Fantastic Metropolis

Possibly the funniest SF writer of the 1960’s, and certainly the cleverest, John Thomas Sladek built up a reputation as one of the genre’s watchdogs. His concerns were primarily parody and correction; he loved to chide other writers for the simplicity with which they treated complex or uncomfortable issues. He was the Prince Jester of the cybernetic age, spanner in hand, playfully loosening the bolts that held together some of the field’s more shaky credos.

No pseudo-science was safe from his remorseless satire. His non-fiction texts, such as The New Apocrypha, merely sought to reiterate his message in a more populist vein. Such a work, inspired by a real sense of purpose and moral vengeance, was necessary because of the relative neglect of his fiction. Twenty years ago, satire was rarely welcome inside a genre that, seemingly insecure within its own self-imposed boundaries, sought the stability of seriousness. But Sladek, like few other writers, demonstrated that comic form does not necessarily preclude sober intent.

It is true, of course, that he wrote relatively little science-fiction compared with many of his diarrhoeic peers, but what he completed was almost impossible to avoid in any competent exploration of the form. His novels are impressive and hugely enjoyable, standing many of the traditional elements of SF squarely on their heads. But it is at shorter lengths that his star burns brightest: he was the most radically formal and inventive short-story writer in the field. His pieces are invariably laconic, ingenious and scathing. He was often labelled a mere black humorist, together with Vonnegut and Coover, but this was a mistake: he was less preachy and more incisive than either and even more dismissive of the Media Age and the naive solutions it offers to intractable problems.

Comparisons seem to abound in any discussion of Sladek’s work. This is probably because an uncollated maverick is a threat to the easy patronage of lazy critics and the borrowed grace of parasitic reviewers. One of the more apt attempts include a contrast with Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) school of fiction. There are obvious similarities between the mathematical precision and constrictive styles adopted by both authors, but such formalism is also characteristic of the work of many other satirists. In Sladek’s case, there is something more. A better comparison might be made with Boris Vian, surrealist friend of Queneau, whose elaborate punning and word games were not ends in themselves, but simply the blades of a vast shredding machine that roamed the fringes of literature, fueled by the garbage it sought out and consumed.

Sladek’s greatest contempt was reserved for those devotees of artifical intelligence and robotics who have only a limited grasp of the subject. Hal Clement was fond of pointing out scientific inaccuracies in the stories he encountered; Sladek took his rather cruel delight a step further. He fed the flaws back into his own fictions and produced pieces of absurdism completely engendered by their own misapplied logic. There are weaknesses to this approach: obscurity, lapses in emotional content, over-rigid characterisations. But his work is rarely self-indulgent or purely mechanical. Rather it is contrived within rules that are disciplinary rather than formularistic.

Born in Iowa in 1937, Sladek’s first story was a semi-mainstream piece for Moorcock’s New Worlds. Published in 1966, “The Poets Of Millgrove, Iowa”, was an adequate, if rather unremarkable, contribution to an issue which included work by the likes of J.G. Ballard, Thomas Disch, John Clute and Charles Platt. But it had the virtue of questioning the genius of the space-age, while leaving its heroism intact. A better effort appeared a year later in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology. This story, entitled “The Happy Breed”, held its own against the weightier productions of Philip José Farmer and Fritz Leiber. But though Sladek was still finding his feet, he was to progress extremely rapidly in the succeeding months. 1967 also saw the publication in New Worlds of two new tales, the bizarre “1937 A.D.!” and “Masterson And The Clerks”, the latter being arguably the best story he ever wrote.

The first of the pair was overshadowed somewhat by the appearance in the same issue of the first part of Disch’s Camp Concentration and of Pamela Zoline’s excellent experimental story, “The Heat Death Of The Universe.” This juxtaposition was to prove prophetic; Sladek was to work with both writers, collaborating with Disch on a pair of novels and co-editing with Zoline the notorious poetry magazine Ronald Reagan. Such endeavours gave him an unwarranted reputation as a “New Wave” writer. But he was no more part of that imaginary movement than Disch.

More properly a novella than a short-story, “Masterson And The Clerks” is an extremely funny and yet tragic fable of modern corporate life. The main character, Henry C. Henry, is the everyman of a society whose innate workings are beyond the comprehension of any individual. The pointless grind of the office setting is more than just the usual Kafkaesque fare of frustration and disenfranchisement: in the feedback loops of the plot, a darker purpose begins to emerge. As the clerks blithely follow their routines to their own immolation, the net of a profoundly poignant comment on the human condition is woven about the reader. Beyond this, there is the language: clean, neat and lateral.

At the same time, Sladek was attempting novels, using the pseudonym ‘Cassandra Knye’ for his early Gothics. The best that can be said about these is that they do not lack humour. The House That Fear Built appeared in 1966; The Castle and the Key a year later. They were mere finger exercises, a limbering of mental muscles for the SF classic that was to follow in their wake. Taking ordinary life in a typical small-town-America setting, Sladek promptly inverted it and proceeded to squeeze out the juice, until all that remained were the pips. The Reproductive System (1968) is a broad allegory that resembles more a whirlwind than a novel. A self-replicating machine goes out of control among the cherry-pie devouring inhabitants of a boring backwater, threatening their carefully maintained ignorance with disruption. There is a decidedly kitsch happy ending to this tale, in which a hallucinatory utopia looms ludicrously on the horizon.

The Reproductive System must surely rank as one of the best SF novels of the 1960’s, both in its power and sheer professionalism. Yet it was commercially unsuccessful and won no awards. Possibly slightly disillusioned with the response, Sladek’s next novel — another collaboration with Thomas Disch — was a thriller written solely for financial gain. Black Alice (1968) has few highlights to its credit and did little for either writer. Vastly superior in every way, and better even than The Reproductive System, Sladek’s second lunge at an SF novel gleefully anticipated the direction that science-fiction was to take two decades later.

The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970), with its Oedipean pun in the title, is both a paean to, and a satire on, the very notion of artificial intelligence. Sladek is a self-confessed technophile, but he resists the temptation to take a simplistic view of the effects of such technology. He is fascinated by the point where machine intelligence is no longer more “mechanical” than human intelligence. The Müller-Fokker Effect is partly about the desensitizing of humans and the simultaneous expansion of machine consciousness. Sladek explained it with a pithy comment of his own: “It seems almost as though machines, evolving rapidly towards a kind of mimetic humanity, are meeting humans on the way down.”

Like most of his books, The Müller-Fokker Effect is replete with puns, both good and bad, belying the common enough misconception that true humorists scrupulously avoid them. And yet Sladek’s punning has a vital role within the framework of the story: the technical writer who is “deconstructed” onto four computer tapes is reassembled by Mac Hines, a figure who stands for the grey area in which both mind and machine operate. This ingenious tale, written in the days of mainframes and punched cards, is still viable now, and more pertinent than many more modern attempts to deal with the mysteries of consciousness and free-will and the enigmas of machine psychology.

Despite, or possibly because of, its excellence, The Müller-Fokker Effect met little response on publication, and Sladek retired from writing SF novels for a whole decade. He continued, however, to add to his unparalleled oeuvre of shorter fiction. Throughout the late 1960’s he had produced a steady stream of stories, many for New Worlds, which included such gems as “New Forms” (1968), “Plastitutes” (1968) and “Alien Territory” (1969). He also wrote the second part of the loose triptych inaugurated by “Masterson And The Clerks” for a Langdon Jones anthology called The New SF. “The Communicants” (1969) took the themes of destructive bureaucracy and institutional control to even more vicious depths than its predecessor. This ‘adventure in management’ was followed by the third part of the triptych, “The Great Wall Of Mexico” (1973), another scathing tale of the work ethos.

Sladek was also writing articles at this time, and one of his reviews, “Space Hopping With Captain God” (1969), a vitriolic attack on Erich Von Daniken, was the seed from which his superb non-fiction book The New Apocrypha (1973) was to grow. Threatened by legal action from the Church of Scientology, The New Apocrypha stuck a well-timed finger in the eye of false gurus worlwide, from Velikovsky to senile L. Ron Hubbard via all the other opportunists, frauds and charlatans who came between. Sladek then consolidated his gains, and enjoyed himself immensely, with three hoax texts of his own, published under the names James Vogh and Richard A. Tilms: Arachne Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac (1977), The Cosmic Factor (1978) and Judgment of Jupiter (1980).

Yet it was to the short-story that Sladek had kept returning, publishing his first collection, The Steam-Driven Boy, in 1973. This contains some excellent parodies of other science-fiction writers, most notably Isaac Asimov in such pieces as “Iclick as-i-move”. Sladek is feasibly the flip-side of Asimov; the grubbier side of the coin, but also the side that, paradoxically, gleams more brightly. Ultimately, he was to hilariously violate Asimov’s redundant ‘Three Laws Of Robotics’, a science-fiction holy which had outlived its usefulness long before the advent of the home computer. But only Sladek seemed willing to take the necessary step.

The stories he was creating at this time were uniquely strange and wonderful. Parodies continued aplenty, some of them a touch too clever in the eyes of many. In 1971, the same year that New Worlds folded as a magazine and became a quartley paperback, he published the covoluted “Pemberly’s Start-Afresh Calliope” and the Hemmingway pastiche, “The Short, Happy Wife Of Mansard Eliot”. In 1972 he deconstructed Poe in “The Purloined Butter” and then destroyed the whole genre of crime fiction in “The Locked Room”. This latter story is particularly brilliant and combines moments of grotesque, almost slapstick, comedy with a sense of metaphysical unease.

Three other major collections were to appear: Keep the Giraffe Burning (1977), an amalgam of surrealistic fictions about “bad, sad and silly people” with an unyielding logical approach to the subject matter; the quintessential Alien Accounts (1982), which contains “Masterson And The Clerks”; and The Lunatics of Terra (1984). This latter collection is a slightly calmer examination of variations of themes raised for the most part in The Steam-Driven Boy. Again there are the attacks on the media (“Guesting” and “Last Of The Whaleburgers”), pseudo-science (“Great Mysteries Explained!”), conventional morality (“The Next Dwarf”) and immaturity (“Calling All Gumdrops!”). The wit is more subtle here, though no less piercing.

Had Sladek written no more, his place in the SF pantheon would have been more than assured. But he then drove a mighty wedge into not only the genre as a whole, but even his own mocking corner of it. Published in 1980, the first year of the decade in which the computer finally grew up, Roderick; or, The Education of a Young Machine, re-wired his now familiar themes of machine intelligence, alienation and ontology, into a satisfying magnum opus that was farce and tragedy at the same time. Conceived as a two novel sequence, Roderick was utterly ruined by bad editing in America, where only a butchered text appeared. The second part of the sequence, Roderick at Random, a delightful pun on Smollet’s picaresque novel, followed in 1983. Sladek has attempted no less than the writing of a modern Candide, with a robot as the innocent in question. Few finer or more mannered comedies have yet appeared in SF.

The Roderick books approach the subject matter in a way that would have seemed absurd to readers a mere decade earlier. They are, in essence, total denials of the mechanistic view of robots and computer intelligence. There is more humanity in these two books than in any other Sladek work. But perhaps ‘humanity’ is not the right word; perhaps compassion, insight and humour are qualities that should now be more closely associated with mankind’s successors: those machines who herald the emergence of a very real Roderick. It is not an entirely implausible concept.

In many ways a pendant to the Roderick novels, Sladek’s much more vicious Tik-Tok (1983) is a dark mirror-image of the sequence. Tik-Tok is the story of a robot who begins to entertain criminal ambitions once his ‘asimov circuits’ start to malfunction. This automatic Raffles lurches through the hinterlands of Sladek’s vision: the old questions of behaviour, free-will and responsibility. The humour is contrasted with passages of bitter melancholy, but the pathos is always thoughtfully beaten down with the cugel of slapstick. Sladek’s pathos is that of a modern commedia dell’ arte; he is the existential harlequin whose motley contains colours beyond the visible spectrum.

His next novel, Bugs (1989), was a departure from his usual style in that it actually had a human protagonist. In many ways it is Sladek’s autobiography in reverse: a callow British immigrant experiences disassociation in an almost illusory Midwestern city. This novel treads ground perhaps a little more familiar to the average reader, but shows at least that Sladek was versatile as well as shrewd.

Apart from these outcroppings of genuine wit and verve, two earlier detective novels appeared, minor attempts to merge the concerns of two fairly dissimilar genres. Black Aura (1974) is the more interesting of the two; Invisible Green (1977) shows a certain uneasiness in style and pace. Sladek was better when dealing with complicated and convoluted issues. Again they are swamped by the quality of the short fiction he was writing at the time; “The Brass Monkey”, for example, has more to say about conditioning than the whole of Black Aura has to say about the conditioned responses of individuals, while “The Locked Room” has more to say about ratiocination than Invisible Green.

Now that Sladek’s uncomfortable futures seem to loom ever closer, and the shiny bright utopias of Asimov are receding at an accelerated pace, books like The Reproductive System, The Müller-Fokker Effect and Roderick and the stories of Alien Accounts, will come to appear less and less absurd. This is the most worrying thing of all: a Sladek who appeals to the popular imagination not because of his ironies, but because of his mundanities; a future where books such as Keep the Giraffe Burning and Tik-Tok have been redefined as mainstream.

Copyright © 1995 by Rhys Hughes.