John Sladek
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John Thomas Sladek (December 15, 1937 - March 10, 2000) was an American science-fiction author. He was known for his satirical and surrealistic novels. Born in Minnesota in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the New Wave movement. His first novel, published in London by Gollancz as The Reproductive System and in the United States as Mechasm, dealt with a project to build machines that build copies of themselves, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In The Müller-Fokker Effect, an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. Roderick and Roderick at Random offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek revisited robots from a darker point of view in Tik-Tok, featuring a sociopathic robot who lacks any moral "asimov circuits", and Bugs, a wide-ranging satire in which a hapless technical writer (a job Sladek pursued for many years) helps to create a robot who quickly goes insane.
Sladek was also known for his brief parodies of other sf writers, such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Cordwainer Smith. A strict materialist, Sladek subjected dubious science and the occult to merciless scrutiny in The New Apocrypha and, under the name of James Vogh, wrote Arachne Rising, which purports to be a nonfiction account of a thirteenth sign of the zodiac suppressed by the scientific establishment, in an attempt to demonstrate that people will believe anything. He also co-wrote two pseudonymous novels with his friend Thomas M. Disch, the Gothic The House that Fear Built (as Cassandra Knye) and the satirical thriller Black Alice (as Thom Demijohn).
Sladek returned from England to Minnesota in 1986, where he lived until his death in 2000 from pulmonary fibrosis.
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Selected Works
Science Fiction Novels
- The Reproductive System (a.k.a. Mechasm) (1968)
- The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970)
- Roderick (1980)
- Roderick at Random (1983) (The Roderick series was also published in a three-volume edition with different volume divisions)
- Tik-Tok (1983)
- Bugs (1989)
Science Fiction Collections
- The Steam-Driven Boy (1973)
- Keep the Giraffe Burning (1977)
- Alien Accounts (1982)
- The Lunatics of Terra (1984)
- Maps, edited by David Langford (2002)
Mystery Novels
- Black Aura (1974) featuring the detective Thackeray Phin
- Invisible Green (1977) the second Phin novel
There are also Phin stories in the collection Maps, edited by David Langford (2002)
Nonfiction
- The New Apocrypha (1973)
- Arachne Rising (1977) (as James Vogh)
- The Cosmic Factor (1978) (as James Vogh)
External links
- An interview with John Sladek (http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/jsladek.html)
- Guardian newspaper obituary (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,178818,00.html)
- ISFDB Bibliography (http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?John_Sladek)