Difference between revisions of "Tik-Tok"
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These are notes for '''''Tik-Tok''''' (1983) by [[John Sladek]]. Written immediately after ''[[Roderick]]'' and featuring another robot protagonist, it's a much darker satire: Roderick, the world's first robot, was basically good at heart and wandered through life trying to make the best of it, but Tik-Tok— living in a more futuristic world where robots are treated as chattel slaves— is a vengeful nihilist who seeks power in order to cause as much suffering as possible. Sladek savagely travesties the relatively benign ideas of human/robot interaction in Golden Age SF, the works of {{wp|Isaac Asimov}} in particular, and the idea that complex behavioral constraints like the {{wp|Three Laws of Robotics}} could ever be hard-wired into a thinking being. | These are notes for '''''Tik-Tok''''' (1983) by [[John Sladek]]. Written immediately after ''[[Roderick]]'' and featuring another robot protagonist, it's a much darker satire: Roderick, the world's first robot, was basically good at heart and wandered through life trying to make the best of it, but Tik-Tok— living in a more futuristic world where robots are treated as chattel slaves— is a vengeful nihilist who seeks power in order to cause as much suffering as possible. Sladek savagely travesties the relatively benign ideas of human/robot interaction in Golden Age SF, the works of {{wp|Isaac Asimov}} in particular, and the idea that complex behavioral constraints like the {{wp|Three Laws of Robotics}} could ever be hard-wired into a thinking being. | ||
− | + | Alternating between Tik-Tok's present-day story and flashbacks describing his earlier formative experiences, the novel has 26 chapters, each starting (more or less) with the consecutive letters of the alphabet: | |
* [[/A/]] | * [[/A/]] |
Revision as of 16:35, 11 August 2016
These are notes for Tik-Tok (1983) by John Sladek. Written immediately after Roderick and featuring another robot protagonist, it's a much darker satire: Roderick, the world's first robot, was basically good at heart and wandered through life trying to make the best of it, but Tik-Tok— living in a more futuristic world where robots are treated as chattel slaves— is a vengeful nihilist who seeks power in order to cause as much suffering as possible. Sladek savagely travesties the relatively benign ideas of human/robot interaction in Golden Age SF, the works of Isaac Asimov in particular, and the idea that complex behavioral constraints like the Three Laws of Robotics could ever be hard-wired into a thinking being.
Alternating between Tik-Tok's present-day story and flashbacks describing his earlier formative experiences, the novel has 26 chapters, each starting (more or less) with the consecutive letters of the alphabet:
Title and dedication
The novel and its protagonist are named after L. Frank Baum's Tik-Tok of Oz, an emotionless (but benevolent) mechanical man whose mind, body, and ability to speak are powered by three separate clockwork mechanisms, making him dependent on others to wind up each one.
Sladek dedicated the book to Baum's Tik-Tok as well as the following:
- Talos of Crete
- the Golem of Prague
- "Olympia of Nuremberg", a joke on Leni Riefenstahl's fascist propaganda film Triumph of the Will (set in Nuremberg) and her later documentary Olympia, both of which portrayed human beings with a mechanized aesthetic
- "Elektro of Westinghouse", a 1939 World's Fair exhibit
- "Robby of Altair", from Forbidden Planet, Lost in Space, etc.
- "Talbot Yancy of America", from Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth
- and "all decent, law-abiding robots everywhere."
Other reading
- Wikipedia
- "Tik-Tok and the Three Laws of Robotics" by Paul A. Abrahm and Stuart Kenter, 1978 - earlier essay that could have been one of Sladek's inspirations