Sun 20 Sep 2026
JOHN T. SLADEK – Mechasm. Ace SF Special 71435, paperback, July 1969. Cover art: Leo Dillon & Diane Dillon. Pocket, paperback, July 1980. Published originally in the UK as The Reproductive System (Gollancz, hardcover, May 1968).
A satirical review of Life in the US in the guise of a standard SF story, and the humor is much too obvious to be mistaken about it. This, plus an uncanny use of coincidence, as characters and their relatives appear and reappear continually, helps to keep enjoyment from overflowing.
The story; A doll factory in Utah, in a last ditch effort to keep from gong bankrupt, files for a government grant for research into the development of a self-reproducing robot. They pick the right man as the leader of the project in Dr. Smilax, for he has his own purposes in finding success: world control and Weltscherz. He has this think about pain. Can Potter, fresh from MIT (Miami Institute of Technocracy), finds that he is the only one who can stop the rapidly growing robot population. He finds love, too.
Lots of paranoia, CIA agents, mentally defective military people, hippies protesting the end of the world, astronauts, all combine to form o one happy mess,
NOTE: Check into the Professor’s betting system, page 82.
Rating: ****½
September 21st, 2026 at 5:11 am
Great stuff! Sladek was a deliciously subversive writer who excelled in satire, detective fiction (his Thackeray Pfin stories deserve to be read by every fan), and tweaking the noses of cult believers (he famously discovered the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, and also “proved” that Ben Jonson — and not Francis Bacon — wrote Shakespeare’s plays). IMHO, Sladek was one of the most interesting writers of the last half of the twentieth century.