Roderick

Roderick is a very good book with plenty interesting things to say. It’s much more a novel of ideas than a compelling story, and I can see why it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I liked it quite a bit.

Our protagonist is Roderick, the first true AI robot, who is developed in a

Show More

fraudulently funded university program, and then abandoned to a series of strangers. He begins life as something that thinks like a child and looks like a toy, but gradually learns and matures through each of his experiences, and is eventually given a roughly humaniform body.

I hadn’t read much Sladek before, and certainly I had no idea that he was so funny. There are moments in this book that verge on pure slapstick (as in the almost perfect third chapter) but more often the humor is an unrelenting satire that that takes aim at humanity’s shortcomings in setting after setting: from academia to public and parochial schools to politics to business to art to government to law enforcement to science fiction classics to you name it. This gives the book an obvious echo of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Indeed there are times when the non-stop grumbling about humanity threatens to derail whatever forward momentum the storyline can offer.

Despite the humor, there is pervasive underlying sadness about the book. Roderick is an innocent who never gets what he needs, but is instead constantly falling victim to the failings of his human companions.

On some level, there is not effort to make the book realistic. In Sladek’s world, people insist on seeing Roderick as a person, visual evidence to the contrary. Indeed this is a world where people always see what they want to see. When Roderick paints his face black as a symbol of mourning for his deceased Pa; he is suddenly subject to appalling racism.

Roderick does lose momentum, and it meanders off into a few subplots that detract more than they add to the book. With some aggressive editing this book might have been one of the great masterpieces of science fiction.

Show Less