Book description
Roderik is a robot and he's on the run in the USA of the very near
future. He's on the run for having been illicitly conceived and
manufactured at the University of Minnetonka. He is also a 'learning
machine' growing up in a complex technological age which threatens to
submerge him in a mire of meaningless and mundane values. The older he
gets and the more widely he travels, the more unable he is to comprehend
the lost innocence of adults. He encounters the plastic lifestyles of
middle-managers in rolling suburbia, confronts megalomaniac army
officers and a hotch-potch assortment of ad-men, con-men, CIA agents,
Mafiosi. Slowly but surely, in his attempt to become
"humanized," Roderik wonders if in fact he should become more
machine-like. 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.
