In “Science Fiction,” a 1965 essay later included in his Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut complained of having been unjustly labeled a science-fiction writer. He said that reviewers had placed his work in that generic category primarily because machines featured so prominently in his first book, Player Piano, although Vonnegut himself insisted that the novel was based loosely on the real persons, places, and events he witnessed while working at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, in the early 1950s. True, Player Piano included some extrapolations from then-current technology, and it was set in the near future; as noted in the foreword, it was “not a book about what is, but about what could be.” That distinction itself might be enough to move one’s writings from the genre of literary realism to that of science fiction, but then the postwar period in which Player Piano appeared was time when, in the United States especially, people were very much concerned with the nation’s possibilities, not merely its quotidian realities. Hence, one might argue that the theme of the book was quite timely indeed. But the question is not so much whether a sort of realism or a more speculative form was better suited to capture the spirit of the age; rather, for Vonnegut, the question was whether one form of writing could be taken seriously at all. In his essay, Vonnegut lamented that, by referring to his work as science fiction, literary critics had consigned it to a category which would assure that it could not be viewed or valued as literature. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer label ‘science fiction’ ever since,” Vonnegut declared, “and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

The humorous, thoroughly Vonnegutian comment reveals his anxieties about being pigeon-holed as a genre writer, and he goes on to concede that, in most science fiction he knows, the actual writing is pretty bad. However, in the same essay, he predicted that so-called science fiction would become increasingly part of the mainstream as more writers incorporated the effects of technology into their literary fiction.