March 2007: 10 best photos

face yourself
Crowne Plaza Hotel, Long Beach, Los Angeles. ( 29 MARCH )

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2007 books

31) John Sladek, The Reproductive System, 1968
John Sladek's comic first novel is an early, rather clunky 'nanotech' story about self-replicating machines let loose across the US. It starts well but then the sub-plots begin to feel increasingly distracting, the set-up gags repetitious and the conclusion a descent into barely contained anarchy and confusion. Sladek makes a few predictable points about the dehumanising effects of technology but it's more the satire that matters, and rather like Terry Pratchett there was a fuzzy exhuberance to Sladek's early stuff that later became sharper: his two Roderick novels certainly deserve their place on the SF Masterworks list. This, on the other hand, doesn't really hold up today, being too firmly embedded in the ’60s.