Jean Harlow (as Kitty Pachard): I read this book... the man says machines are going to take over every profession!

Marie Dressler (as Carlotta Vance): (Looks her over) My dear, you've got nothing to worry about.

Just one of the dry and appropriate quotations the renownedly erudite Sladek uses to pepper the chapter headings in this brilliant book about a very human machine in a dehumanised world full of mechanical people. Roderick is a learning machine - the product of a highly experimental artificial intelligence project at the University of Minnetonka. But the project's funding is under threat and their leading genius is on the verge of mental breakdown. Roderick escapes and is adopted, bought or just kidnapped by one after another crazy person - beginning with a disfunctional couple who neglect him. He starts to learn all about the world from TV, and begins the long process of trying to work the whole thing out using his (as you would expect) powerfully logical brain. He is forced to work in a fairground by the scary Mr Kratt, comes across a sinister corporate conspiracy, and is eventually adopted by the warm-hearted, but extremely eccentric Ma and Pa Wood who teach him human values and try to get his body sorted out for him. If the story sounds a bit like the "Wizard of Oz" or "The Brave Little Toaster" believe me it isn't - well I suppose it is a bit, but it's also full of dark humour, weird characters and hilarious situations. There's beautifully observed school scenes, and an unforgettable theological discussion with a very worried priest. There's the story of Abraham and Isaac as a flow chart, and lots of strange little codes and puzzles to work out. There's obsessive artists, craven academics, moronic TV shows and general satirising of all the crass things we've come to accept as inescapable parts of modern life in the twenty years since the book was written. Together with its sequal "Roderick at Random", "Roderick" - one of David Pringle's "Science Fiction: One Hundred Best Novels" - is a fitting memorial to a great modern satirist who died in March this year.

The exposure of human gullibility and self-delusion is such easy work - demanding only some accurate research - that one wonders why more people do not undertake it. This is, on the face of it, a peculiar project: a science-fiction writer taking time off his day job to write one long guide of the strangest kind of cultish or pseudo-scientific stuff that was wheeling around in the late sixties and early seventies (a time very sympathetic to such things). The book is economically written, well referenced and good fun, and the author, as one would expect from a capable professional writer, is able to send up his subjects with the minimum of effort, letting them speak for themselves. (One quotation from English bad-writing legend Barbara Cartland is particularly to be cherished.)
One has to wonder about his own intellectual position, though. We find out with dismay that he is a friend of Michael Moorcock, who is not only a prejudiced enemy of religion but the author of some of the most odiously immoralistic books ever written (take the praise of rape in GLORIANA or of mass murder in some of the ELRIC books), viciously using a practised "literary" hand to promote views that make John Norman of GOR fame sound mild. And while there is nothing in this book of Moorcock's more extreme and ludicrous attitudes, there is a good deal to suggest that religious positions are neither taken seriously nor knowledgeably. What he describes as the Catholic position in his otherwise well-deserved skewering of Teilhard de Chardin (and he has not even said the worst of Teilhard, who was a lifelong admirer of totalitarian dictatorships and especially of Chinese Communism) makes Catholicism sound more like a variety of Hinduism than the religion of Augustine or Aquinas, Suarez or Chesterton. Besides, one would never understand from his writing that the Catholic Church has condemned Teilhard's writings for the heretical trash that they are (with loud approval, by the way, from one of Moorcock's favourite targets - C.S.Lewis, who was not a Catholic). From a different point of view, his ridiculously unsympathetic and extremely brief reference to the great philosopher Giovanbattista Vico, quoted,`alas, from Benedetto Croce, is gravely prejudicial and puts his readers - who are not likely to have read much philosophy themselves - in danger of excluding themselves from one of the most original and creative minds in many centuries, the father of half a dozen modern disciplines from anthropology to culture history.
Having said all that, this book is more likely to be an influence for good than for evil. If the author has any negative view about religion as such, he keeps them to himself; there is no implication anywhere that the religious person as such is an idiot (such as one finds scattered all over Moorcock). Sladek has only attacked what is more than deserving of attack, and the dose of scepticism he delivers in this book is healthy for any intellectual constitution.

This is a magnificent book, a hugely entertaining look at pseudoscience and various kinds of occult/spiritual silliness, from Nostradamus to various "psychic detectives", taking in eternal motion machines, various ludicrous but successful cults that would no doubt sue Amazon if I named them, Noah's Arc, Erich von Daniken, the incredibly strange people who claim to be UFO contactees, the secret codes that "prove" that Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and various other forms of nuttery along the way.

Sladek's expositions of these beliefs are impressively researched, and his use of original sources to let his various cranks and charlatans speak for, and demolish, themselves is brilliantly effective and often hilarious.

I found it a life-changing book. I was already starting to wean myself away from various kinds of woolly thinking - eg taking Lyle Watson more or less seriously - but it wasn't just the extraordinary range of Sladek's material that impressed me, but how much fun the book was. Sladek's obvious glee at challenging various kinds of straight-faced amd deeply serious nonsense is highly enjoyable - and contagious.

Sadly, though (like the previous reviewer) I too was waiting for the encore, there isn't going to be one. Sladek died in 2000. His friend Michael Moorcock apparently suggested that Sladek write "The New Apocrypha"; perhaps Moorcock might provide us with the long-awaited sequel? Anyway, Sladek's science fiction is also well worth reading, though this remains my favourite of his books.

As for the feeble pun in my review title, it's a homage to Sladek, who does rather better. His chapter on flying saucer cullts is headed, childishly but splendidly, "Will U kindly FO?"

Grab this book if you find a copy. Note to publishers: It's time it was re-issued.

Cheers!

Laon

A text well worth searching for! Sladek weaves an exciting book out of what could be a very dry subject. A must-have to be jealously guarded by any aspirant guru-buster. The only thing left to say is...when is the sequel due

I had heard this book was an outrageously funny masterpiece of black humor, so finally, after many years I tracked it down at the library. While I discovered is a brief satire with a one joke premise that's diverting, but ages quickly. Told in 26 chapters-each of whose first word follows the sequence of the alphabet (Chapter 1, "As"; Chapter 2 "Broaching"; Chapter 3. "Culpritwise" and so on, at least until the final letters, where Sladek's gusto for this very little joke seems have run dry)-the story tells of a sociopathic robot in future America.

Tik-Tok has "asimov circuits" which are supposed to keep him from harming humans, but somehow these aren't working, or as he suggests at one point, never really existed in the first place, but are part of some massive groupthink. The result is that Tik-Tok kills sadistically over the course of the book, all while building himself a corporate empire and manipulating social and political opinion so that robots are allowed to own property and vote. This is all fairly predictable from the beginning, but what I did find unexpectedly interesting are the parallels with Bret Easton Ellis' highly controversial novel American Psycho, which was written eight years later. In both, an outwardly impeccable character engages in nasty sadism, even tells other people what's he's done, only to have them think it's a joke.

Mixed in with Tik-Tok's ascension are his reminisces of past owners, which are mostly played to comic effect, with a running commentary equating robots with slaves. Traditional caretakers of the moral status quo such as priests, judges, military, and aristocracy are repeatedly revealed to be charlatans, sadists, and just plain crazy. On the other end of the spectrum, the civil rights do-gooders of the "Wages For Robots" movement come under equal unsubtle satirical attack, as does the celebrity media industry. Capitalism itself, along with the military-industrial complex is further fodder for Sladek's acid pen. Ultimately, however, none of the satire is as subtle as I would have liked, and much of the book reads like an author riffing on familiar subjects. It's a nice addition to robot literature, but hardly the masterpiece it's made out to be.

The title character is a 'domesticated robot' living in a time when most humans own at least one and sometimes more, using them as slaves; as he awaits jugement for crimes he perpetrated, he writes his memoirs. Sladek uses a lively back-and-forth structure that weaves together two main timelines. Tik-Tok, in platonic terms, is a 'liberated prisoner' among robots: unlike the others, he is aware of what went behind his construction and 'education', but rather than alerting the other robots, he is more interested in making various experiments to see how far he can go with this discovery. His actions speak less of a downright vengeance on his one-time human masters than of curiosity - hence his relative contempt for both humans (because of their lies and contradictions) and robots (for their incapacity to wake up and refuse passive submission). The conscience of his freedom liberates him from what humans have called 'Azimov circuits' (based on the three inhibitory laws formulated by Isaac Asimov), but these, as he remarks, could very well be illusions used to solidify human authority. There's a relentless cynicism, even nihilism running through the entire work, but it is mainly upsetting because it forces the reader to re-evaluate preconceptions about the world. Whether 'Tik-Tok' ultimately convinces us of its conclusions or not, the book is too powerful to ignore.

fist of all 2 who doesnt have d time or d patience 2 further reading THIS NOVEL IS A MUST for all those who like science fiction & for learning how 2 write a story which is a warning sign , cynical , humorous & most important : interesting & fluent . usually when i read a book i can spot d points where d author has been " stacked " (if u know what i'm talking about if no just go 2 another review ). in TIK-TOK i just could'nt find this. it is (my humble opinion) a perfectly fluent story

I last read this book in 1980 but what I remember about it the most is the consistently high quality of the stories and the humor. There are 2 or 3 short stories which spoof Philip K. Dick and are written in a parody of his style. This book is worth searching out, not only for SF fans.

The sequel to Sladek's excellent "Roderick", "Roderick at Random" is subtitled "the further education of a young machine". This sees Roderick - ingenuous product of an artificial intelligence project at a fictitious midwestern university - separated from Ma and Pa Wood (the good hearted, though eccentric folks who have raised him), and cast into Sladek's surreal, brassy, outrageously craven, corporate-controled America. An America full of extraordinary characters: the scary entrepreneur/fairground boss, Mr Kratt; the old man busily setting out a complete moral code for all human conduct, the devotees of amazingly loony religious cults, and the unbearably pretentious and tortured new-media artists, among many others. It's a dehumanised America which in the early eighties seemed to be of the not-too-distant future - and still seems so now, even though alot of what Sladek forsaw has already arrived. It's a society in which an artificial young man is treated just like one more unwelcome member of yet another minority faction, even though he is, perhaps, the most human character in the book. With clear echoes of Smollet's "Roderick Random" and a similar dry revelry in maltreatment and impious misfortune, but with a satiric wit and incomparable humour all its own (Sladek has been compared to Vonnegut, Voltaire, and even Frank L. Baum) this is an excellent book - but you might want to read "Roderick" first.