I'd never heard of Mockingbird, which surprised me a little because it's good.
It surprised me a lot that I hadn't heard of Walter Tevis because three of his six novels are famous on film--a curious mix:
The Hustler (1959; 1961 movie with Paul Newman)
The Man Who Fell to Earth, (1963; movie starring David Bowie 1976),
and The Queen's Gambit (Netflix series, 2020)
Mockingbird has never been filmed. With the success of the Queen's Gambit, maybe now it will be.
It’s a hopeful story set in a dystopian future where robots do everything and a drugged humanity has forgotten how to read, or that reading even exists.
Asked if a decline in literacy in America had inspired his plot line, Tevis said:
"My private experience as an English teacher has been that Americans don’t read books. They didn’t read books in 1949 when I started teaching. They don’t read books now [1981].
Television did make a difference. It deepened the slack of the slackjaws and gave another great quantity of garbage for people to fill their lives with. But, you know, there was other garbage around before television.
Mockingbird does sometimes, I think, weaken into an attack solely on television and on the modern world, and “weaken” I say, because I’m not completely convinced of all those things that I say.
But what I am convinced of is that it is very bad for people to find substitutes for living their lives, and that’s what I hope I do say, and say well, from time to time in the book.
--"An Interview with Walter Tevis", 1981, Brick Magazine https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-walter-tevis/