View source for Roderick/Book Two

This was originally published as Book Two of ''[[Roderick]]'', and is also Book Two of the combined edition ''The Complete Roderick''.

== Summary ==
Allbright has sent Roderick to live with Hank and Indica Dinks, who mostly ignore him and leave him to learn about human behavior from TV. When the Dinks' marriage breaks up, Hank goes berserk; Roderick defends himself and, thinking he has killed Hank, mails himself to the home of Ma and Pa Wood (whose address was provided by Dan Sonnenschein). These kindly eccentrics try to bring him up as their own child and send him to school, where the teachers and administrators assume he is a boy with unusual physical disabilities even though he has no human parts. During his "childhood" Roderick is kidnapped repeatedly, goes on the road with drifters and grifters, and works as a carnival fortune-teller for the shady businessman Mr. Kratt (who later coincidentally hires the former Roderick researcher Ben Franklin and the spy Mr. O'Smith). He graduates from his child-sized "toy tank" body to an adult-sized, mostly humanoid body created by the Woods (who, he learns, were Dan's foster parents). Allbright, briefly cleaned up but not any nicer, reveals that Dan is now in a mental hospital. Back in Minnetonka, the Campus Ripper is unmasked and goes on the lam. Meanwhile, Indica has become the leader of a "Machine Liberation" movement, while Hank has joined an opposing anti-machine group. A coalition of Hank's followers, various disgruntled townspeople, and racists (since Roderick painted his head black in mourning when he thought Pa Wood was dead), storm Kratt's factory and attempt to lynch Roderick; fortunately, they wrongly assume he's dead after his head comes off. The Orinoco Institute continues to look for him without success. Roderick finally hits the road alone, hoping to track down Dan.

== Chapter I ==

=== Indica ===
Indica's name literally means "of India", and is also one of the two main species of cannabis.

=== his glass of bean milk ===
{{wp|Soy milk}} was still a novelty in the US when this was written; it had only been commercially available there for one year.

=== in the shape of a pyramid—because of the rays ===
The belief in paranormal {{wp|pyramid power}} became popular in the US in the 1970s.

=== Vinnie's Rock Bottom, for rock-bottom prices ===
Pretty much everything in Roderick's internal narration in this chapter is a pastiche of what he's been watching on TV: ads for discount electronics, hygiene products, breakfast cereal; police dramas, Westerns, historical dramas, war movies; etc. US readers will probably recognize all of these—TV hasn't changed that much in some ways since 1980.

=== the true person, true to his own environment, fixes everything himself ===
Hank's philosophy may have been inspired by {{wp|Stewart Brand}}, a former Buckminster Fuller disciple best known for the ''Whole Earth Catalog'', whose influence on 1970s counterculture is hard to overstate. Brand espoused an extreme (though maybe not as extreme as Hank) version of do-it-yourselfism, regarding decentralized technologies maintained by individualist jacks-of-all-trades as the wave of the future.

=== ''bricoleurs'' and Zen motor cycles ===
A ''bricoleur'' is someone who tinkers or improvises with found materials. ''{{wp|Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance}}'' was a 1974 memoir by Robert Pirsig, describing a motorcycle road trip Pirsig took after a nervous breakdown; in one of his many philosophical digressions, Pirsig talks about the spiritual value of having an old motorcycle that he can repair himself, unlike his friend who has to hire mechanics.

=== nine months with the Braxton Hicks Dancers ===
{{wp|Braxton Hicks contractions}}, or "false labor", are uterine contractions that are common during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter II ==

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter III ==

=== Muse-suck ===
Pa's disparaging nickname for [[wikipedia:Muzak (brand)|Muzak]]. Muzak per se would normally only be played on internal company sound systems, factory floors, elevators, etc. rather than broadcast over the radio, but maybe Pa (who doesn't realize he no longer works at the factory) has tuned into a similar-sounding {{wp|easy listening}} station.

=== the giant toilet bowl ===
As Ma explains in Chapter IV, this was really "a bird-bath for [[wikipedia:rook (bird)|rooks]]".

=== Jil, Meri, Su ===
This long list of names is parodying a practice that had become popular in the US in the 1970s: using a standard English name but changing the spelling slightly. The one exception is "John"—but that could be someone's attempt to misspell "Jon", since the latter is also a standard name.

=== Ed ("Kookie") Byrnes ===
The actor {{wp|Edd Byrnes}}, who played "Kookie"— a stereotypical young [[wikipedia:Greaser (subculture)|greaser]] obsessed with combing his hair— on the series ''77 Sunset Strip''.

=== Joe McCarthy ... Charlie McCarthy ===
Senator {{wp|Joseph McCarthy}}, and the puppet character Charlie McCarthy created by {{wp|Edgar Bergen}}. In 1952-53, the former was at the height of his power, while the latter was on his way out (Charlie/Bergen was much more successful as a radio character than on TV).

=== a few lines of Apollinaire ===
Ma is quoting from a translation of the poem "Les Fenêtres" (Windows), from the collection ''{{wp|Calligrammes}}''. Apollinaire's Surrealist fragments are not straightforward to translate, so other English versions of this poem use wildly different wording. Many of the pieces in ''Calligrammes'' are concrete poems, where the visual layout of the words is just as important as the words, but Ma has picked one of the text-only pieces.

While the stereotype of an eccentric elderly counterculture couple has lasted into the 21st century, 1980 was not very long after the original hippie movement. Sladek has created a somewhat different archetype for Ma and Pa Wood: they seem to have absorbed all the earlier countercultures and avant-garde art movements of the first half of the 20th century— {{wp|Dada}}, the [[wikipedia:Beat Generation|Beats]], etc.— while simultaneously being folksy rural Midwesterners like Superman's adoptive parents [[wikipedia:Jonathan and Martha Kent|Ma and Pa Kent]]. Also, as we will see later, contrary to the image of 1960s/70s radicals, they have no concept of sex.

=== buses and data highways ===
A [[wikipedia:bus (computing)|bus]] is a structure for transferring data between several digital components that are usually physically attached, for example {{wp|USB}}.

=== short for Paul and Mary ===
Pa's and Ma's names might be based on two-thirds of the folk singing group {{wp|Peter, Paul and Mary}} (although "Paul's" name was actually Noel Paul).

=== The Queen of Spain was adopted by fairies ===
I'm not sure if this is what Ma is talking about, but there is a Spanish ballad— called "La Infantina" by at least one author<ref>[http://blogs.bl.uk/european/2014/11/are-you-afraid-of-the-fairies.html "Are you afraid of the fairies? You should be"], Olga Kerziouk (2014)</ref>, and listed as "A cazar va el caballero" in the collection ''El Romancero Castellano''<ref>[https://archive.org/details/romancerocastel02timogoog ''El Romancero Castellano''], volume II, ed. G.B. Depping (1844)</ref>— in which the daughter of the King of Castille is taken away by fairies for seven years (not exactly adopted, but imprisoned on a mountain). Ma might be conflating this story with the real Infanta {{wp|Isabella I of Castile}}, who was brought up by other members of the royal family after her father's death.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter IV ==

=== Mayflies ... have children inside them when they're born ===
This isn't true, but Pa may be thinking of {{wp|aphids}}, which can sometimes start reproducing asexually before birth ("telescoping generations"). Pa goes on to say that there's an infinite series of smaller and smaller "children" within, which also isn't true, but was once thought to be how all creatures formed ({{wp|preformationism}}).

=== teleological void ===
{{wp|Teleology}} is the study of the inner purpose of things; as far as Ma is concerned, TV has none.

=== the cigarette girl who loved a bullfighter ===
The title character in ''{{wp|Carmen}}'', who falls in love with a bullfighter, works in a cigarette factory (as opposed to being a [[wikipedia:cigarette girl (person)|cigarette girl]]— a seller of cigarettes). Ma has reimagined her as a girl magically turned into tobacco, and added in {{wp|Walter Raleigh}} and the banjo from "{{wp|Oh! Susanna}}".

=== Windows were better than TV ===
Ma's "few lines of Apollinaire" in the previous chapter were from the poem "Windows".

=== Zadig the engineer ===
''[[wikipedia:Zadig|Zadig, or the Book of Fate]]'' is a Voltaire novel whose title character (not an engineer, but this is a typical reinterpretation by Ma and Pa Wood) uses his wits to solve various people's problems during his travels, and eventually becomes king of Babylonia.

=== a dentist's jawbone ===
{{wp|Samson}} was said to have killed a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. Pa is implying that his neighbor, the dentist, is an ass.

=== Achilles and this tortoise ===
One of {{wp|Zeno's paradoxes}}, proposing that it's logically impossible to catch up with a moving target even if you are moving faster than it, because you have to travel through an infinite number of intermediate locations.

=== I'd throw some kid in ===
Louie is remembering the scene in the 1931 ''[[wikipedia:Frankenstein (1931 film)|Frankenstein]]'' movie where the creature, innocently trying to imitate a little girl who was throwing flowers into a lake, runs out of flowers and throws the girl.

=== like in truth tables ===
A {{wp|truth table}} shows all the possible results of combining a set of true/false variables in some way.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter V ==

=== Find the Lady ===
Also known as {{wp|Three-card Monte}}.

=== everybody has to have a name beginning with ''Z'' ''J'' or ''Ch'' ===
Like all the other details of the "gipsy" family, this isn't related to any real [[wikipedia:Romani people|Roma]] tradition as far as I know.

=== Elmer two six one zero five eight niner seven ... Lolita six eight five zero one niner two three ===
Roderick has turned the license plate 180 degrees, and fortunately all the letters and numbers on it happened to look like other letters and numbers when flipped: "E26105897" -> "L68501923". The usual {{wp|NATO phonetic alphabet}} uses "Echo" and "Lima" for E and L; "Lolita" presumably refers to the [[wikipedia:Lolita|Nabokov novel]], and "Elmer" was an [[wikipedia:William_Grey_Walter#Robots|early experimental robot]] (though it's also the name of a tiny town in Minnesota).

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter VI ==

=== There's no such thing as the Mafia ===
The idea that the [[wikipedia:American Mafia|Mafia]] in America is a myth or an exaggeration has usually been proposed by organized crime suspects or their lawyers, but the sociologist Joseph Albini made something of a career of that idea throughout the 1970s, in writings like ''The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend''.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter VII ==

=== Elizabeth Borden ===
The principal's name refers to the famous (alleged) murderer {{wp|Lizzie Borden}}.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter VIII ==

=== pale, humourless young man with a glassy stare ===
This is Goun, the former Minnetonka University professor who taught "Sociology of Losing" and whose sister was murdered by the Campus Ripper.

=== cut the last two chapters out of ''The Marvellous Land of Oz'' ===
The mysterious censor may have objected to the ending of this, the [[wikipedia:The Marvelous Land of Oz|second Oz book]], for its transgender theme: the boy Tip turns out to be the princess Ozma, transformed by magic.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter IX ==

=== decigeons tree ===
A {{wp|decision tree}} is a simple flowchart, often used in computer science but also sometimes used manually by humans. Roderick's word "decigeons" is an echo of a mistake he once made while thinking about pigeons, [[Roderick/Book One#decigeons|before his "birth"]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter X ==

=== an iron man who falls apart and puts himself together again ===
This would be Ted Hughes's 1968 novel ''[[wikipedia:The Iron Man (novel)|The Iron Man]]'', later filmed as ''{{wp|The Iron Giant}}''.

=== IRON ROBOT MAN ===
Roderick's word game is a {{wp|Caesar cipher}}. If he had continued with the remaining letters of <small>MAN</small>, the last word of the result would have been "UH".

=== the answers sometimes come up in dreams, Kékulé ===
Friedrich August Kekulé claimed to have discovered the circular chemical structure of {{wp|benzene}} in a waking dream.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XI ==

=== the Des Moines Bienniale ===
There is no such exhibition, but in the Midwest-centric world of ''Roderick'', Iowa has its own [[wikipedia:Biennale|famous international modern art show]].

=== Lyle Danton? Is it you? ===
Lyle has only briefly appeared so far, as a student in Minnetonka who [[Roderick/Book One#Ptolemy doesn't mention the Southern hemisphere .... it's not important|asked a question about astrology]], and was described as having "a hideous birthmark". We now learn that he's an artist, and we get some of his unhappy family history (his father used to run the factory where Pa Wood worked; his father hated Lyle, and may have caused his mother's death; Lyle changed his last name to Tate to distance himself from his father, who now works in the restaurant business)... which will not figure into Part 1 at all, but will become more important in [[Roderick/Part 2|Part 2]].

=== I got fired from the tattoo parlor ... something about T. S. Eliot ===
Lyle presumably did the palindrome tattoo in Chapter V.

=== Giuseppe Coppertino ===
{{wp|Joseph of Cupertino}}, a 17th century Franciscan monk whose rumored feats of levitation got him in trouble with the Inquisition. He is the patron saint of aviators, and also, due to his legendary mental simplicity, of "those suffering mental handicaps".<ref>[http://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=72 "St. Joseph of Cupertino"] on ''Catholic Online''</ref>

=== though superficially identical ===
Edd McFee's identical square paintings, said to have different individual meanings due to the different times and places they were painted in, may be a reference to the Borges story "{{wp|Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote}}", in which an avant-garde writer is praised for copying ''Don Quixote'' with no changes at all but, supposedly, a different subtext.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XII ==

=== kumbīniNg speeCh Thayrupee ===
The half-mad Ms. Beek is writing in a mish-mash of {{wp|International Phonetic Alphabet}} and other phonetic writing schemes: "The idea of combining speech therapy with remedial reading is just one more example of the breakdown of the whole godawful system which they keep urging me to join (as though people were glue)".

=== the Goethescope with its ebony prism ===
Goethe wasn't all about darkness, but Pa may be thinking of things like ''{{wp|The Sorrows of Young Werther}}''.

=== framed photo of Rex Reason ===
[[wikipedia:Rex Reason|Movie and TV actor]] best known for ''This Island Earth''. By the time of this novel he had already been retired for nearly 20 years; as far as I can tell, it's never explained why he was special to Ma or Pa.

=== the Bow-wow Symphony ===

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XIII ==

=== History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken ===
A mash-up of two famous quotations: "History is bunk" (attributed to {{wp|Henry Ford}}) and "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (Stephen Dedalus in ''[[wikipedia:Ulysses (novel)|Ulysses]]'').

=== New Ur ===
{{wp|Ur}} was one of the oldest known cities. The religious community that founded New Ur was probably thinking of the "Ur Kasdim" or "Ur of the Chaldees" mentioned in the Bible, which may or may not be the same place.

=== the boy who couldn't shiver ===
Also known as "{{wp|The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was}}".

=== Let's just recall the facts ===
The detective's logic problem here is solved at the end of the book, in exhaustive detail, in "Note on Die! Die! Your Lordship"; it checks out.

The ridiculously elaborate, yet also tediously A-to-B-to-C reasoning in this passage is not just for satirical effect: we learn later in Chapter XVIII that the book was written by a computer program.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XIV ==

=== Frobisher. Like the pirate ===
The pirate was {{wp|Martin Frobisher}}.

=== if it was replaced a bit at a time ===
Similar to what happened to the {{wp|Tin Woodman}}.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XV ==

=== Saint Peter shut us out ===
Father O'Bride's complaints about the school's athletic rivals are all jokes about the saints and martyrs the rival schools are named after:
* {{wp|Saint Peter}} is said to be in charge of the gates of heaven
* "we spanked Saint Theresa": {{wp|Teresa of Ávila}} wrote about her religious visions using what some might consider kinky imagery ("so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it")
* "Saint Bart massacred us": the {{wp|St. Bartholomew's Day massacre}}
* "Cosmas & Damian took a double-header": {{wp|Saints Cosmas and Damian}} were beheaded
* "singed by St. Joan": {{wp|Joan of Arc}} was burned at the stake
* "slaughtered by Holy Inno's": the Holy Innocents were the babies legendarily [[wikipedia:Massacre of the Innocents|massacred by Herod]]
* "a no-hitter surprise from St. Sebastian": after miraculously surviving being shot full of arrows, {{wp|Saint Sebastian}} was martyred by being beaten with clubs.

=== discount stuff from Iraq or is it Iran ===
As we see [[Roderick/Part 2#SHAMEROCKS|later in Part 2]], it's possible that "Charlie"'s shoddy goods aren't coming from anywhere overseas at all.

=== Vincent, who put his ear to the sunflower to hear the roaring of the sun ===
An unusual version of the life of {{wp|Vincent van Gogh}}.

=== ''I, Robot'' ===
[[wikipedia:I, Robot|Short story collection by Isaac Asimov]], written from 1940 to 1950. Most of Asimov's robot stories were based on logic problems arising from his fictional "Three Laws of Robotics", supposedly unbreakable behavioral rules that sometimes caused impossible dilemmas for the robots.

=== ''That Hideous Strength'' ===
The 1945 [[wikipedia:That Hideous Strength|novel by C.S. Lewis]], a religious science fiction/fantasy thriller that was his somewhat less successful sequel to ''Perelandra''. It doesn't have any robots in it, but it does have an insane mutated severed head being kept alive in a lab in order to communicate with demons.

[[Category:Roderick]]

== Chapter XVI ==

=== in this house at Bethany ... poured oil all over him ===
In the Gospel of John, {{wp|Mary of Bethany}} (Lazarus's sister) anoints Jesus with perfume.

=== the Flight into Egypt ... the Deadly Desert ===
Roderick is associating the Biblical story of Exodus with the lethal wasteland first mentioned in {{wp|Ozma of Oz}}.

=== wasn't Bethlehem where the steel came from ===
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was a major [[wikipedia:Bethlehem_Steel|center of steel production]] until the 1980s.

=== Limbo, with a bunch of yelling babies around ===
Catholic theologians have sometimes proposed that infants who died without being baptized would go to the [[wikipedia:Limbo#Limbo of infants|Limbo of infants]].

=== WORD .... MEAT ===
An example of Lewis Carroll's game "[[wikipedia:Word_ladder|Word-links]]", also called word ladder or word golf.

=== How can they program a robot to obey some dumb law ===
Roderick's basic objection to Asimov's {{wp|Three Laws of Robotics}} is addressed from a different, much darker angle in Sladek's later novel ''Tik-Tok''. Roderick, despite not being programmed with any rules other than a desire to learn and make sense of things, is basically a nice guy; the title character in ''Tik-Tok'', once he realizes that there's no way his ethical "asimov circuits" could really work as described, becomes a murderous sociopath (and takes advantage of other robots who still believe in the Three Laws by using loopholes much like the ones Roderick thought of, such as misleading them about who is or isn't a human being).

=== the first real bionic man wasn't even scratched in that plane crash ===
The 1970s TV hero Steve Austin, {{wp|The Six Million Dollar Man}}.

Mr. O'Smith later tells a similar story about himself— some of the parts he lost were not due to injury, but {{wp|hospital-acquired infection}}— in [[Roderick/Part 2|Part 2]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XVII ==

=== Another yard of Frazer ===
Pa is complaining that Ma cites ''{{wp|The Golden Bough}}'' too often.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XVIII ==

=== the Asimov story "Satisfaction Guaranteed" ===
A 1951 story (not included in ''I, Robot'') in which a woman falls in love with a humanoid robot which pretends to return her affection in order to avoid hurting her feelings.

=== tachypomps ... sensters ===
"{{wp|The Tachypomp}}" was an 1874 science fiction story that described, among other things, an "Android" that could write sonnets (although the "tachypomp" was not actually the robot, but a different invention). The {{wp|Senster}} was a computer-controlled sculpture built in 1970.

=== Rogers and his ultra-modern kitchen ... I tried to get into his freezer ===
This will not be the last time that Allbright fails to notice important evidence related to the Campus Ripper murders; it happens again early on in [[Roderick/Part 2|Part 2]].

=== ''The Adding Machine'' .... Elmer Rice ===
A [[wikipedia:The Adding Machine|1923 play]] about the death and afterlife of a man driven mad by automation.

=== this psychic Matthew Manning ===
[[wikipedia:Matthew Manning|Manning]] claimed to be able to draw in the styles of various famous artists via a psychic ability.

=== Fascinating article there by this J. Hannah ===
The lengthy list of vaguely robot-related cultural references in Dr. Hannah's article is similar to her [[Roderick/Book One#the Blackfeet boy, Kut-o-yis|ramblings in Book One]], but the Orinoco Institute analysts are more impressed than Hannah's colleagues were. Ironically, they see her interest in the subject as a sign of pro-robot sentiment, even though she said much the same kinds of things when she was anti-robot.

=== That's Leo Bunsky ===
The first and last mention of Leo Bunsky so far was in [[Roderick/Book One#With Leo Bunsky it was his heart|the first chapter of Book One]].

Leo's disembodied existence is a common scenario in both [[wikipedia:Brain in a vat|philosophy]] and [[Roderick/Book One#Donovan's Brain|science fiction]].

=== Duchamp, ''The Bride Stripped Bare'' ===
''{{wp|The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even}}'', an abstract sculpture whose metal components remind Ma Wood of "nutmeg graters."

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XIX ==

=== Ramon Llull .... he made up all these wheels ===
"The radical innovation Llull introduced in the realm of logic is ... the construction and the use of a machine made of paper to combine elements of thinking, i.e. elements of language. With the help of connected geometrical figures ... Llull tried to produce all the possible declarations of which the human mind could think."<ref>[http://history-computer.com/Dreamers/Llull.html "Ramon Llull"], Georgi Dalakov, on [http://history-computer.com ''History of Computers'']</ref> (Follow the link for illustrations of Llull's wheels.)

=== ''Malleus Maleficarum'' ===
A 15th-century [[wikipedia:Malleus Maleficarum|witch-hunting manual]].

=== ...essor Rogers is still at large ===
Although the serial killer subplot in ''Roderick'' is so far in the background that the discovery of the Campus Ripper's identity doesn't even start with a full sentence (and Rogers never gets a first name), Sladek seems to have come up with the "insane scholar turns out to have been serving human flesh to his colleagues" scene slightly earlier than the first appearance of {{wp|Hannibal Lecter}}.

=== The story the TV repairman the disc jockey the waitress .... waited on humored told ===
I did not try to diagram this gigantic sentence to check that the {{wp|reduced relative clause}}s all balance out. You can if you like.

=== ''Golden Buff'' ===
A joke about the [[wikipedia:Ough (orthography)|ambiguous pronunciation of "ough"]].

=== a removable mask as in ''Westworld'' ===
A [[wikipedia:Westworld|1973 movie]] in which a murderous robot played by Yul Brynner eventually loses its face.

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XX ==

=== Doc Sam ... the touchiest coloured boy ===
Evidence that "Dr. Death" is really Dr. De'Ath rather than Dr. D'Eath, since De'Ath said [[Roderick/Book One#I'm Dr. De'Ath, he's Dr. D'Eath|in Book One]] that D'Eath was the white one. This will become a plot point.

=== I even buy Uncle Ben's rice ===
Jake thinks he's not prejudiced because the logo on [[wikipedia:Uncle Ben's|his favorite rice]] is an African-American man.

=== A.M.D.G, A.M.D.G. ===
Initials of the [[wikipedia:Ad maiorem Dei gloriam|motto of the Jesuits]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXI ==

=== a drowsy numbness pains his senses as though of hemlock he had drunk ===
From Keats's [http://www.bartleby.com/101/624.html "Ode to a Nightingale".]

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXII ==

=== seems a little fond of Goldwynisms ===
Ma is comparing Indica's awkward metaphors to the legendary malapropisms of [[wikipedia:Samuel Goldwyn#Goldwynisms|Samuel Goldwyn]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXIII ==

=== he doesn't even have enough ideas of his own ... has to ask his wife ===
A married couple writing popular science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s together under a pseudonym suggests the Golden Age writers {{wp|Henry Kuttner}} and {{wp|C. L. Moore}}.

=== Eando Binder ... Nor anybody else who wrote "I, Robot" ===
Binder wrote a short story by that name in 1939 — infinitely less well known than the Asimov book — but as far as I know no other writers used the title until Cory Doctorow did in 2005.

=== Madame DeFarge ... Jacquard loom ===
Ben is comparing Madame DeFarge, the ''{{wp|tricoteuse}}'' in ''A Tale of Two Cities'' who marked people for execution by knitting their names in code, to the first [[wikipedia:Jacquard loom|programmable loom]], which could presumably do the same thing more efficiently but wasn't available until a few years after the French Revolution.

=== a wire running right into everybody's head ===
The idea of {{wp|brain stimulation reward}} was first described in the 1950s, and quickly became common [[wikipedia:Wirehead (science fiction)|in science fiction]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXIV ==

=== It was the best of time, it was the worst of time. Choose one ===
A semi-quote from the opening of ''{{wp|A Tale of Two Cities}}'' (previously mentioned in [[Roderick/Book Two#Madame DeFarge ... Jacquard loom|the last chapter]]). The narrator of that novel was saying that it was ''both''; however, in this case the two options are being compared to the two buttons that Dr. Tarr's pigeon might choose to peck, implying that this [[Roderick/Book One#decigeons|decigeon]] is totally arbitrary.

=== I'll be the Kladd, you be the Kludd ===
These were [[wikipedia:Ku Klux Klan titles and vocabulary|actual titles in the Ku Klux Klan]].

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXV ==

=== the happy couple; Jim and the Dean of Persons ===
Jim is Dean Boag's [[Roderick/Book One#Jim still had his uses|former secretary]], and now her fourth husband (see the first page of Book One, Chapter I).

[[Category:Roderick]]
== Chapter XXVI ==

=== a young man Ben thought he recognized, until he saw him full-face (without a birthmark) ===
Ben has once again come close to Roderick without knowing it. He thinks Roderick looks familiar because Roderick now looks like [[Roderick/Book Two#Lyle Danton? Is it you?|Lyle Tate]], who was commissioned by Ma Wood to design Roderick's new head. Ben and Lyle have never appeared together in the book, but presumably Ben saw him around the Minnetonka campus and remembered him because of the birthmark. Roderick's resemblance to Lyle will become a plot point in [[Roderick/Part 2|Part 2]].

=== the Shah was a puppet ===
The Shah of Ruritania is being compared to the [[wikipedia:Mohammad Reza Pahlavi|Shah of Iran]], the US-backed dictator who was deposed in 1979.

=== My name Felix Culpa ===
Rogers continues to use this alias in [[Roderick/Part 2|Part 2]]; he may have been the one who [[Roderick/Book One#a signature on the white plaster: Felix Culpa|wrote it on the skier's leg cast]] a long time ago, or he may have gotten the idea from reading the cast. Goun, since he was happy to recognize Rogers, presumably hasn't been [[Roderick/Book Two#...essor Rogers is still at large|listening to the radio]].

=== LOUIE HONK-HONK'S DETECTIVE AGENCY ===
Roderick's childhood friend Louie was last seen in [[Roderick/Book Two#Let's just recall the facts|Chapter XIII]], when Roderick answered the ''Die! Die! Your Lordship'' contest for him and won him $500,000. This is a happy ending.

== Notes to the notes ==
<references/>

{{Roderick nav}}