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Tik-tok
  
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Tik-tok (Hardcover)

by John Sladek (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (1 Oct 1983)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575033363
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575033368
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 267,296 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

All John Sladek's SF novels showed his dark humour and fascination with robots. The farce is funniest and blackest in Tik-Tok (1983), a British SF Association Award-winner.

Robot narrator Tik-Tok may have winsome ways and a cute name from Oz, but inside he's bad, bad, bad. It's not just that his "asimov circuits"--which stop robots hurting people--are defective. He enjoys killing, starting with a dear little blind girl in chapter one and reaching a body count well into four figures. With such achievements behind him, how could Tik-Tok not be offered the US Vice-Presidency?

Sladek's nightmarishly satirical future America is full of daft technology like a nuclear-powered land aircraft carrier the size of Delaware, needing 135 million tyres. Starting life on a Southern plantation where they lynch robots instead of blacks, Tik-Tok rapidly changes owners: a fast-food entrepreneur whose Szechuan duck is really armadillo, a habitual robot-smasher, a fake evangelist (Rev. Flint Orifice) who repeatedly "saves" Tik-Tok at public performances, and many more. Successful careers as robot artist and crimelord are mere steps toward the top.

It seems Tik-Tok can talk his way out of anything, even the bad publicity when his Clockman Medical Centre kicks out non-paying patients: "An interrupted appendectomy held himself together and crawled down the steps". His Wages for Robots campaign, improvised mostly for the fun of guilt-tripping human audiences, is a springboard into US politics. Then he commits one murder too many... Wonderfully, horribly inventive and funny. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

Something has gone very seriously wrong with Tik-Tok's 'asimov circuits'. They should keep him on the straight and narrow, following Asimov's First Law of Robotics: 'A robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm,' But they don't. While maintaining the outward appearance of a mild-mannered robot, albeit one with artistic tendencies and sympathy for the robot rights movement, Tik-Tok's real agenda is murderously different, The chronicle of the rise of one completely amoral robot and his dealings with an assortment of deranged and maniacal humans is the showcase for the satirical genius of John Sladek --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Good fun, but no masterpiece, 29 Jun 2002
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Tik-Tok (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
I had heard this book was an outrageously funny masterpiece of black humor, so finally, after many years I tracked it down at the library. While I discovered is a brief satire with a one joke premise that's diverting, but ages quickly. Told in 26 chapters-each of whose first word follows the sequence of the alphabet (Chapter 1, "As"; Chapter 2 "Broaching"; Chapter 3. "Culpritwise" and so on, at least until the final letters, where Sladek's gusto for this very little joke seems have run dry)-the story tells of a sociopathic robot in future America.

Tik-Tok has "asimov circuits" which are supposed to keep him from harming humans, but somehow these aren't working, or as he suggests at one point, never really existed in the first place, but are part of some massive groupthink. The result is that Tik-Tok kills sadistically over the course of the book, all while building himself a corporate empire and manipulating social and political opinion so that robots are allowed to own property and vote. This is all fairly predictable from the beginning, but what I did find unexpectedly interesting are the parallels with Bret Easton Ellis' highly controversial novel American Psycho, which was written eight years later. In both, an outwardly impeccable character engages in nasty sadism, even tells other people what's he's done, only to have them think it's a joke.

Mixed in with Tik-Tok's ascension are his reminisces of past owners, which are mostly played to comic effect, with a running commentary equating robots with slaves. Traditional caretakers of the moral status quo such as priests, judges, military, and aristocracy are repeatedly revealed to be charlatans, sadists, and just plain crazy. On the other end of the spectrum, the civil rights do-gooders of the "Wages For Robots" movement come under equal unsubtle satirical attack, as does the celebrity media industry. Capitalism itself, along with the military-industrial complex is further fodder for Sladek's acid pen. Ultimately, however, none of the satire is as subtle as I would have liked, and much of the book reads like an author riffing on familiar subjects. It's a nice addition to robot literature, but hardly the masterpiece it's made out to be.

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Fun for all the family, 22 July 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Tik-Tok (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
Tik-Tok was almost everything I hoped it would be. Getting the problem spots out of the way first the book does seem a little disjointed, the plot jumps from scenario to scenario at tremendous speed. However I still haven't enjoyed any work as much as this for quite a while. Though not laugh outloud funny I was still constantly amused by what our favourite homicidal robot involves himself in. Reading this book is a must for anyone who doesn't take their fiction too seriously, I'd recommend it just for the body count. The Gollancz range seems to be throwing up countless gems that as a youngster myself I never probably would have discovered, if you liked Sladek's work I'd push you towards 'Next of Kin' by E.F.Russell, another highly amusing read.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Entertainingly mean spirited, 13 July 2006
By deadmanjones (Stockport, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Tik-Tok (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
Entertainingly mean spirited and undeniably dark edged, but much feels like padding in this satire on human nature that is basically the anti-Millennium Man. Sladek forces 26 chapters by starting each with each letter of the alphabet in turn, a witty conceit in place of a convincing structure.
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