The narrator of Sladek's blackly satirical novel is the robot, Tik-Tok, whose malfunctioning 'asimov circuits' have turned him into an amoral psychopath. Tik-Tok records his life from his first job as a domestic servant in the Deep South, through the murders and mischief he commits on his way to wealth and power, to his final ambiguous comeuppance. In a gleeful reversal of expectations, Tik-Tok provides the flipside to Sladek's earlier two-part novel about a thinking machine called Roderick. Where Roderick is an innocent abroad, wandering wide-eyed through the dubious wonders of American civilization, Tik-Tok is a malevolent Machiavellian, prepared to manipulate both fellow robots and human beings in his relentless pursuit of his own ends. Far from proving a handicap, his amorality propels him to the top of American society, even into the vice-presidency.

John Sladek was one of the wittiest and most original SF writers of his generation. Born in America but resident for many years in England, where he was linked with the writers of the British New Wave, he displayed his playful and parodic imagination in a number of quirky and offbeat novels. Tik-Tok shows Sladek at his most slyly inventive, appropriating characters and ideas from classic American fantasy and SF and using them for his own purposes. The villainous robot anti-hero shares his name with a faithful mechanical servant in L. Frank Baum's Oz books; the entire plot subverts the famous Three Laws of Robotics used in Asimov's fiction from the 1940s and 1950s and reveals how flawed their relative optimism might prove. In the real world of the future the relationship between man and machine might not be one of benign symbiosis but of bitter competition. Tik-Tok is tough-minded satire written by an author who has often been compared to Kurt Vonnegut in his bleak playfulness and wry perspective on the world.

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