Tik-Tok
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Tik-Tok (1983) was John Sladek's immediate follow-up to the Roderick books. While it features 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 further-future world where robots are common and 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 views of human/robot interaction in Golden Age SF, and the idea that complex behavioral constraints like the Three Laws of Robotics could ever be hard-wired into a thinking being—while also suggesting that if people wished to do so, it would be for the worst possible reasons.
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 (video)
- "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."
Major characters
- Tik-Tok, a.k.a. "Banjo": a domestic robot
- Duane and Barbie Studebaker: Tik-Tok's final owners
- the Culpepper family: Tik-Tok's first owners
- Colonel Jitney, Judge "Juggernaut" Arnott, Reverend Flint Orifice, Dr. Hekyll: more of Tik-Tok's previous owners
- Gumdrop: Tik-Tok's robot girlfriend on the Culpepper plantation
- Colonel Cord: Tik-Tok's political patron
- the Jord family: interplanetary bandits
- Nobby, Blojob, Roadhog, Dig-Dig, Sniffles, Rodan: robots employed by Tik-Tok
- Sybilla White, Harry LaSalle: college students, robot rights activists
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