Player Piano

London: Macmillan & Co., 1953 First UK edition, first printing. With laid-in bookplate signed by Vonnegut. Publisher's red cloth, with light toning to spine ends, a few tiny bumps to edges of rear board, a hint of soiling to spine ends, bottoms of boards, and edges of endpapers, and light foxing to text block edges; about very good clipped dust jacket, with light fading to spine, light soiling to panels and spine, front flap stamped with "Macmillan's Overseas Library," light wear to edges and spine ends, light foxing to jacket verso, tape reinforcement along upper and lower margins of jacket verso, and some splitting to top portion of rear flap fold. Overall, a pleasing copy. Vonnegut's first book Player Piano is a dystopian novel set ten years after World War III, in the fictional town of Ilium, New York. In this town, society is largely run by self-automating machines, and the population is divided into managers and engineers on one side of the river, and the "Homestead" - a camp for people displaced by technology - on the other. The story's protagonist, Dr. Paul Proteus, is a manager at Ilium Works, who becomes increasingly rebellious to the system. For this novel, Vonnegut drew on his personal experience working as a technical writer at General Electric shortly after the close of World War II. In a 1973 interview, Vonnegut said that he "cheerfully ripped off the plot of Brave New World, whose plot had been cheerfully ripped off from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.". Signed by Author. Hard Cover. Near Fine/Dust Jacket Included.