John Sladek

John Sladek (1937-2000) was an American science-fiction writer known for satirical and surreal novels, many written from England, where he settled in the 1960s and became associated with the New Wave movement centered on the magazine New Worlds. His debut, published in the UK as The Reproductive System and in the US as Mechasm, imagined self-replicating machines spiraling out of control, and he returned to satire of robots and artificial minds in Roderick, Roderick at Random, and the BSFA Award-winning Tik-Tok, whose sociopathic robot narrator lacks any restraining "asimov circuits." Sladek also parodied fellow science-fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke in the collection The Steam-Driven Boy, and wrote mysteries as Thackeray Phin. He worked for years as a technical writer, an experience he mined for the satire Bugs, and occasionally published pseudonymously, including two novels co-written with Thomas M. Disch.