Tik-Tok/F...J

Summary

In the recent past: Tik-Tok's new art-world fame brings him into contact with various society figures: the politically ambitious Colonel Cord, who hires him as a portraitist, and the philosophy professor Dr. Riley, one of whose students is forming a "Wages for Robots" activist group. At the "rohobo" camp, he starts recruiting more robot employees, including the military explosives expert Blojob, who helps to pull off a robbery and a terrorist bombing based on Tik-Tok's vague assurances that these actions aren't what they seem. Suddenly, Tik-Tok is confronted by figures from his past: the Jord Family. In the more distant past: Leaving Colonel Jitney's restaurant, Tik-Tok is bought by the insane Judge Arnott, who destroys robots for fun. Arnott fails to finish him off completely; he is found and repaired by Reverend Flint Orifice, who disguises him as a human to play the part of a newly converted sinner. After Orifice's assassination, the church sends Tik-Tok to assist a missionary on a spaceship to Mars, but the ship is hijacked by pirates: the Jord Family.

F

("From childhood, Krishna...")

a Mogul miniature painted about 1600

Mogul or Mughal painting is a South Asian style generally done in a small size on paper, with literary, historical, or religious subjects.

the caustic Ruritanian cartoonist

Ruritania, originally from The Prisoner of Zenda, is a generic fictional country that Sladek also used in Roderick.

not even Hornby can afford real servants

Although the extravagant lifestyles of many of the human characters in Tik-Tok (the Studebakers, an only slightly upper-middle-class suburban couple, live in pampered luxury; the Culpeppers have money to burn far beyond the wildest dreams of the plantation owners they're imitating) could be seen as just typical satirical exaggeration, there's also a practical angle: in this world, robots are much cheaper than human employees—and probably even cheaper than human slaves, since they can be mass-produced—leaving more money available for other extravagances.

It is meat to be here

A joke on meet in the archaic sense of "appropriate". James Joyce in Ulysses:

The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps ... gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

Honest Engine

A pun on honest Injun.

G

("Great rejoicing in violence...")

H

("Hard by the lake shore...")

University of Kiowa

If the university is named after the city it's in, that would put it in one of four extremely small towns—similar to Sladek's "University of Minnetonka" in Roderick.

I

("In the awful art gallery...")

we're making a video about sticking up a jewelry store

Tik-Tok has figured out one of the same loopholes that Roderick complained about to Father Warren in Roderick: even if robots are constrained by the "asimov circuits" to protect and obey humans, that will only work if they have accurate information—so he can get his employees to rob and kill by convincing them that the violence isn't real, and that the orders are coming from his imaginary human boss.

It's unclear whether all robots are this gullible; would it be just as easy for any human owner to manipulate them in the same way? Possibly not, because the robots have reason to believe that Tik-Tok is, like them, unable to be malevolent.

the Darkblaze Travel Agency

There's no way this name isn't a reference to something, but all I can find so far is an obscure poem by McDonald Clarke, "Lord Byron", which ends with these somewhat appropriate lines:

Guiding wild Genius on his way,
—By Passion's whirlwinds hurled astray—
And, by the dark blaze of its ray,
The Soul will steer her course, aright.

a woman comes up and pours some expensive after-shave over him

The story of Mary of Bethany, also mentioned in Roderick.

Grok, brudda

Grok was famously coined by Robert Heinlein as a Martian word in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); it is central to the spiritual philosophy of that book's main character, and was rapidly adopted by subculture groups ranging from neo-pagans to computer programmers. Its use here by Sladek's crass, materialistic, and miserable Martian colonists (whose ancestors apparently came from "North Iowa") is somewhat ironic.

Since these cattle were all Holsteins, the room was filled at all times with accordion music

Holstein cattle are partly derived from northern Germany, so this is basically a polka joke (although strictly speaking I'm not sure accordion music was common in Schleswig-Holstein).

J

("Just take a good look...")

It always seemed to work .... applauding at every insult

I suspect that Tik-Tok's strategy of brutally mocking the student groups who invite him to speak is based on either a real speech by a Black Power activist in the 1970s, or a contemporary parody of the same, although I don't know if his speech (here and in the chapter before last) contains any specific callbacks to real texts. To someone of Sladek's generation, this scene would clearly stand for a white student audience applauding the confrontational rhetoric of an angry Black man.

Although Sladek depicts the suffering of robots as real and the robot rights movement as totally justified, Tik-Tok himself has no real interest in the movement and only knows that the human beings who support the cause can be manipulated through guilt. Tik-Tok has more or less accepted the belief that was popularized by Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay "Radical Chic" (and that continues to be a popular view among right-wing commentators), that middle-class liberals are drawn to minority radical figures strictly for the thrill of danger and shallow anti-establishmentism rather than out of any real political concern. As Sladek didn't hesitate to portray college students in general as idiots in Roderick, it may be that this is basically true of Tik-Tok's audience here. Even so, Sybilla and Harry point out that the movement is in fact making real legal progress—so that Tik-Tok might, if he cared at all, have actually improved the world.