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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 Great Britain as The Reproductive System and in the United States as Mechasm, dealt with a project to build machines that build more machines, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In The Muller-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 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.
Selected Works
Science Fiction Novels
Science Fiction Collections
Mystery Novels
Nonfiction
External links
