The novel depicts a dystopia of automation partly inspired by the author's time working at General Electric, describing the negative impact technology can have on quality of life.

[2] While most Americans were fighting in the third world war, the nation's managers and engineers responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed factories to operate with only a few workers.

The polarization of the population is represented by the division of Ilium, New York, into "Homestead", where every person not a manager or an engineer lives – added to by the growing number of those displaced from that status – and the industrialized north side of the river, inhabited by those who service and develop the machines.

His acknowledgment of that feeling is heightened when Ed Finnerty, an old friend whom Paul holds in high regard, informs him that he has quit his important engineering job in Washington, DC.

"[3] But for the moment, she uses her sexual hold on Paul to convince him to stay and compete with two other engineers, Dr. Shepherd and Dr. Garth, for a more prominent position in Pittsburgh.

While Paul takes part in the annual managerial bonding event at "the Meadows", his superiors tell him that he has been chosen to infiltrate the "Ghost Shirt Society", and rumors of his disloyalty to the system are circulated.

Despite the brief and impressive success of the rebellion, the military quickly surrounds the town, while the population begin to use their innate abilities to rebuild the machines of their own volition.

"[4] More specifically, it delves into a theme to which Vonnegut returns, "a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines.

[6] Mankind's blind faith in technology and its usually-disastrous effect on society as well as the dehumanization of the poor or oppressed later became common themes throughout Vonnegut's work.

In a 1973, interview Vonnegut discussed his inspiration to write the book:[9] I was working for General Electric at the time, right after World War II, and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines.

Early in the book, Paul Proteus's friend and future member of the Ghost Shirt Society, Ed Finnerty, is shown manually playing a player piano, suggesting the idea of humans reclaiming their animus from the machines.

This satirical take on industrialization and the rhetoric of General Electric[10] and the big corporations, which discussed arguments very topical in the postwar United States, was instead advertised by the publisher with the more innocuous and marketable label of "science fiction", a genre that was booming in mass popular culture in the 1950s.

He was distressed because he felt that science fiction was shoved in a drawer which "many serious critics regularly mistake... for a urinal" because "[t]he feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works.

"[4] Player Piano was later released in paperback by Bantam Books in 1954 under the title Utopia 14[2] in an effort to drive sales with readers of science fiction.

"[13] They praised Vonnegut for "blending skillfully a psychological study of the persistent human problems in a mechanistically 'ideal' society, a vigorous melodramatic story-line, and a sharp Voltairean satire.