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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote

Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | Christopher Buckley | Daphne Du Maurier | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | Bernard Malamud | Tim Powers | Philip Roth | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut

Although I read a handful of Kurt Vonnegut's '80s novels back when I was in college, almost thirty years ago now, this year will be the first time I've ever attempted to either read him comprehensively, read his really early works, or even learn more about him and his career history; and so that made it a big surprise last week to read his Wikipedia page for the first time and realize that he was actually considered a mid-tier Silver Age science-fiction author for the first five books of his career, all the way up to his 1969 breakout hit Slaughterhouse-Five. So in other words, not an Isaac Asimov but more a Frederik Pohl, with books that were loved by hardcore genre obsessives but that never really made a dent with the general public.

This is very clearly on display in his first-ever novel, 1952's Player Piano, which is shocking in hindsight precisely for what a so-so book it actually is, and how conventionally written it is, given how famous Vonnegut eventually became for both his unusual writing style and the high quality of his concepts. Ironically, the speculative novel is about a "world of the future" that has largely come to actually pass by 2018 -- an America where not only have most industrial and factory jobs been automated and are now run by robots, but even most white-collar jobs like writers, accountants and secretaries, Vonnegut envisioning a crazy far-future when computers can do things like (gasp!) catch typos in memos and automate tax preparation. In Vonnegut's world, pretty much the only humans left with actual jobs are computer engineers and their managers, eerily predicting the actual state of Silicon Valley in the 21st century; and while the rest of the country is still well taken care of, due to the socialized basic income that all this automation can now afford, it's left the US in a state of violent despondency over most people now no longer knowing their "purpose" in life, most former blue-collar workers now throwing themselves into their fraternal organizations like the Elks and the Rotary Club with a kind of zeal that has turned them almost into weaponized religious cults.

The novel is mostly notable now for the ways that Vonnegut correctly predicted much of the technology that would pass in the 65 years between then and now, even while badly misjudging what kind of effect this technology would have on society at large; he pictures this sea change in technology happening in a sociological bubble that completely stands still, leading to a shell-shocked populace who are utterly unequipped to adapt themselves to their rapidly changing times, while in reality over the last 65 years we've seen an America that has largely been able to successfully change its outlook and educational options to adapt to this rise in technological automation, giving us a contemporary US in 2018 that by and large is much wealthier and better-working than the barely functioning dystopia Vonnegut imagines in his book. (Also glaringly obvious to modern readers, Vonnegut's complete and total inability to predict in 1952 the rise of creative industries to replace all the factory workers and administrative peons of his own times -- designers, marketers, TV and film producers, craft artists, small business owners, "user experience" experts, basically all the modern job types that get lumped into the catch-all term "creative class.")

That makes the book problematic for contemporary readers, because it's hard to get over the schism here of Vonnegut describing a world that technologically works much like our real world does, but that in his case produces an Orwellian nightmare of a society that is perpetually on the brink of an ideologically based violent revolution; and like mentioned before, this is then compounded by the fact that his writing style here is barely above serviceable, a book that reads and feels exactly like the genteel Mid-Century Modernist relic that it actually is. According to his Wikipedia page, Vonnegut didn't develop his now iconic "Vonnegutian style" of writing until 1973's Breakfast of Champions, which apparently was the result of a nervous breakdown and an erroneous belief that that book was going to be the last of his career (but more on all this when we reach it); so while I work my way up to that point, I'm going to keep my expectations low for these more straightforward sci-fi novels from the start of his career, advice that I recommend to others as well who are making their way through his early books. Although I'm glad I now have it under my belt, I can't honestly say that I will ever take on Player Piano again, a reading experience that mostly left me anxious to get to Vonnegut's mature classics from later in his career.