by Sladek, John
‘The Design’ – Ambit #35, © 1968
‘Elephant with Wooden Leg’ – Galaxy, © June 1975, UPD Publishing Corp.
‘Flatland’ – New Worlds Quarterly #5, © 1973
‘The Great Wall of Mexico’ – Bad Moon Rising, © 1973, Thomas M. Disch
‘The Hammer of Evil’ – New Worlds Nine, © 1975
‘Heavens Below’ – The New Improved Sun, © 1975, Thomas Disch
‘The Locked Room’ – New Worlds Quarterly #4, © 1972
‘The Master Plan’ – New Worlds #187, © 1969
‘The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa’ – New Worlds #168, © 1966
‘Scenes from Rural Life’ – Bananas, © 1975
‘The Secret of the Old Custard’ (under the publisher’s title The Babe in the
Oven) – IF, © November 1966, UPD Publishing Corp.
‘Undecember’ – Bananas, © 1976
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Also by John Sladek
Novels
The Reproductive System (1968) (aka Mechasm)
The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970)
Roderick (1980)
Roderick At Random (1983)
Tik-Tok (1983)
Bugs (1989)
Wholly Smokes
Collections
The Steam-Driven Boy (1970)
Keep The Giraffe Burning (1977)
Alien Accounts (1982)
The Lunatics Of Terra (1984)
Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek (2001)
John Sladek (1937 - 2000)
John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937 but moved to the UK in 1966, where he became involved with the British New Wave movement, centred on Michael Moorcock’s groundbreaking New Worlds magazine. Sladek began writing SF with ‘The Happy Breed’, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and is now recognized as one of SF’s most brilliant satirists. His novels and short story collections include The Muller Fokker Effect, Roderick and Tik Tok, for which he won a BSFA Award. He returned to the United States in 1986, and died there in March 2000.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © The Estate of John Sladek 1977
All rights reserved.
The right of John Sladek to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11062 5
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
* Written with a 307-word vocabulary: the 300 Key Words listed in A Second Ladybird Key Words Picture Dictionary and Spelling Book by J. McNally (Wills & Hepworth, Loughborough, 1966), and seven proper nouns.
* See Borges, ‘A New Refutation of Time’ where ‘Borges’ appears to doubt his own reality.
* And bulletproof, another legacy of poor Rogers.
* War god of the Fon.
* The other bunkhouses were Shirley Temple, Margaret O’Brien, Butch Jenkins. Baby Leroy, Bobby Driscoll, Jackie Cooper, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Luana Patten, Mickey Rooney, Dean Stockwell and Skippy Homeier.
* Lambs: a vigilante group borrowing rhetoric and enthusiasm from the late ‘silent patriot’, S. Agnew: ‘They call us pigs, but we are really sacrificial lambs. We will not bandy epithets, but gladly give our lives to sweep this country clean of its plethora of pusillanimous liberals and their drug-pushing, parasitical radical associates.’
