2007 books

[peteryoung]

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.

Comments

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I agree with your comments but it made a big impression on me when I read it back in the '70s (much of the '60s happened in the '70s). There was a wonderful flowering of absurdist writing around that time, probably all started by Sheckley back in the '50s, and including other writers such as Dick, Goulart, and Robert Anton Wilson. I think of it as the literary equivalent of the San Francisco psychedelic sound of the '60s and '70s, which was also very loose. My personal favorite is Goulart's After Things Fell Apart, maybe because a lot of it is set near where I grew up, and it all seemed to be a lot more plausible than it probably was intended to be.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Keep the Giraffe Burning and the Roderick books made a big impression on me in the early ’80s (and later I discovered the excellent Alien Accounts). And yeah, Sladek was a good match for Wilson and Sheckley. The four Sladek books in print here were only re-issued by Gollancz after he died, and I'm probably going to read Tik-Tok sometime soon (and I think I have The New Apocrypha somewhere).

I've only read one Ron Goulart, The Panchronicon Plot... like The Reproductive System it felt like a book where 'you had to be there'. Am I right in reckoning every book Goulart wrote about is probably a distant future echo of ’60s California?

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

A lot of them are, but I haven't read all of Goulart's writing -- I think he has written some science fiction under the name "William Shatner" and he's also written comics and crime novels.

This reminds me that I need to read the Sladek collection that Langford edited.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Yes, I really should get stuck into that one too (rather belatedly, since I bought it at the book launch at a con a few years ago).