Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Boxes That Ate Altoona, 27 Aug 2009
Poor old John Sladek hardly gets a look in these days, despite being a quietly uproarious trigger for so much that's come since. Douglas Adams certainly read him("Dimension of Miracles" is nakedly a huge influence on "The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy"). Here, he unleashes the story of a failing doll manufacturer who produces a self-replicating machine entity that threatens to eat all the metal in the world in order to fuel its rampage.
The ideas are good, the jokes are mostly funny and the writing speaks out of the side of its mouth in that "seen it all" sixties fashion that attempts to catch the note of Kurt Vonnegut and just falls short. Where the book loses a star is in its lack of interest in making us feel that any of its characters are alive in any way; Sladek is only interested in them insofar as he can pin funny-clever names on them and use them to carry the plot to its next set-piece.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
A Satirical and Hysterical Attack on American Society, 28 Nov 2003
Sladek has a particular writing style of manic and complex multi-character narrative, perhaps perfected in his magnum opus 'Roderick'. Here, Sladek employs his sharp and incisive talent for satire and characterisation to expose the hypocrisies of US society.
In an effort to save their ailing doll-manufacturing business, the Wompler family apply to the government for a research grant, and very shortly find their research headed by the dysfunctional trio of Professor Toto Smilax and Kurt and Karl, the Frankenstein brothers. The aim of Project 32 is to create self-reproducing mechanisms which may or not ultimately have military applications.
Prototypes in the form of small mobile grey boxes are produced, and on being fed metal, proceed to construct others, each time improving on the original design.
Inevitably, some of the boxes escape and 'The Reproductive System' as Smilax terms it, begins to spread across America.
Sladek is fond of using a large cast of characters, and his novels resemble an intricate and complex farce, in that inevitably seemingly unrelated characters turn out to have some connection with each other, such as Mary, whose relationships with men seem to connect several of the characters leading to bizarre but oddly logical consequences.
Sladek's plotting is faultless, and in a brilliant scene - in which various people (for various reasons) are wandering around Marrakesch in astronaut suits - both the Russian and American agents end up in the rocket while the French astronaut is left on the ground. As the hijack of the rocket threatens to cause a major international incident, both agents are ordered to kill themselves in order that the blame for the hijack can be laid at the door of the country of the survivor. Thus, the agents are put in the surreal position of having to keep each other alive.
If this novel has a fault it is that is a frantic roller-coaster ride and one gets occasionally lost by the welter of bizarre yet fully rounded characterisations.
The Reproductive System itself, obviously, is merely a device around which Sladek builds his savage vision of the US. It is a Heath-Robinson fantasy and Sladek makes no attempt to explain its physical workings or structure, but rather merely presents us with the surreal results of its development.
Deceptively frothy and lightweight, it's a vicious and very amusing portrait of American society of the 1960s, and a refreshing antidote to some of the more paranoiac novels of the previous decade.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books I ever read, 17 Jan 2002
By A Customer
I just hate to see favourite things of mine get bad reviews.When I read this, I thought it was one of the best and funniest books I'd ever read. Now, I was only 16, and it was a long time ago, but I don't think my tastes have changed so much. The book does indeed heavily use unlikely coincidences as a comic device, and I think it does so very successfully. It's certainly not 'serious' science fiction, but that makes it all the more unique and precious.
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