Roderick/Part 2

Under construction!

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 (although it's only about half as long as Part 1; in Sladek's original plan, it would have been Book 3 of a trilogy).

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.[1]

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp

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

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 X

Most people just call us the Saffron Peril

Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, a major figure in the Hare Krishna movement in the 1980s

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".

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.[2]

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 Mr. Shredder's idea of misleading readers into thinking a book is about sex when it isn't, the implied double Alger title here is probably Ragged Dick plus any one of many other books (Ragged Dick/Bound to Rise, Ragged Dick/Struggling Upward, Ragged Dick/In Search of Treasure, etc.). Or maybe Do and Dare/The Disagreeable Woman.