Roderick/Book Two

This was originally published as Book Two of Roderick, and is also Book Two of the combined edition The Complete Roderick.

Summary

Allbright has sent Roderick to live with Hank and Indica Dinks, who mostly ignore him and leave him to learn about human behavior from TV. When the Dinks' marriage breaks up, Hank goes berserk; Roderick defends himself and, thinking he has killed Hank, mails himself to the home of Ma and Pa Wood (whose address was provided by Dan Sonnenschein). These kindly eccentrics try to bring him up as their own child and send him to school, where the teachers and administrators assume he is a boy with unusual physical disabilities even though he has no human parts. During his "childhood" Roderick is kidnapped repeatedly, goes on the road with drifters and grifters, and works as a carnival fortune-teller for the shady businessman Mr. Kratt (who later coincidentally hires the former Roderick researcher Ben Franklin and the spy Mr. O'Smith). He graduates from his child-sized "toy tank" body to an adult-sized, mostly humanoid body created by the Woods (who, he learns, were Dan's foster parents). Allbright, briefly cleaned up but not any nicer, reveals that Dan is now in a mental hospital. Back in Minnetonka, the Campus Ripper is unmasked and goes on the lam. Meanwhile, Indica has become the leader of a "Machine Liberation" movement, while Hank has joined an opposing anti-machine group. A coalition of Hank's followers, various disgruntled townspeople, and racists (since Roderick painted his head black in mourning when he thought Pa Wood was dead), storm Kratt's factory and attempt to lynch Roderick; fortunately, they wrongly assume he's dead after his head comes off. The Orinoco Institute continues to look for him without success. Roderick finally hits the road alone, hoping to track down Dan.

Chapter I

Indica

Indica's name literally means "of India", and is also one of the two main species of cannabis.

his glass of bean milk

Soy milk was still a novelty in the US when this was written; it had only been commercially available there for one year.

in the shape of a pyramid—because of the rays

The belief in paranormal pyramid power became popular in the US in the 1970s.

Vinnie's Rock Bottom, for rock-bottom prices

Pretty much everything in Roderick's internal narration in this chapter is a pastiche of what he's been watching on TV: ads for discount electronics, hygiene products, breakfast cereal; police dramas, Westerns, historical dramas, war movies; etc. US readers will probably recognize all of these— TV hasn't changed that much in some ways since 1980.

the true person, true to his own environment, fixes everything himself

Hank's philosophy may have been inspired by Stewart Brand, a former Buckminster Fuller disciple best known for the Whole Earth Catalog, whose influence on 1970s counterculture is hard to overstate. Brand espoused an extreme (though maybe not as extreme as Hank) version of do-it-yourselfism, regarding decentralized technologies maintained by individualist jacks-of-all-trades as the wave of the future. His 1994 book How Buildings Learn proposed that most buildings should be basic boxes that the owner can easily modify.

bricoleurs and Zen motor cycles

A bricoleur is someone who tinkers or improvises with found materials. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a 1974 memoir by Robert Pirsig, describing a motorcycle road trip Pirsig took after a nervous breakdown; in one of his many philosophical digressions, Pirsig talks about the spiritual value of having an old motorcycle that he can repair himself, unlike his friend who has to hire mechanics.

nine months with the Braxton Hicks Dancers

Braxton Hicks contractions, or "false labor", are uterine contractions that are common during the second and third trimesters of pregnancy.

Chapter III

Muse-suck

Pa's disparaging nickname for Muzak. Muzak per se would normally only be played on internal company sound systems, factory floors, elevators, etc. rather than broadcast over the radio, but maybe Pa (who doesn't realize he no longer works at the factory) has tuned into a similar-sounding easy listening station.

the giant toilet bowl

As Ma explains in Chapter IV, this was really "a bird-bath for rooks".

Jil, Meri, Su

This long list of names is parodying a practice that had become popular in the US in the 1970s: using a standard English name but changing the spelling slightly. The one exception is "John"— but that could be someone's attempt to misspell "Jon", since the latter is also a standard name.

Ed ("Kookie") Byrnes

The actor Edd Byrnes, who played "Kookie"— a stereotypical young greaser obsessed with combing his hair— on the series 77 Sunset Strip.

Joe McCarthy ... Charlie McCarthy

Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the puppet character Charlie McCarthy created by Edgar Bergen. In 1952-53, the former was at the height of his power, while the latter was on his way out (Charlie/Bergen was much more successful as a radio character than on TV).

a few lines of Apollinaire

Ma is quoting from a translation of the poem "Les Fenêtres" (Windows), from the collection Calligrammes. Apollinaire's Surrealist fragments are not straightforward to translate, so other English versions of this poem use wildly different wording. Many of the pieces in Calligrammes are concrete poems, where the visual layout of the words is just as important as the words, but Ma has picked one of the text-only pieces.

While the stereotype of an eccentric elderly counterculture couple has lasted into the 21st century, 1980 was not very long after the original hippie movement. Sladek has created a somewhat different archetype for Ma and Pa Wood: they seem to have absorbed all the earlier countercultures and avant-garde art movements of the first half of the 20th century— Dada, the Beats, etc.— while simultaneously being folksy rural Midwesterners like Superman's adoptive parents Ma and Pa Kent. Also, as we will see later, contrary to the image of 1960s/70s radicals, they have no concept of sex.

buses and data highways

A bus is a structure for transferring data between several digital components that are usually physically attached, for example USB.

short for Paul and Mary

Pa's and Ma's names might be based on two-thirds of the folk singing group Peter, Paul and Mary (although "Paul's" name was actually Noel Paul).

The Queen of Spain was adopted by fairies

I'm not sure if this is what Ma is talking about, but there is a Spanish ballad— called "La Infantina" here, and listed as "A cazar va el caballero" in the collection El Romancero Castellano— in which the daughter of the King of Castille is taken away by fairies for seven years (not exactly adopted, but imprisoned on a mountain). Ma might be conflating this story with the real Infanta Isabella I of Castile, who was brought up by other members of the royal family after her father's death.

Chapter IV

Mayflies ... have children inside them when they're born

This isn't true, but Pa may be thinking of aphids, which can sometimes start reproducing asexually before birth ("telescoping generations"). Pa goes on to say that there's an infinite series of smaller and smaller "children" within, which also isn't true, but was once thought to be how all creatures formed (preformationism).

teleological void

Teleology is the study of the inner purpose of things; as far as Ma is concerned, TV has none.

the cigarette girl who loved a bullfighter

The title character in Carmen, who falls in love with a bullfighter, works in a cigarette factory (as opposed to being a cigarette girl— a seller of cigarettes). Ma has reimagined her as a girl magically turned into tobacco, and added in Walter Raleigh and the banjo from "Oh! Susanna".

Windows were better than TV

Ma's "few lines of Apollinaire" in the previous chapter were from the poem "Windows".

Zadig the engineer

Zadig, or the Book of Fate is a Voltaire novel whose title character (not an engineer, but this is a typical reinterpretation by Ma and Pa Wood) uses his wits to solve various people's problems during his travels, and eventually becomes king of Babylonia.

a dentist's jawbone

Samson was said to have killed a thousand Philistines (or as Roderick hears it, "Phyllis Teens") with the jawbone of a donkey. Pa is implying that his neighbor, the dentist, is an ass.

Achilles and this tortoise

One of Zeno's paradoxes, proposing that it's logically impossible to catch up with a moving target even if you are moving faster than it, because you have to travel through an infinite number of intermediate locations.

I'd throw some kid in

Louie is remembering the scene in the 1931 Frankenstein movie where the creature, innocently trying to imitate a little girl who was throwing flowers into a lake, runs out of flowers and throws the girl.

like in truth tables

A truth table shows all the possible results of combining a set of true/false variables in some way.

Chapter V

Find the Lady

Also known as Three-card Monte.

everybody has to have a name beginning with Z J or Ch

Like all the other details of the "gipsy" family, this isn't related to any real Roma tradition as far as I know.

Elmer two six one zero five eight niner seven ... Lolita six eight five zero one niner two three

Roderick has turned the license plate 180 degrees, and fortunately all the letters and numbers on it happened to look like other letters and numbers when flipped: "E26105897" -> "L68501923". The usual NATO phonetic alphabet uses "Echo" and "Lima" for E and L; "Lolita" presumably refers to the Nabokov novel, and "Elmer" was an early experimental robot (though it's also the name of a tiny town in Minnesota).

Chapter VI

There's no such thing as the Mafia

The idea that the Mafia in America is a myth or an exaggeration has usually been proposed by organized crime suspects or their lawyers, but the sociologist Joseph Albini made something of a career of that idea throughout the 1970s, in writings like The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend.

Chapter VII

Elizabeth Borden

The principal's name refers to the famous (alleged) murderer Lizzie Borden.

Chapter VIII

pale, humourless young man with a glassy stare

This is Goun, the former Minnetonka University professor who taught "Sociology of Losing" and whose sister was murdered by the Campus Ripper.

cut the last two chapters out of The Marvellous Land of Oz

The mysterious censor may have objected to the ending of this, the second Oz book, for its transgender theme: the boy Tip turns out to be the princess Ozma, transformed by magic.

Chapter IX

decigeons tree

A decision tree is a simple flowchart, often used in computer science but also sometimes used manually by humans. Roderick's word "decigeons" is an echo of a mistake he once made while thinking about pigeons, before his "birth".

Chapter X

an iron man who falls apart and puts himself together again

This would be Ted Hughes's 1968 novel The Iron Man, later filmed as The Iron Giant.

IRON ROBOT MAN

Roderick's word game is a Caesar cipher. If he had continued with the remaining letters of MAN, the last word of the result would have been "UH".

the answers sometimes come up in dreams, Kékulé

Friedrich August Kekulé claimed to have discovered the circular chemical structure of benzene in a waking dream.

Chapter XI

the Des Moines Bienniale

There is no such exhibition, but in the Midwest-centric world of Roderick, Iowa has its own famous international modern art show.

Lyle Danton? Is it you?

Lyle has only briefly appeared so far, as a student in Minnetonka who asked a question about astrology, and was described as having "a hideous birthmark". We now learn that he's an artist, and we get some of his unhappy family history (his father used to run the factory where Pa Wood worked; his father hated Lyle, and may have caused his mother's death; Lyle changed his last name to Tate to distance himself from his father, who now works in the restaurant business)... which will not figure into Part 1 at all, but will become more important in Part 2.

I got fired from the tattoo parlor ... something about T. S. Eliot

Lyle presumably did the palindrome tattoo in Chapter V.

Giuseppe Coppertino

Joseph of Cupertino, a 17th century Franciscan monk whose rumored feats of levitation got him in trouble with the Inquisition. He is the patron saint of aviators, and also, due to his legendary mental simplicity, of "those suffering mental handicaps".[1]

though superficially identical

Edd McFee's identical square paintings, said to have different individual meanings due to the different times and places they were painted in, may be a reference to the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", in which an avant-garde writer is praised for copying Don Quixote with no changes at all but, supposedly, a different subtext.

Chapter XII

kumbīniNg speeCh Thayrupee

The half-mad Ms. Beek is writing in a mish-mash of International Phonetic Alphabet and other phonetic writing schemes: "The idea of combining speech therapy with remedial reading is just one more example of the breakdown of the whole godawful system which they keep urging me to join (as though people were glue)".

the Goethescope with its ebony prism

Goethe wasn't all about darkness, but Pa may be thinking of things like The Sorrows of Young Werther.

framed photo of Rex Reason

Movie and TV actor best known for This Island Earth. By the time of this novel he had already been retired for nearly 20 years; as far as I can tell, it's never explained why he was special to Ma or Pa.

Chapter XIII

History is a bunk on which I am trying to awaken

A mash-up of two famous quotations: "History is bunk" (attributed to Henry Ford) and "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses).

New Ur

Ur was one of the oldest known cities. The religious community that founded New Ur was probably thinking of the "Ur Kasdim" or "Ur of the Chaldees" mentioned in the Bible, which may or may not be the same place.

the boy who couldn't shiver

Also known as "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was".

Let's just recall the facts

The detective's logic problem here is solved at the end of the book, in exhaustive detail, in "Note on Die! Die! Your Lordship"; it checks out.

The ridiculously elaborate, yet also tediously A-to-B-to-C reasoning in this passage is not just for satirical effect: we learn later in Chapter XVIII that the book was written by a computer program.

Chapter XIV

Frobisher. Like the pirate

The pirate was Martin Frobisher.

if it was replaced a bit at a time

Similar to what happened to the Tin Woodman.

Chapter XV

Saint Peter shut us out

Father O'Bride's complaints about the school's athletic rivals are all jokes about the saints and martyrs the rival schools are named after:

• Saint Peter is said to be in charge of the gates of heaven
• "we spanked Saint Theresa": Teresa of Ávila wrote about her religious visions using what some might consider kinky imagery ("so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it")
• "Saint Bart massacred us": the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre
• "Cosmas & Damian took a double-header": Saints Cosmas and Damian were beheaded
• "singed by St. Joan": Joan of Arc was burned at the stake
• "slaughtered by Holy Inno's": the Holy Innocents were the babies legendarily massacred by Herod
• "a no-hitter surprise from St. Sebastian": after miraculously surviving being shot full of arrows, Saint Sebastian was martyred by being beaten with clubs.

discount stuff from Iraq or is it Iran

As we see later in Part 2, it's possible that "Charlie"'s shoddy goods aren't coming from anywhere overseas at all.

Vincent, who put his ear to the sunflower to hear the roaring of the sun

An unusual version of the life of Vincent van Gogh.

I, Robot

Short story collection by Isaac Asimov, written from 1940 to 1950. Most of Asimov's robot stories were based on logic problems arising from his fictional "Three Laws of Robotics", supposedly unbreakable behavioral rules that sometimes caused impossible dilemmas for the robots.

That Hideous Strength

The 1945 novel by C.S. Lewis, a religious science fiction/fantasy thriller that was his somewhat less successful sequel to Perelandra. It doesn't have any robots in it, but it does have an insane mutated severed head being kept alive in a lab in order to communicate with demons.

Chapter XVI

in this house at Bethany ... poured oil all over him

In the Gospel of John, Mary of Bethany (Lazarus's sister) anoints Jesus with perfume.

the Flight into Egypt ... the Deadly Desert

Roderick is associating the Biblical story of Exodus with the lethal wasteland first mentioned in Ozma of Oz.

wasn't Bethlehem where the steel came from

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was a major center of steel production until the 1980s.

Limbo, with a bunch of yelling babies around

Catholic theologians have sometimes proposed that infants who died without being baptized would go to the Limbo of infants.

WORD .... MEAT

An example of Lewis Carroll's game "Word-links", also called word ladder or word golf.

How can they program a robot to obey some dumb law

Roderick's basic objection to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics is addressed from a different, much darker angle in Sladek's later novel Tik-Tok. Roderick, despite not being programmed with any rules other than a desire to learn and make sense of things, is basically a nice guy; the title character in Tik-Tok, once he realizes that there's no way his ethical "asimov circuits" could really work as described, becomes a murderous sociopath (and takes advantage of other robots who still believe in the Three Laws by using loopholes much like the ones Roderick thought of, such as misleading them about who is or isn't a human being).

the first real bionic man wasn't even scratched in that plane crash

The 1970s TV hero Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man.

Mr. O'Smith later tells a similar story about himself— some of the parts he lost were not due to injury, but hospital-acquired infection— in Part 2.

Chapter XVII

Another yard of Frazer

Pa is complaining that Ma cites The Golden Bough too often.

Chapter XVIII

the Asimov story "Satisfaction Guaranteed"

A 1951 story (not included in I, Robot) in which a woman falls in love with a humanoid robot which pretends to return her affection in order to avoid hurting her feelings.

tachypomps ... sensters

"The Tachypomp" was an 1874 science fiction story that described, among other things, an "Android" that could write sonnets (although the "tachypomp" was not actually the robot, but a different invention). The Senster was a computer-controlled sculpture built in 1970.

Rogers and his ultra-modern kitchen ... I tried to get into his freezer

This will not be the last time that Allbright fails to notice important evidence related to the Campus Ripper murders; it happens again early on in Part 2.

The Adding Machine .... Elmer Rice

A 1923 play about the death and afterlife of a man driven mad by automation.

this psychic Matthew Manning

Manning claimed to be able to draw in the styles of various famous artists using some psychic ability.

Fascinating article there by this J. Hannah

The lengthy list of vaguely robot-related cultural references in Dr. Hannah's article is similar to her ramblings in Book One, but the Orinoco Institute analysts are more impressed than Hannah's colleagues were. Ironically, they see her interest in the subject as a sign of pro-robot sentiment, even though she said much the same kinds of things when she was anti-robot.

That's Leo Bunsky

The first and last mention of Leo Bunsky so far was in the first chapter of Book One.

Leo's disembodied existence is a common scenario in both philosophy and science fiction.

Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, an abstract sculpture whose metal components remind Ma Wood of "nutmeg graters."

Chapter XIX

Ramon Llull .... he made up all these wheels

Examples of Llull's wheels.

Malleus Maleficarum

A 15th-century witch-hunting manual.

...essor Rogers is still at large

Although the serial killer subplot in Roderick is so far in the background that the discovery of the Campus Ripper's identity doesn't even start with a full sentence (and Rogers never gets a first name), Sladek seems to have come up with the "insane scholar serves human flesh to his colleagues" scene decades before Hannibal.

The story the TV repairman the disc jockey the waitress .... waited on humored told

I did not try to diagram this gigantic sentence to check that the reduced relative clauses all balance out. You can if you like.

Golden Buff

A joke about the ambiguous pronunciation of "ough".

a removable mask as in Westworld

A 1973 movie in which a murderous robot played by Yul Brynner eventually loses its face.

Chapter XX

Doc Sam ... the touchiest coloured boy

Evidence that "Dr. Death" is really Dr. De'Ath rather than Dr. D'Eath, since De'Ath said in Book One that D'Eath was the white one. This will become a plot point.

I even buy Uncle Ben's rice

Jake thinks he's not prejudiced because the logo on his favorite rice is an African-American man.

A.M.D.G, A.M.D.G.

Initials of the motto of the Jesuits.

Chapter XXI

a drowsy numbness pains his senses as though of hemlock he had drunk

From Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale".

Chapter XXII

seems a little fond of Goldwynisms

Ma is comparing Indica's awkward metaphors to the legendary malapropisms of Samuel Goldwyn.

Chapter XXIII

he doesn't even have enough ideas of his own ... has to ask his wife

A married couple writing popular science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s together under a pseudonym suggests the Golden Age writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore.

Eando Binder ... Nor anybody else who wrote "I, Robot"

Binder wrote a short story by that name in 1939, but as far as I know no other writers used the title until Cory Doctorow did in 2005.

Madame DeFarge ... Jacquard loom

Ben is comparing Madame DeFarge, the tricoteuse in A Tale of Two Cities who marked people for execution by knitting their names in code, to the first programmable loom, which could presumably do the same thing more efficiently but wasn't available until a few years after the French Revolution.

a wire running right into everybody's head

The idea of brain stimulation reward was first described in the 1950s, and quickly became common in science fiction.

Chapter XXIV

It was the best of time, it was the worst of time. Choose one

A semi-quote from the opening of A Tale of Two Cities (previously mentioned in the last chapter). The narrator of that novel was saying that it was both; however, in this case the two options are being compared to the two buttons that Dr. Tarr's pigeon might choose to peck, implying that this decigeon is totally arbitrary.

I'll be the Kladd, you be the Kludd

These were actual titles in the Ku Klux Klan.

Chapter XXV

the happy couple; Jim and the Dean of Persons

Jim is Dean Boag's former secretary, and now her fourth husband (see the first page of Book One, Chapter I).

Chapter XXVI

a young man Ben thought he recognized, until he saw him full-face (without a birthmark)

Ben has once again come close to Roderick without knowing it. He thinks Roderick looks familiar because Roderick now looks like Lyle Tate, who was commissioned by Ma Wood to design Roderick's new head. Ben and Lyle have never appeared together in the book, but presumably Ben saw him around the Minnetonka campus and remembered him because of the birthmark. Roderick's resemblance to Lyle will become a plot point in Part 2.

the Shah was a puppet

The Shah of Ruritania is being compared to the Shah of Iran, the US-backed dictator who was deposed in 1979.

My name Felix Culpa

Rogers continues to use this alias in Part 2; he may have been the one who wrote it on the skier's leg cast a long time ago, or he may have gotten the idea from reading the cast. Goun, since he was happy to recognize Rogers, presumably hasn't been listening to the radio.

LOUIE HONK-HONK'S DETECTIVE AGENCY

Roderick's childhood friend Louie was last seen in Chapter XIII, when Roderick answered the Die! Die! Your Lordship contest for him and won him $500,000. This is a happy ending.