Book description
John Sladek explains the theme of the darkly comic stories in this
wonderful collection: "The aliens here are human. This book
contains no giant flying snails or telepathic octopods, no Ganymedean
cat-women dressed in silver, no aggressive dugong chiefs roaming the
galaxy in their pulsar-powered yo-yo ships. The aliens here are human
aliens. Most of them work in ordinary offices, and they do not commute
to work from Proximo Centauri, either. Yet these here humans are aliens.
Office life attracts them ..." John Sladek (1937 - 2000) John
Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he
became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael
Moorcock's groundbreaking New Worlds magazine. Sladek began writing SF
with 'The Happy Breed', which appeared in Harlan Ellison's seminal
anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and is now recognized as one of
SF's most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections
include The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick and Tik Tok, for which he won
a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there
in March 2000.
