well, what the heck," said Buck. "I mean, they aren't people. They don't suffer. They don't mind working."
"No. But they compete with people."
"That's a pretty good thing, isn't it--considering what a sloppy job most people do of anything?"
"Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave," said Harrison thickly, and he left.
You perhaps disagree with the antique and vain notion of Man's being a creation of God.
But I find it a far more defensible belief than the one implicit in intemperate faith in lawless technological progress--namely, that man is on earth to create more durable and efficient images of himself, and, hence, to eliminate any justification at all for his own continued existence.
You know I had never realized how close to Nova Scotia the Titanic sank.