His first story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," was published in the 11 February 1950 issue of
Collier's. This led to the difficult decision to quit his job as a publicist for General Electric Corporation, whereupon he settled with his family in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, to write full time. Succeeding years have brought travel, lecture tours, and teaching positions, most notably an association with the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.
Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano (1952), is stock science-fiction fare, complete with the standard formula of a future setting derived mainly from exaggeration of contemporary trends. Dr. Paul Proteus, whose name baldly describes his changeable nature, gradually rejects his comfortable life as one of society's managers in a world where life is business oriented, structured by education, and dominated by machines. The opening lines, "Ilium, New York, Is Divided Into Three Parts," suggest a parallel with Caesar's Gallic Wars and prepare the reader for some manner of struggle between barbarians and civilized men. The overeducated managers, in fact, tend the machines that furnish all the amenities of civilized life while everyone else lives across the river (like Caesar's Gauls) in The Homestead, residence of the uneducated and unnecessary members of the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, the "Reeks and Wrecks." Paul's metamorphosis (and the reader's enlightenment) comes through a series of humorous scenes, sometimes heavily ironic, as when a foreign visitor mistakes the computer EPICAC XIV for the American God, or when a mock morality play designed to glorify technology actually exposes its superficiality.
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