Search Results for: roderick

Roderik is a robot and he’s on the run in the USA of the very near future. He’s on the run for having been illicitly conceived and manufactured at the University of Minnetonka. He is also a ‘learning machine’ growing up in a complex technological age which threatens to submerge him in a mire of meaningless and mundane values. The older he gets and the more widely he travels, the more unable he is to comprehend the lost innocence of adults. He encounters the plastic lifestyles of middle-managers in rolling suburbia, confronts megalomaniac army officers and a hotch-potch assortment of ad-men, con-men, CIA agents, Mafiosi. Slowly but surely, in his attempt to become “humanized,” Roderik wonders if in fact he should become more machine-like.

Roderick wasn’t exactly happy, but at least he was holding down a job, even if it was only as a bowl-washer at Danton’s Doggie Dinette. He didn’t know they were out to get him. He didn’t know that in the whole wide world of lunatic game-shows, maniacal religious cults, tentacular business corporations, murderous governments, crazy consumerism and pill-popping people, there was no place for one mild-mannered robot.

Phenomenally inventive, bitingly satirical, a masterpiece of modern comic writing, Roderick at Random is the second dazzling novel by John Sladek to feature the more-and-less-than-human robot.