Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

On one level, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker is a straightfoward, linearly-plotted tale of a young adult's experiences in a post-apocalyptic British east coast landscape subsequent to the death of his father in a work-related accident.

However, such an unadorned description does little justice to the complex, richly allusive nature of this extraordinary, peregrinating, puzzling work.

Every 1 knows about Bad Time and what come after. Bad Time 1st and bad times after. Not many come thru it a live. (p. 2)

Christian fabulation, folklore, mythology, technology, atomic theory, and popular culture intersect in Riddley Walker in complex ways which invite multiple, parallel readings of their significance.

Thematic points of origin in the text between 'the 1 Big 1 or the Spirit of God of the Littl Shyning Man or what ever' (p. 150) are indistinguishable. History and language have become muddied and muddled in the work, which is presented in the first person in phonetically-inflected language by a titular narrator through whom meaning is iterated, but also impeded:

You know some times you get a fealing you dont want to put no words to. (p. 54)

The frequently encountered (and fully documented) 'Eusa Story' is simultaneously a retelling of the tale of St. Eustance, and a referent to the USA -- presumably one of the participants in the cataclysmic atomic event (the '1 Big 1') that led to the destruction of the previous civilization from which the world of Riddley Walker emerged -- as well as a computer 'user', as fragments of the language we encounter suggest.

The' Little Shyining Man the Addom' refers to both a Christ (and perhaps also Adamic) analogue, and the splitting of the atom. The Eusa Show, enacted with puppets modelled on traditional Punch & Judy entertainments, represents aspects of the puppet show from which it has been derived but also introduces novel elements which serve as a gloss, or perhaps a satire on, or possibly even a theatrical requiem to, the lost knowledge of the past:

Eusa says, 'I dont know what Ive los I aint very qwick.' The Littl Shyning Man says, 'Wel Eusa you bes qwicken up fas then becaws there gone Good Time and here comes Trubba.'
Eusa says, 'It looks like you see Trubba all ready you aint even in 1 peace.'
The Littl Man says, 'Eusa dont you know who done thise to me dont you onow who toar me in 2? Dont you know who opent me like a chicken time back way back in the wood in the hart of the stoan?'
Eusa says, 'How cud I know that?'
The Littl Man say, 'Becaws youre the 1 as done it.'
Eusa says, 'I dint know that Ive los it clean out of memberment.' (pp. 49-50).

The prehistory of Riddley Walker is a conundrum, despite the fictive future of the work being dated with some specificity:

There's a stoan in the Power Ring stannings has the number 1997 cut in to it nor we aint  never seen no year number farther on nor that. After Bad Time dint no 1 write down no year count for a long time we dont know how long til the Mincery begun agen. Since we startit counting its come to 2347 OC  which means Our Count.'
I said, 'Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?' (pp. 100, 124)

Relatively early in Riddley Walker, before aspects of the novel's back story are introduced towards the end of the work, the reader is invited either to conclude that magical realist elements feature in the novel's universe, or that genetic adaptation or mutation has taken place across not only humanity, but other species:

The dogs begun running round me all in a circel roun and roun with ther littl heads up hy and ther hy sholders up. They begun running on ther hynt legs. The sky wer black the stoans gon wite the dogs gone all diffrent shyining colours and the wite stoans shyning thru them. I tryd to hol it like that but I los it wernt man a nuff right then. (p. 157)

The 'fits' that Riddley has become a focus for this theme, leaving the reader to ponder whether the titular protagonist has epilepsy, or is perhaps manifesting some sort of evolutionary effect precipitated over thousands of years by his progenitors' exposure to radiation:

I had like a mynd flash of colourt lites with clicking and bleaping it wernt like nothing I ever acturely seen nor heard only in dreams. I cud like feal the woal circel of the dead towns in me and see a line of grean lite sweaping round that circel from the senter. (p. 89)

A sense emerges during the course of the work of the possibility of the existence of a genetic-level code trigger or gene mutation: I wer programmit diffrent then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my hed ben ful or words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots (p. 163)

Technologies have clearly informed the language and thinking of the society from which the communities of Riddley Walker have evolved:

Like it says in Eusa 5: 'Evere thing blippin & bleapin & movin in the shiftin uv thay Nos. Sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit.' (p.101)

This is an historic figure of speech suggesting 'we made ready and got underway' rather than suggesting that there are live terminals.

We pult datter and we printowt we wer roading Goodparleys show (p. 202)

Green Man myths and subsequent discoveries could be as prosaic as the discovery of the remains of a garden supply centre, but they also have a symbolic value as a signifier of rebirth and regrowth:

I had a idear of what it wer going to be when I unrapt it. I were right. It wer Greanvine. Carvit out of wood and paintit it wer may be 1/2 as big as a real face. The back of it flat and the front of it ful roundit it wer that same and very face I seen in my mynd. Them wide open grean eyes staring up at me wylst the vines and leaves growit out of his mouf (p. 165)

Granser recreates the 1 Littl 1 -- gunpowder -- using  'yellerboy stoan [sulphur] and Saul & Peter [potassium nitrate, or saltpetre] and chard coal [charcoal]' (p. 185):

He wer pounding the yellerboy stoan to a fine powder. Then he done the same with some chard coal. Done it with a boal and pounder. He had the Saul & Peter all ready that wer kirstels like salt. He took little measurs and measuring out yellerboy and chard coal and Saul & Peter. Mixing them all to gether then and me watching. It wer like the 1st time I seen a woman open for mee and I wer thinking: This is what its all about then (p. 189)

Orfing reveals that the technology humanity was in possession of prior to the apocalyptic nuclear event is still extant as colonists had already passed beyond our galaxy. This passage also suggests that the trances Riddley has experienced and the 'telling' that takes place elsewhere in the work are genetic  echoes of post-Singularity bioengineering which connected humanity together; the receptors remain, but with the collapse of the technologies that enabled them, the facilitating data is no longer being generated:

To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas. Not jus singing it you know. Acturely going it acturely roading out thru space. Jus try to get it in your mynd try to happen it in your head o dint they trants hy you cud feal the thrus and the boost of it you know the jynt woosh of them liffing  off and to the stations. Which they jumpt 1 station to the nex you see and til they jumpt right out beyont them gallack seas. I tel you Riddley lissening to then trantsing and telling it wer all mos like being in 1 of them space craf o the yoaring and the roaling o the nertial and the navigation of it' (p. 195)

After the explosion that kills Granser reintroduces gunpowder-making, civil discord is unleashed and the existing order is overthrown. Orfing says:

It looks to me like that Fools Circel is broakin now I dont think therewl be no mor regler hevvys and any Eusa folk whatre stil a live theyre all too binsy running a roan trying to go bang. Plus a woal lot of other peopl as wel by now parbly. Fars we know there bint no mor bangs yet but we dont have the leas idear whats going to happen. Right now there aint even no Pry Mincer its what they call a care maker Mincery with regenneril guvner me from the Ram at all the forms. (p. 198)

A thread of existentialist thought runs through Riddley Walker:

Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don't know what it is. What a way to live. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome[...] The thot come to me: EUSAS HEAD IS DREAMING US' (pp. 7, 61)

'Them peopl as jus want to hol on to what theyve got theyre afeart to chance any thing theyre afeart to move even 1 littl step forit.' (p. 125)

He said, 'I never sung no beginning becaws you wont never fynd no beginning its long gone and far pas. What ever youre after youwl never fynd the beginning of it that why youwl all ways be too late. Onlyes thing youwl ever fynd is the end of things. What ever happens itwl be what you dint want to happen. What ever dont happen thatwl be the thing you wantit. Take your choosing how you like yuowl get what you dont want. (p. 150)

If I wer a figger in a show what hand wer moving me then? I cudnt be bothert to think on that right then. Theres all ways some thingwl be moving you if it aint 1 thing its a nother you cant help that (p. 170)

A transcendent and richly rewarding entry in the SF Masterworks series, Riddley Walker is an essential read.

I thot: Whyd we come here? Id knowit some kynd of thing like this myt happen. Whynt we stay hoalt up? Whynt we go somers far a way? Becaws you cant stay hoalt up. Becaws there aint no far a way. Becaws where you happen is where you happen[...] Stil I wunt have no other track (p. 206, 215)

Tweet

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) SFMW 70

Robert Spofforth, 'mankind's most beautiful toy,' (p. 278) is 'the last of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes' (p. 4).
Spofforth's personality has been derived from 'a brilliant and melancholic engineer named Paisley['s] […] personality, his imagination, and his learning had all been recorded on tapes when he was forty-three, and afterwards the man was forgotten' (p. 4)

However, Spofforth 'did not really want to live. He had been cheated – horribly cheated – of a real, human life, something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him' (p. 10)

It is difficult to review the work without disclosing its plot, namely [select text to read] Spofforth's program of social engineering to make man extinct as a species and thereby allow his machine protocols to finally let him destroy himself. Spofforth's ambitions are threatened when Mary Lou and Bentley stop taking the sedatives and drugs, which (although unknown to them at the time) also contain contraceptives, and therefore place his agenda in danger through their propagation.

Spofforth's solution is to separate the pair by jailing Bentley for the illegal act of cohabitation, and to experiment with his pseudo-humanity in the interim by taking Mary Lou away with him and installing her in his apartment as a surrogate wife, despite his sexlessness.

Paul Bentley is what passes for a university professor in the twenty-fifth century that Tevis envisages. Education has become a much-degraded and perfunctory affair in the novel as humanity has lost the ability to read. Bentley is extraordinary in that having discovered some books, rare but nevertheless unvalued artifacts, he has taught himself to read with them. Bentley now wishes to teach others to do the same, and presents himself to Spofforth, Dean of Faculties at New York University (but formerly Director of Population Control) at the beginning of the novel. However, Spofforth sets Bentley about the task of recording the dialogue in archival silent film instead.

Mary Lou Borne is an escapee from a public dormitory for children who grew up in the desert and has been on the margins of the society the novel depicts ever since.

A section towards the middle of the work narrated by Mary Lou offers some insight into her radicalisation by an old man called Simon whom she encountered and lived with for a time in the desert. Simon inculcates in her the idea, if not a full understanding of, the impact that 'the death of intellectual curiosity' has had upon humanity, and the fact that 'everybody's head is a cheap movie show' (p. 98). Spofforth in his turn also has some bitter things to say along the same lines later in the novel: 'The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life' (p. 174).

Mary Lou offers some jarring reflections on her relationships with Bentley and Spofforth, which invite the reader to consider her inner life as a character more intently than the narrative to this point has suggested that they may need to:

'Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown – even at the bits I thought were funny.

Bob was hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humour, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but eventually I became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-bedroom apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.' (pp. 98-99)

I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it, I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot. What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.' (p. 99)

Education's aim in the novel is to shame, pacify and alienate, expressed through parroted maxims such as “when in doubt, forget it.”' (p. 22); 'quick sex is best' (p. 10), and 'alone is best.' (p. 28)

This deadening of affect and interpersonal relations is completed by the tranquilisers (sopors), joints and drugged food that are routinely ingested by the citizenry. Self-immolations by combustion are described frequently within the novel, their agents depicted as being unable to either iterate or comprehend the stunted nature of their lives, but seemingly driven by deeper urges to end their existences rather than endure the mockery of being that Spofforth's plan has imposed upon them.

A good deal of the book is narrated by Bentley in the first person in the form of a journal that Spofforth instructs him to keep during his studies. Bentey's auto-didactic program brings him to self-consciousness, and prompts him to question every aspect of the rigid social structures his world is governed by: 'I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given:”To learn by heart,” and how strange that was – heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” somehow seems right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.' (p. 35). Readers also share, and are thereby invited to reflect upon the implications of, several epiphanic moments in Bentley's self-education, including his coming to understand the purpose and function of dictionaries (pp. 69-72).

During his incessant search for printed matter, Bentley encounters a text published at that point in the novel's prehistory where reading died, which is interesting to encounter in our own historic moment as digital books supersede their printed antecedents:

'I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that cause books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape, it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools in the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret...” and so on.' (p. 114)

Bentley also encounters a book by Alfred Fain called The Last Autobiography wherein the author opines 'A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I've asked him why they don't stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn't know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn't know how to read himself, but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he loved her dearly.' (pp. 117-18).

The work also envisages the impact of a future peak oil crisis within the novel's fictional world from Tevis's 1980s viewpoint 'before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age […] when gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home.' (p. 173)

Subsequent to his escape from prison, Bentley takes shelter briefly in a defective factory, a 'mindless parody of productivity' (p. 168) which stands as a metaphor for the banal nature of the endless consumption of manufactured needs in a world of finite resources: 'The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew.' (p. 167)

Mockingbird begins and ends in Manhattan. This paradigmatic urban environment, read backwards from the twenty-fifth century Tevis imagines to the historical present of the work's composition around 1980, holds a totemic fascination for the author as an archetype of everything that has gone awry with human endeavour: Manhattan, where 'white men had focused their fretful intensity of power and money and yearning, pushing up buildings in hubris, in mad cockiness, filling streets with taxis and anxious people, and, finally, dying into drugs and inwardness.' (p. 277) The SF Masterworks edition's cover echoes this sentiment, with the Empire State Building which features in the work situated between the shattered remnants of two other skyscrapers, the outlines of which it is impossible not to view post-911 as representing the former World Trade Center.

Tevis lambasts organised religion through its representation as an historical curio as described by Bentley:

'I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real […] As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With The Wind, nor a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was this thing called a 'great man'. I am not certain I like the idea of 'great men'; it makes me uncomfortable. 'Great men' often have had very bloody plans for mankind.' (pp. 140, 141-42).

The prostration of the intellect before the tyranny of monotheism is considered at greater length during Bentley's residence within the neo-fundamentalist community of Baleen he encounters towards the end of the novel, but which I will not address at length here.

Mockingbird plays with layers of symbolism in a deft and satisfying manner, for example the tableau that Mary Lou forms in the artificial python's cage at the zoo: 'she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips...”Why did you pick it?” I said.”I don't know,” she said. “”It seemed to be the thing to do.”' (pp. 41, 47) The scene amusingly parodies the Biblical Eve and the serpent retrospectively in the context of the narrative arc that follows and the fate the awaits Bentley prior to the text's resolution.

Tevis seems to disclose his own fondness for Kentucky's most famous export in ensuring that his protagonist is well-provided with what you would have thought to have been a near-impossible commodity, to acquire namely bourbon: 'I have a half bottle of whiskey – J.T.S. Brown Bourbon – and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table.' (p. 250)

Despite the consolations of mellowed alcohol, the melancholy air that pervades the work is encapsulated in the titular quote that reoccurs frequently in Bentley's mind after his initial exposure to it during his film studies left an enduring impression:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' spoken by an old man to a young girl.' (p. 20)

The quote's lilting yet downbeat cast seems to colour much of Bentley's world-view, and he reaches for it frequently when unable to express himself in any other manner. 'It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing.' (p. 230).

The novel proposes that whilst a machine intelligence coming to consciousness may regret the fact of its own existence, humanity, although prey to the same exigencies of fate, appears better equipped to deal with its vagaries. The following exchange between Spofforth and Bentley occurs close to the end of the work, where the former's life is close to its cessation, and the latters is about to bloom fully:

'I am sick of life. I never wanted it.'
I stared at him. 'That's the name of the game. I never asked to be born either.' (p. 237)

That is not to say that Tevis, through the mouth of his protagonist, does not rue the fact that our species-being is not perhaps a little better equipped to deal with the tests to our patience that human interactions can present. In conversation with a sentient bus that he adapts for his own use, Bentley asks:

'Why are you so... so pleasant?' I said.
'We all are,' the bus said. 'All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.'
'That's better programming than people get,' I thought, with some vehemence.
'Yes,' the bus said. 'Yes it is.' (p. 252)

It becomes evident during the course of the work that Bentley is the titular mockingbird, his solitary intelligence the song, and the edge of the woods the precipitous twilight of humanity:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' the bus said.'
It was startling to hear that. 'You took those words from my mind?' I said.
'Yes. They are often in your mind.'
'What do they mean?'
'I don't know,' the bus said. 'But they make you feel something strongly.'
'Something sad?'
'Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel' (p. 258).

Mockingbird is beautifully structured, perfectly paced, artfully composed, and compelling in its subject matter. It is a most satisfying entry to the SF Masterworks series, and is to be commended to new readers without reservation.

Tweet

Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980) SFMW 27

Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winning novel imagines what scientists of the late 1990s would do if they wished to send a message back in time to the early 1960s to warn their historic peers of the catastrophic effect that long-chain molecule pesticides have had upon the environment, and to thereby change the course of history.

Expressed in so reductive a manner, the text sounds preposterous and juvenile, but is in fact both nuanced, sophisticated and at time hugely enjoyable if the reader is prepared to suspend judgement on the absolute truth-value of the physics it contains. Benford's novel has often been praised for its hard science and plausible explanations of how tachyons could theoretically travel faster than light and, if aimed at the correct coordinates at the right time could theoretically send messages backwards or forwards in time.

Benford's work contains a number of dramatic set pieces: the discovery of the note in the bank vault proving that messages have been received; Greg Markham's fevered dream state as he perishes in an air crash in the original timeline whilst resolving crucial equations; the fact that Kennedy survives the assassination attempt which killed him in our reality as a consequence of a student interrupting Oswald whilst fetching a journal featuring an article by Gordon Bernstein discussing his discovery of the 'spontaneous resonance effects' - Markham's transmissions from the future - and the inevitable meeting of the two protagonists in an alternate future that they have both been instrumental in constructing.

The latter conceit is that which precipitates the final sequence of occurrences depicted in the gripping last 30 pages of the novel and elevates the work above the status of being merely 'interesting but worthy'. It is as clever a re-imagining of such a hackneyed historic event as a reader is ever likely to encounter.

The novel does have its weaknesses. Beyond Bernstein in the 1960s and Markham in the 1990s, Benford and his sister-in-law Hilary Foister Benford, whom the author credits as having 'contributed significantly to the manuscript' in a special acknowledgment, have a tendency to indulge themselves in some broad but generally unconvincing characterisations in the persons of their extensive ensemble cast. The bit-part characters' contributions to the plot are slight and their antics can give the work something of a 'soap opera' feel at times. The novel could easily have lost at least a quarter of its 400 pages without impacting on its thematic development in any way. For example, whilst it's nice to meet Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (p. 173), and read a peon of praise in honour of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (p. 213) you have to wonder what they are doing in the book.

Overall, Timescape nevertheless ranks as one of the most enjoyable entries in the SF Masterworks series, and despite the Benfords' tendency towards the linguistically gaudy (some of the laboured puns the characters are forced to opine can grate, for example) the work contains some thought-provoking, powerfully conveyed ideas:

'Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures that men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you' (p. 176).

'He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see that time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this river-run of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light' (p. 410).

'No matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time' (p. 412).

Tweet

John Sladek, The Complete Roderick (1980, 1983) SFMW #45

"Of all kinds of satire, there is none so entertaining and universally improving, as that which is introduced, as it were, occasionally in the course of an interesting story, which brings every incident home to life; and, by representing familiar scenes in an uncommon and amusing point of view, invests them with all the graces of novelty, while nature is appealed to in every particular."

So begins the Preface to Tobias Smollett's debut novel, Roderick Random (1748). Titular similarities aside, John Sladek's Roderick, or the Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random, or Further Education of a Young Machine (1983), collected in this entry in the SF Masterworks series as The Complete Roderick, bear many similarities to the eighteenth century novel's form. The structure of the work is episodic, with a panoply of robustly picaresque characters populating its 609 pages and driving the colourful life of its 'Candide-like protagonist' (Clute and Nichols, ESF, p. 1114) forward.

There are no shortage of playful homages to the eighteenth century novel's experimental forms, and some of the typographical jouissance the reader encounters in The Complete Roderick serves to confirm at least one oft-cited similarity between Sladek and Kurt Vonnegut. We get to read the University of Minnetonka Special Emergency Finance Committee Voting Record Part 189077 (p. 73), see what the decision tree that Roderick sketches in school looks like (p. 161), can study the solution that the robot mails to to the publishers of the murder mystery paperback Die Die Your Lordship (p. 339), review Roderick's mapping of the story of Abraham and Isaac as a flowchart (pp. 248-50), puzzle over Ma's (who turns out to be Pa, p. 312) mirror writing (p. 294), and consider the truth tables with which he simulates (with the help of a partner) the mental processes corresponding to sexual experience as the puzzling mind-body barrier that the sexual act in part is (p. 378).

The fact that the titles in their current form were intended to be concluded by a third volume that never appeared gives some intimation that the works as presented may have been considered to be less than wholly successful by their author. Sladek seems to take as much delight in satirizing the dull, drugged, repetitious nature of the exhaustive comparisons of the effects of prescription drugs and tendency to list things endlessly that characters indulge in as he does in the endeavours of his protagonist to find his way through his world, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why the final entry to the trilogy was never forthcoming. Sladek may simply have lost interest in his robotic creation, and those readers that manage to finish the work in this two-volume form might be able to see why.

The reader comes to feel that the work is less about the coming-to-consciousness of a robot than it is about the reader's coming-to-consciousness of the dehumanizing, robotic nature of contemporary life. The novels are set in a present that seems adjacent to our own, but slightly more desensitized: a little more hopped up, even more suffused with corrosive advertising, and prone to iterating litany-like lists as passive viewers rather than active interpreters: "we've traded away our reality. We have no past, no future, no minds, no souls" (p. 445).

Even the under-achieving, unambitious, unquestioning nature of the sphere of human activity that Roderick is exposed to seems disappointing to him compared to the tawdry banalities of the television programmes that have served to shape his perceptions as an under-stimulated and largely ignored machine consciousness. Stolen by a family of hucksters, partially disabled and sold into service as Rodini Robot ('palmist, tarot reader, seer, scryer, mystic, clairvoyant', p. 138), Roderick finds that:

Television had never prepared him for [his customers'] stories of loneliness, horror, guilt, confusion, sickness, dread. Almost none of his visitors came close to televised truth: here were no pop stars, kindly country doctors, top fashion designers, executives with drink problems, zany flight attendants, sneering crooks, tough but fair cops, devoted night-nurses, cynical reporters, hell-for-leather marines, dedicated scientists, big-hearted B-girls, ageing actors, cute orphans, smart lawyers - none of the ordinary decent network folks he'd come to know and almost like (p. 140)

The novels have a propensity towards self-referentiality that find their fullest expression in the relationship that Roderick develops with Father Warren of the church school that he attends who, like most of the other characters in the work, seems incapable (in keeping with the novel's thematic interest in comprehension per se) of recognizing the robot for what he is, or for getting his name right: "I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Tried that yet? Here, take it along" (p. 224). The naive but logical and incisive questions that Roderick asks of Father Warren unbalance the latter's sanity to the point where he begins to pick stigmata in his hands, and Sladek introduces some interesting perspectives on programming, religiosity, and autonomy. Religion is given a thorough working over by Sladek through the Roderick titles, perhaps to most amusing effect in the description of the costume that Ma, the robot's surrogate mother, creates for his nativity play to the horror of the audience (p. 243).

Whilst it is never spelled out quite so synoptically, the books have a proclivity for obsessing over what we might call the 'autonomy of automata', most notably in a sequence on pp. 327-28 that iterates historical studies of the 'revenge of the common man upon the common object' when automatons have suffered at the hands of their creators or been otherwise abused. Sladek's parallel representation of the impulse-oriented nature of the behaviour of the characters he has created invites the reader to extrapolate from these passages in order to consider the lack of will that the human-as-consumer manifests in failing to resist the tyranny of the object over the subject - the possession's possession of the possessor: "we must smash the machines inside us, smash the idea of the machine" (p. 489). "If you think machines are trouble, just look at the dumb bastards running them" (p. 491). "Everyone's[...] so obsessed with our machine world they think we have to be machines to fit into it"" (p. 555).

A cleverly allusive work that makes playful reference to everything from the Andrex puppy adverts (p. 393) to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (p. 571), The Complete Roderick is a likeable but neither especially engaging nor particularly profound entry to the SF Masterworks series which may be recommended if not for its plot, style or ideas then for its not taking itself too seriously: 'the world was beginning to resemble something in a satirical science-fiction novel of no great quality' (p. 401); 'left, right and centre, it's all a great big nothing!!!' (p. 399).

Tweet