Roderick/Part 2

The second of the Roderick novels was originally published as Roderick at Random, or Further Education of a Young Machine. In The Complete Roderick, it's simply called Part 2.

Summary

Roderick, now passing for human, has moved to the big city—where "Felix Culpa" (now known as the Lucky Legs Killer) and Allbright (now on the skids again, after apparently having caused Dora's death) have also relocated. He finally succeeds in making contact with the institutionalized Dan Sonnenschein, putting both Ben and the Orinoco Institute on his trail. His new friend, derelict ex-astronaut and religious dabbler Luke Draeger, gets him a job at a demolition company, where he witnesses disasters caused by another of Mr. Kratt's business ventures. Indica and Hank continue to expand their pro- and anti-machine activism; Father Warren, Roderick's former teacher at Catholic school, takes over Hank's increasingly violent organization. Roderick discovers that he is no longer the only sentient machine: other types of commercially marketed robots and computers have become self-aware, and now regard him and Dan as mythical heroes. When he finally comes face to face with the Orinoco Institute, they've changed their policy (due to realizing that they had been misinterpreting the messages from Leo Bunsky's brain) and want him to join their team to steer the course of the human race. Horrified by the thought of how much pointless violence these covert futurists have committed due to his existence, he rejects the offer, and offers himself up to Kratt's company to be dismantled and used as the basis for a new generation of robots; but this never happens, since they lose track of him, and he becomes a nameless statue. The book ends with a service at the new Church of the Plastic Jesus, led by Luke, bringing together a congregation of "the derelict and forgotten simulacra"; Allbright and Dora are reunited.

Chapter I

Calloo, and also Calais

"Callooh! Callay!" was an exclamation of joy in Carroll's "Jabberwocky". "Calloo", if it's not a misprint, would be a kind of Arctic duck. Calais is a major port in France.

a kind of grammar-machine built into the human head

Noam Chomsky's idea of universal grammar.

project librarian and historian

This is the first time anyone has described what Ben Franklin's job on the Roderick project actually was. Given the usually abstracted, literary or sociological nature of his internal monologues, it makes sense that he's not really all that technically minded.

blooming, buzzing confusion

William James's description, in Principles of Psychology (1890), of the confusing perceptual experience of an infant who hasn't yet learned to sort out its new senses.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp

Rembrandt's 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.

Still at large ... At random, one might say

This (and the title Roderick at Random that was used for the separate publication of this volume) refers to the 18th-century picaresque novel The Adventures of Roderick Random.

Sladek may also have had in mind The Absolute at Large, the English title of a 1922 novel by Karel Čapek—not about robots, but about the upending of society by a spiritual force that is a by-product of technology, which is metaphorically somewhat parallel to this book. Čapek himself is of course permanently associated with robots due to R.U.R.

Chapter II

He had taken only a few steps

There's a full list of the books from which all of these italicized passages are quoted at the end of the novel; Roderick has been reading everything from Camus to Spillane, but he seems more preoccupied with violence than he used to be.

Danton's Doggie Dinette

The Doggie Diner was a chain of restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, famous for its huge sculpted dog head signs (one of which is now an official San Francisco landmark). However, it only had dogs as mascots, not as customers.

This alliterative name slightly recalls the Büchner play Danton's Death, about the French Revolutionary leader who helped to start the Reign of Terror before becoming one of its victims, but Mr. Danton doesn't seem to have any historical parallels other than being generally a violent person.

Skinner's Dream

This is the only sample of Allbright's poetry that appears in the book (other than the six-word poem he wrote during his sober period). It continues the theme of associating pigeons with decisions.

Chapter III

I'm doing Rolfing now

An alternative medicine practice that was particularly popular in the 1960s and 1970s, combining bodywork with ideas about "energy".

Chapter IV

The Escorial Ballroom

Probably named after the Spanish palace.

R.U.R. My Baby

Combining the play that coined the word "robot" with the song "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby".

Chapter V

I knew this FBI special agent

The mention of frequent facelifts implies that this was Agent Wcz, who first appeared in Book Two, Chapter VI and will return later in this volume.

following the truth tables he'd scribbled

Another way to look at a truth table is as a list of binary numbers. If L=0 and R=1, then the 10-digit sequences shown here (LLLLLLLLLL through LLLLLLLRLL) would be the numbers zero through four; assuming he wrote down every possible combination, the full list would be zero through 1,023, so Ida might have had to flash the light up to 10,240 times.

Chapter VI

yellow chrysanthemums, they say—

There are many versions of the language of flowers, but in a common English-speaking tradition, yellow chrysanthemums would mean neglected or rejected love.

hair a dark 6B scribble

A 6B pencil is a very soft pencil, producing a smudgy line.

forbidden planet, Walter Pigeon

The 1956 film, loosely based on The Tempest, starring Walter Pidgeon (sic) as the mad scientist.

The Tik Tok Club

Tik-Tok was a robot character in the Oz books, also referenced in Sladek's later novel of the same name.

Lake Kerkabon

There is no Lake Kerkabon, but that name appears in Voltaire's novel L'Ingénu (or "The Huron, Pupil of Nature"), in which the Abbot Kerkabon baptizes a man from North America who grew up in an Iroquoian commuity ("Huronia") but turns out to be a Kerkabon relative. Ma Wood's earlier mention of Zadig may have been another Voltaire reference—not surprising since Roderick is, like Candide and "The Huron", an innocent abroad.

SHAMEROCKS

Assuming that the shirts are for a baseball team called the Shamrocks, this suggests that the constantly misspelled athletic gear that Father O'Bride kept ordering for the Holy Trinity Hellcats in Book Two might be coming from the same Skid Row factory.

Skid Row

A generic term for a slum full of derelicts. There is an actual neighborhood called Skid Row in Los Angeles, but it's never clear that this book takes place in any specific city.

Chapter VII

a star with three lines coming down from it

a NASA astronaut pin

Luke's pin would look like this.

Chapter VIII

a smart apartment building at 334 East 11th

The setting of Thomas M. Disch's 334.

how you managed to make your hands bleed

In Book Two, Father Warren developed a skin problem after he told Roderick to poke him on the hand (to prove that Roderick could harm humans and therefore couldn't be a robot) and then couldn't stop scratching this tiny injury. This has apparently led to rumors about stigmata.

Chapter IX

There was a girl who really took me seriously, took my work seriously

Dora is given perhaps shorter shrift than any other recurring character in Roderick—like much of the emotionally charged material related to Allbright's and Lyle's lives, she seems to have personal importance to Sladek in the moment but is never really integrated into the novel. But from what we've seen of her and Allbright, there's no sign that she had any particular opinion about his work; this may be Allbright's assumption because he can't imagine that she was devoted to him as a person.

inspecting a microprocessor factory in Taipin

In the first chapter of Book Two, Lee Fong was said to have been "deported to Taipin", which implies that it's meant to be a fictional Asian country (rather than an alternate spelling for Taiping in Taiwan).

Chapter X

Most people just call us the Saffron Peril

Luke is being coy about the name, but he's clearly talking about the Hare Krishna movement. His nickname combines the old xenophobic term Yellow Peril with the saffron color of the robes customarily worn by followers of this tradition.

Chapter XI

Dipchip International

There was an earlier mention of this company in Book Two, Chapter VI, when Kratt was plotting to take it over—although at that point Dipchip's business was apparently "trying to coat microcircuit chips with peanut butter," rather than the dehydrated dip idea Hatlo is talking about here.

Also: Sladek once used the name "Chipdip K. Kill" for the author of his Philip K. Dick parody story "Solar Shoe-Salesman" (and Dick himself later used that name in a fanzine, for a spoof review of his own novel The Divine Invasion).

Les Noces

French title of "The Wedding", the 1923 Stravinsky ballet first choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. Jerome Robbins also created a version in 1965, which I haven't seen, but I'm guessing that Culpa is talking about the original one.

For once, Rogers/Culpa's analysis isn't just meaningless bullshit. The overall impression of the ballet—musically, visually, and thematically—is of harsh, mechanized, coercive ceremony. The bride begins by describing a matchmaker violently brushing her hair; in Stravinsky's words, she weeps "not necessarily because of real sorrow at her prospective loss of virginity, but because, ritualistically, she must weep." Culpa's phrase "celebration of rape" is odd not so much because of the last word (although that usually connotes more of a personal crime than the desexualized social transaction depicted here) but because the tone of the piece is, to put it mildly, not what most people would describe as a celebration of anything.

The claim that Stravinsky "scored it for pianolas" is sort of true: an early, unfinished draft proposed the use of player pianos and other automated instruments, but production obstacles prevented this. One science/technology connection that Culpa fails to mention is that Stravinsky structured some of the music around the golden ratio, the same concept that Idris is obsessed with in Chapter XIX.

doesn't mean you can really compare the Rockettes to an assembly line

This comparison, attributed to Rogers, really came from Allbright's drunken ramblings in Book One. Judi Mazzini is giving Allbright the kind of skeptical critical reading that he never had to face before now, pointing out that the kind of clever free-associations that he (like Sladek) is so fond of don't necessarily point to any deeper insight. At the same time, Mazzini one-ups him at his own game by going on to list a number of other dance/robot cultural references that he missed. But the harshest possible judgment of Allbright's work is that the only person who thinks very highly of it is the Campus Ripper—and that may not even be an honest opinion so much as a self-serving one, since the Ripper has taken credit for his writing.

Mazzini is described earlier in the chapter as being Dr. Tarr's secretary, so her ability to think clearly probably makes it hard for her to enjoy her job. Unfortunately, her judgment fails her when she leaves the party with Felix Culpa.

good old Father Cog on the radio

Father Charles Coughlin, a right-wing political commentator with a large radio following in the 1930s.

We changed it from another name, a very downmarket name

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's beloved dog was named "Flush". Flush was featured in an eponymous novel by Virginia Woolf, in which the puppy observes his owner's troubled home life and the strangeness of the modern human world from a perspective not unlike Roderick's.

Then I felt like some sky-watcher / When a new planet orbits into sight - zowie!

A deliberately ghastly modernization of these lines from Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer":

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;

General Fleischman has chosen, for his series of dumbed-down classics, a poem about deeply appreciating literature.

Chapter XIII

Mary Mendez

This is the only appearance of the final member of the original Roderick team; at the beginning of Book One, Lee Fong described how Mary ended up "as good as dead" after a car crash caused by overwork.

there's no malaria in Taipin

Ben probably contracted malaria in chapter IX, when he used a KUR blood-test machine that had previously been used by Father Warren in Chapter VIII.

Chapter XIV

**DICA **NKS

Sladek used asterisked-out names for some of his parodies of other writers—e.g., "*s**c *s*m*v" was credited as the author of his Asimov parody story "Broot Force"—although they were eventually collected under his own name.

Prospero Books

In The Tempest, Prospero the magician gives up his powers with the promise that "I'll drown my book."

Your Erroneous Zones

An extremely popular 1976 self-help book by Wayne Dyer. The title is an obvious pun on erogenous zones, but Shredder believes it was aimed at readers who literally don't know the difference.

two Horatio Alger books in one with the titles run together

In the context of Shredder's idea of misleading readers into thinking a book is about sex when it isn't, the implied double Alger title here could be Ragged Dick plus any one of many other books: in Chapter XV we see that Indica has picked up Ragged Dick/Bound to Rise, but Shredder could also publish Ragged Dick/Struggling Upward, Ragged Dick/In Search of Treasure, etc. Or maybe Do and Dare/The Disagreeable Woman.

Chapter XV

human use of human beings wiener

This is probably another of Shredder's faux-erotic editions: The Human Use of Human Beings is a 1950 book about automation by Norbert Wiener.

Chapter XVI

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem

An indication that the Newman Club is named after the Catholic theologian John Henry Newman.

I thought Pascal was a language

Named after Blaise Pascal, the Pascal programming language was popular in the 1970s and 80s.

a robot pope, like in that Robert Silverberg story

"Good News from the Vatican" (1971).

I must be a Manichee, I always see two sides to everything

Manichaeism is actually the opposite of what most people mean by "seeing two sides to everything": rather than acknowledging that both sides might have a point, a Manichaean would declare that one side is pure evil.

made a beaker without a mouth, so much for Keats

From Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale":

O for a beaker full of the warm South,
  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
      And purple-stained mouth;

Albert Robida ... Br'er Robbie?

Robida's La vie électrique is a science fiction novel from 1890. The other speaker has misheard the French pronunciation of his name, and is thinking of the dialect word "br'er" (brother), best known from the Br'er Rabbit stories of Uncle Remus.

that sonofabitch Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana (named after the city) is the pen name of the New York novelist, playwright, and art critic Gary Hoisington; but it's unlikely that Sladek meant to refer to the same person unless they happened to know each other personally, since Hoisington was still fairly obscure in the early 1980s. On the other hand, Sladek was a friend of long-time New Yorker and theater aficionado Thomas M. Disch, who might well have encountered Indiana's Off-Off-Broadway plays or his early writing for Art in America, so this might have been a deliberate inside joke.

eleven of the twenty-one students

The students who are named in the following paragraphs (constructed apparently for no reason other than to allow a very determined or bored reader to piece together this joke) correspond to each letter of the alphabet from A to T, and are sitting in alphabetical order. Roderick is "alone in the last row" because he's been given the double last name "Underwood Robey" (never explained, but possibly the result of someone's attempt to file him "under 'Wood, Robbie'"; of course this gives him the initials R.U.R.) and there are no V-Z students. It's possible that there's some significance to the order in which the various students start and stop paying attention to the lecture, since Sladek describes this in some detail, but there's a limit to even my obsessiveness.

Deutsche Ostwest Afrika

"German East West Africa".

Chapter XVII

a basset hound named Parmenides

I'm not sure if there is a more specific philosophy joke here, but in the Parmenides dialogue of Plato, Socrates is compared to a hound (as a compliment).

Chapter XVIII

You remind me of a statue ... taking out a splinter

Maybe Boy with Thorn, also called "the faithful boy".

Chapter XIX

Idris seemed to speak no English

Idris is the son of the Shah of Ruritania, and seems to have inherited his father's enthusiasm for automation. In Chapter IV of Book One, the Shah paid a $2.5 million bribe to ensure Idris's eventual acceptance to Minnetonka U; Idris was six months old at the time, so nearly two decades must have passed since the beginning of the novel.

in 1973 this insurance company invented 185 million dollars in assets

Equity Funding, a US company that committed the largest financial fraud in US history prior to Bernie Madoff, at a time when auditing procedures had not yet caught up with computer technology.

Every day and every way, I'm getting more and more aware

Based on the self-help mantra of Émile Coué: "Every day in every way, I am getting better and better."

as though a figure were gradually being built up from empty clothing

This is the reverse of what eventually happens to Mr. O'Smith in Chapter XX.

Sunshine Dan

"Sunshine" is the German meaning of Dan's last name, Sonnenschein.

Hadaly?

This is italicized as if Idris is speaking another language, but the meaning is unclear. Hadaly is however the name of an android (created by Thomas Edison!) in the 1886 novel The Future Eve.

Chapter XX

There is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot execute

From The Principles of Psychology by William James (1890).

I feel like I saw a Mickey Mouse mask like that before

He did, in Book One, before he was born.

Fill up that sunshine balloon

This annoyingly cheerful song has recurred throughout the book: Pa Wood listened to it on the radio, Roderick heard it in the Slumbertite factory, Hank Dinks complained about it at the mall, etc. But it originally comes from Sladek's earlier novel The Muller-Fökker Effect, where "Sunshine Balloon" is featured in an easy-listening mix called "Melodiak".

Chapter XXII

the man behind the desk was cleaning his pipe

This Orinoco Institute executive and his colleagues are never named, and only minimally described (they have brush-cut hair; they smoke pipes; they have professorial jackets). But there are arguably some very slight hints throughout the book that Professor Tarr might be working with them:

• Tarr is the only character we've seen outside of Orinoco who always has a pipe.
• Compared to all his colleagues at Minnetonka, Tarr seems both unusually intelligent and unusually unscrupulous. For instance, he dismissed Aikin's pendulum project as unworthy of a grant, but later (Chapter XII) we see that he turned it into a profitable market research venture. His fraudulent pigeon project, in which he reported false signals from a dead bird, is also reminiscent of the situation of Leo Bunsky.
• And we see in this chapter that the Institute's subjects of interest include both parapsychology and market research.

Admittedly, this is a very thin thread, and Tarr has a fair number of scenes where he's busy enough with other things that he doesn't seem likely to have a secret life. It may also be (as with many other threads in the book that don't seem to go anywhere) that Sladek thought of setting something up with the pipe references, but never got around to it.

Chapter XXIV

pizza-flavored yogurt fudge

This fatal snack was mentioned in a news broadcast in Chapter XXI, when it was "found to contain a poison similar to oxalic acid."

The Russian war-gaming machine that will only display icons

The word "icon" wasn't yet commonly associated with computers in 1983 (the Xerox Star used icons, but most computer users didn't encounter that kind of interface until the Macintosh). The reference here is probably to the religious art objects common in the Russian Orthodox Church.

in one of our storerooms or offices or somewhere ... found a broken-down robot

What actually happened to Roderick in between now and his previous appearance is ambiguous. It's possible that he really was broken and had been put into storage—there was some foreshadowing earlier in the chapter about the possibility of an accident, as a huge dish antenna (the same kind of Moxon satellite dish that, as mentioned in Chapter II, destroyed the town of Newer) was being installed near where he was standing, and Roderick was said to look like "someone expecting a heavy burden to drop from the sky"; but we never hear about such a disaster happening.

It could also be—since, the last time we saw him, Roderick was standing on a terrace and "saw no point in jumping ... [but] saw no point in going back inside"—that Jough Braun did not have to look in any rooms but found him exactly where he is now: not dead nor broken, but just immobile because he was no longer interested in doing anything.