John Sladek SF Gateway Omnibus

An SF Gateway Omnibus featuring three classic works from John Sladek.

From the vaults of The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to the razor-sharp wit of John Sladek.

An important voice in the New Wave movement, Sladek had stories published in Harlan Ellison's seminal anthology, Dangerous Visions, as well as in Michael Moorcock's ground-breaking NEW WORLDS magazine. Perhaps best known for the ambitious robot tales Roderick and Roderick At Random, he is now recognised as one of SF's most brilliant satirists. This omnibus collects novels The Reproductive System, The Muller Fokker Effect and BSFA AWARD-winning Tik-Tok.

The Reproductive System : Wompler's Walking Babies aren't selling like they used to, so the company develops Project 32, producing self-replicating mechanisms designed to repair inter-cellular breakdowns. But then the metal boxes begin crawling about the laboratory, feeding voraciously on metal and multiplying. . .

The Muller- Fokker Effect : Bob Shairp - a writer and dreamer - has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp's physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be reversed?

Tik Tok : Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's 'asimov circuits'. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's First Law of Robotics: 'a robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.' But they don't. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok's real agenda is murderously different. He seems intent on injuring - preferably fatally - as many people as possible. Almost inevitably, a successful career in crime and general mayhem leads to a move into politics and Tik-Tok becomes the first robot candidate for Vice President of the United States.

About the Author

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.