<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

John T. Sladek (1937-2000) was a satirical science fiction writer. He first became known as a writer of short stories for New Worlds in the 1960s. His first novel, The Reproductive System (1968, reprinted as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1969 under the title Mechasm), dealt with an attempt to build machines that build copies of themselves. The project of course gets out of hand and threatens to destroy the world. Among the satirical elements is a female lead who spent her childhood in schools for the handicapped because the school system couldn't think of anything else to do with someone who was significantly smarter than any of the other kids.

The Muller-Fokker Effect, which had moderate sf content (tapes on which a human personality was preserved), was published in the US as mainstream fiction. Among other targets, it satirized evangelists, racist groups, and men's magazines. (The publisher of one is prevented by his staff from ever having sex, because they believe that it is his virginal obsession that distinguishes their product from all the other mags.)

Roderick (1980) and Roderick at Random (1983) offer the traditional trope of an innocent outsider viewing society; in this case the outsider is a robot. One traditional metaphor is literalized here: A prostitute is kind to Roderick in the first volume, and in the second she is given a prosthetic heart; it is of course made of gold. Tik-Tok offers an opposite approach--a robot that overcomes its Asimov's laws programming and becomes a serial killer.

A strict materialist, Sladek wrote The New Apocrypha, a nonfiction debunking of pseudoscientific dogmas. Cynically, he followed it with Arachne Rising, under the name of James Vogh, purporting to demonstrate the existence of a thirteenth astrological sign that has been suppressed by the Establishment. In doing so, he may have provided a counterexample to H.L. Mencken's "No one…has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

It was Sladek's misfortune (and ours) that the two literary communities--sf and experimental writing--that could have embraced him each thought he belonged in the other. His books have fallen out of print, but the Roderick novels have been reprinted in a single volume by Overlook Press and five volumes of his short stories are available from Cosmos Press.

Links:

• John Sladek at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• Interview conducted by Dave Langford