Player Piano is a preview of American life after the third World War…. It is a country in which a man's station and future are totally controlled by a configuration of punched holes in a personnel card and men's minds have been ground down to a conformity as fine as our dust. That dust is occasionally stirred by ancient dreams and inchoate resentments, and such a stirring is taking place as the novel begins. But mostly America is a country in which life is intolerably dull.

That seems to be a quality shared by most versions of the future and it poses a very difficult problem for their creators: namely, how to write interestingly about a dull subject. Player Piano's stereotyped or amorphous characters, inept construction, blunderbuss satire, and pedestrian prose help matters not at all.

And yet these defects, however serious, might be pardoned in a...