SLADEK, John T(homas)

(1937-)

   US writer who spent two decades in the UK from 1966, becoming involved in the UK NEW-WAVE movement centred on Michael MOORCOCK's NEW WORLDS, and co-editing with Pamela ZOLINE Ronald Reagan: The Magazine ofPoetry (2 issues 1968), in which work by both editors, J.G. BALLARD, Thomas M. DISCH and others appeared. In the mid-1980s he returned to Minneapolis, a town which had long supplied local colour to many of his more severely satirical stories, whose protagonists ricochet through their preordained and absurd lives within the vast, hyperbolic flatlands of middle America. This mise en scene, when illuminated by his adept control of the language and pretensions of the modern bureaucratic state, provides a matrix for his best work, and helps make plausible the frequent comparisons that have been drawn between him and Kurt VONNEGUT Jr; but Vonnegut has an easier emotional flow than JTS, while JTS lacks Vonnegut'srhetoric and avoids his excessive simplicity of effect.He began writing sf with "The Happy Breed", published in Harlan ELLISON's DANGEROUS VISIONS (anth 1967), though his first published story was "The Poets of Millgrove,Iowa" for NW in 1966; his first 2 novels - The House that Fear Built (1966 US) with Disch and The Castle and the Key (1967 US) - were GOTHICS, both as by Cassandra Knye. His first sf novel, The Reproductive System (1968; vt MECHASM 1969 US), introduced into his typical small-town-US setting a brilliant maelstrom of sf activity: a self-reproducing technological device goes out of control in passages of allegorical broadness, but everything turns out all right in the end, though not through positive efforts of the inept cast, and a dreamlike UTOPIA looms on the horizon; governing the conniptions of the tale is an obsessive discourse upon and dramatization of the metamorphic relationships between human and ROBOT, a relationship which lies at the centre of all his subsequent solo novels and much of his short fiction. His next book, however, Black Alice (1968 US) with Disch, both as Thom Demijohn, was a mystery novel, not sf. InJTS's next sf book, The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970), a man's character is transferred onto COMPUTER tape, and the dissemination of several copies of this "personality" instigates a series of absurd events (FABULATION), some of them extremely comic in effect, some horrifying, all mounting to a picture of a USA disintegrated morally and physically by its own surrender to TECHNOLOGY, the profit motive and the ethical falseness that leads to dehumanization. In its questioning of the nature of narrative events and of fiction itself, the book is a significant example of modern US self-analysis at its highly impressive best. In 1970 the book gained little response, and for a decade JTS wrote no more sf novels.Through his career, JTS has written numerous stories whose strenuous formal ingenuity, and whose surreal combining of a deadpan ribaldry and pathos, have made them underground classics of the genre. The most notable of them all, because of its length and impassioned veracity of tone, may be "Masterson and the Clerks" (1967), in which the immolation of its protagonists in the process of a US business is first hilariously then movingly presented; true to the oddly uncommercial course of his career, JTS collected this tale only much later, in Alien Accounts (coll 1982). Previous collections - The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (coll 1973), which containsseveral superb parodies of well known sf writers (SATIRE), and Keep the Giraffe Burning (coll dated 1977 but 1978), selections from both volsbeing brought together as The Best of John Sladek (coll 1981 US) - tended to assemble stories which, perhaps more formally brilliant than "Masterson", lack something of its human intensity. Later stories wereassembled in The Lunatics of Terra (coll 1984), in which the comic melancholy of his early work wears a somewhat calmer guise. During the 1970s, when most of his stories became generally available, JTS publishedtwo detective novels, Black Aura (1974) - which contains some borderline-sf elements - and Invisible Green: A thackeray Phin Mystery (1977), as well as a sequence of nonfiction texts of considerableinterest. The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs (1973) - all subsequent texts modified under threat of legalaction from the Church of Scientology - scathingly anatomizes the various cults and PSEUDO-SCIENCES that exist as a kind of fringe around the sf reader's areas of interest, from SCIENTOLOGY to VON DANIKEN. Arachne Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac (1977; vt The Thirteenth Zodiac:The Sign of Arachne 1979) as James Vogh, The Cosmic Factor (1978) as James Vogh and Judgement of Jupiter (1980) as Richard A. Tilms were hoax demonstrations of the kind of fringe theorizing that underpins the cults described in The New Apocrypha.JTS then returned to sf with Roderick, or The Education of a Young Machine (1980) and Roderick at Random, or FurtherEducation of a Young Machine (1983), 2 texts conceived as a single novel. The US version, also entitled RODERICK (1982 US), constituted only about two-thirds of the original RODERICK; the publisher had intended to make a trilogy out of the 2-vol novel, but the project foundered, and only the single savagely truncated vol appeared. The novel represents the autobiography of the eponymous robot and is JTS's most ambitious work to date, conveying with considerable ingenuity and some pathos its protagonist's Candide-like innocence and its author's OULIPO-derived numerological sense of narrative structure. Tik-Tok (1983), a thematic pendant which again took its structure from the arbitrary rule-generating principles of oulipo, follows the career of a robot who, once his "asimov circuits" go on the blink, becomes criminally ambitious. Though robots inevitably appear, Bugs (1989 UK) was JTS's first sf novel to feature a "normal" human protagonist; and in its tracing of the derangingexperiences of a UK immigrant to a strange Midwestern city the tale could be seen as guardedly autobiographical.As the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US sf writers, JTS has always addressed the heart of the genre, but never spoken from it. We need his attention: he deserves ours.

   JC

   Other works: Red Noise (1982 chap US); Flatland (1982 chap US); The Book of Clues (1984), a series of short detective puzzles; Blood and Gingerbread (1990 chap).

   About the author: A John Sladek Checklist (1984 chap) by Chris DRUMM.

   See also: ABSURDIST SF; AUTOMATION; BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION AWARD; HUMOUR; LEISURE; MACHINES; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; PARANOIA.