Maps

by John Sladek

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Maps is the definitive collection of John Sladek's uncollected work put together by his friend, fellow writer and critic David Langford who also provides an introduction. It includes all the solo stories - science fiction, detective puzzles, mainstream, "non-fact" pieces - as well as poems, playlets, pseudonymous fiction, all the short collaborations with Thomas M. Disch (including three never previously published) and some witty autobiographical essays. Sladek, was as good a writer of satire as Vonnegut, and without the Vonnegut mannerisms. Unfortunately he never received the appropriate credit, except from a small following of devoted readers.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 301

Sample

John Sladek is remembered as one of the cleverest, wittiest writers ever to work in, or around the edges of, the science fiction
field. This book of his previously uncollected stories takes its title Maps from a project which he never completed, perhaps never began, but talked about enthusiastically in the early 1980s:


It will be something between a novel and a set of linked stories, but the linkages are going to be fairly complex, with stories
inside stories, stories completely permeating one another, a character in one story turning into, say, an event or a place
in another – in other words, the notion of mapping is going to predominate. If all this sounds vague and confusing, it is
because I’m still vague and confused about it – and will be until I start work on it. (Interview, Science Fiction Review #46, 1983)


The present volume isn’t the Maps which Sladek intended, although (like Nabokov’s antihero in Pale Fire, imposing his own Ruritanian obsessions on a text which has nothing to do with them) he might well have enjoyed himself hugely
and wasted a great deal of time concocting a labyrinthine explanation of how all the stories and miscellanea here are “really”
linked by subtle connections, exactly as described above. Maps, puzzles, codes, wordplay, number games and webs of insane
sophistry always intrigued him, and cropped up again and again in his fiction.


This is especially evident in the early pieces collected here. “The Lost Nose: A Programmed Book” was produced in a handmade
edition of one copy as a Christmas gift to amuse the girlfriend who later became his first wife Pamela Sladek. (She recalls
that he later made further little books of a similar nature for their daughter Dorothea; other friends also received such
one-off treats.) Perhaps inspired by Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”, its high-spirited multiple-choice narrative prefigures
the whole 1980s publishing category of interactive SF and fantasy gamebooks. Particularly Sladekian is the painstaking and
entirely unnecessary map or flowchart of possible routes through the story. His friend Charles Platt remembers:


John and I shared a similar weakness for codes, palindromes – word games and number games in general. I corresponded with
him about this; both of us realized it was a total waste of our time, yet neither of us knew how to stop. John originated
multi-threaded fiction, so far as I know (it would be termed “hyperlinked” today), and he and I both produced some early samples. A couple
of his were published, after his initial effort was written as a gift for his then-girlfriend, Pamela. […] He lived at our
house at 271 Portobello Road for a year or so, during which time I tried to understand what drove him as a writer. I feel
the real dilemma in his life was his difficulty in channeling his obsessiveness productively. (E-mail, April 2000)


“The Lost Nose” in its original form includes collages and gummed-in artifacts such as watch cogs, paperclips and cigarette
cards – three identical cards from a famous-cricketer series, so the Royal Advisers of section 31 are in fact the Three W.G.
Graces. The narrative incidentally links to other early Sladek stories via a rare instance of his recycling a tiny joke. Genetically mutated (“uplifted”) foxes who aren’t sure whether their children
are called pups or cubs also feature in “Is There Death on Other Planets?” and his Cordwainer Smith parody “One Damned Thing
After Another”, both collected in The Steam-Driven Boy.


Another example of hyperlinked storytelling, “Alien Territory”, was presumably omitted from past collections owing to the
difficulty of reproducing its striking original appearance in book form. The story filled a double-page spread in the large
format used by Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds in 1969, laid out by the designer Charles Platt as a chequerboard of paragraphs, four across, nine down. Arrows indicated
the reader’s choices at each step: to read the next paragraph down (with an extra link from the bottom of a column to the
top of the next) or across (doubling back from the end of a row to the start of the next).


The brief “In The Distance” was created for the little magazine Concentrate, whose editor Mike Butterworth explains: “My idea was a magazine of condensed writing, and John was very taken by it.” This
story has a peculiarly mechanical rhythm which reminded me of my own attempts at computer software that would “write” fiction.
I guessed that in those pre-home-computer days Sladek had constructed it by inserting randomly or semi-randomly chosen nouns,
adjectives, and adjectival phrases into a sentence template, perhaps governed by dice throws. Platt confirmed:


That is precisely how John did it. I remember seeing his “writing engine”, consisting of bits of paper with vocabulary, some
sentence construction rules, and, yes, dice. He was the Charles Babbage of interactive fiction! (E-mail, October 2000)


Sladek mentioned in a letter to Butterworth that he’d worked with a 200-word vocabulary for “In the Distance”. His later,
longer story “A Game of Jump”, collected in Keep the Giraffe Burning, used only the 300 words of the children’s primer A Second Ladybird Key Words Picture Dictionary and Spelling Book (1966), plus a few character names. A far smaller significant vocabulary emerges in the poem “The Brusque Skate”, which imitates the spirit if not the form of the sestina by shuffling
and mutating a very few key words and phrases. (One private joke in Sladek’s 1983 novel Tik-Tok is the appearance of “Brusque skate!” as a fragment of uncomprehended speech.) The author himself later stated his ambitions
for what might be called automatic writing:


I want, as soon as possible, to write a novel in collaboration with a computer. Some computer writing has been done, but mostly
using a computer as a high-speed typewriter, recombining simple phrases. What I have in mind is a little more complicated.
I feel I ought to do my part in helping machines take over the arts and sciences, leaving us plenty of leisure time for important
things, like extracting square roots and figuring pay rolls. (Back flap biography, The Müller-Fokker Effect, 1970)


It is clear that John Sladek’s literary influences largely lay outside the SF circles where he was most appreciated: William
Gaddis and Joseph Heller, for example, rather than Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. Joycean portmanteau constructions like
“creedchair cumfarts” are evident amid the general haze of literary allusiveness in the stream-of-consciousness prose poem
“A Section from the Adventures of I.E.M.” – apparently his earliest published fiction, dating back to 1963 and described as
a section from a novel.


Whatever I’m reading at the moment seems to influence whatever I’m writing. I found some time ago that I have to be careful,
while working on a novel, what I read. People may notice the influence of Joseph Heller in “Masterson and the Clerks” or of
William Gaddis in Roderick. Recently I’ve been reading Angela Carter and John Cheever, so I suppose my work will soon have clouds of purple perfume
or else exhilarating sunlight on suburban lawns … (Interview, Science Fiction Review #46, 1983)


His use of elaborate structures, artificial constraints and controlled randomness echoes the practices of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentialle) literary group founded in 1960, whose members have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. For example,
the latter’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) took its plot skeleton from the random fall of Tarot cards.


Thus the Sladek poem “Down His Alarming Blunder” inflicts a very Oulipo-esque “controlled accident” on Andrew Marvell’s “To
His Coy Mistress” by replacing most of its nouns with other nouns, verbs with other verbs, and so on. As with “In the Distance”,
the aspect of which the author retains control – choice of vocabulary – still gives it an ineluctably Sladekian flavour. (The
fourth from last line is missing, accidentally omitted by either Sladek or the original publisher.) In the very short prose
“Radio Cats”, the imposed constraint is less obvious: it was written for an anthology of Drabbles, defined as stories of precisely
100 words.


The challenge of devising meticulously dovetailed plots lured Sladek into the realms of detective fiction. In 1972 The Times newspaper and the publishers Jonathan Cape ran a competition for best unpublished detective story, drawing well over a thousand
entries, and the judges – who included Agatha Christie and Tom Stoppard – gave the £500 prize to Sladek’s locked-room mystery
“By an Unknown Hand”. This has apparently not been reprinted in English since the resulting Times Anthology of Detective Stories (1972). The competition win also brought him a contract to write a full-length crime novel, Black Aura (1974), later followed by Invisible Green (1977). Both these novels and the original story feature the same conscientiously eccentric detective, Thackeray Phin, as
does the short squib “It Takes Your Breath Away” (1974), syndicated in various London theatre programmes and never before
reprinted.


Unfortunately, as our author soon discovered, the 1970s were not a good time for displays of outrageous detective ingenuity:

Those two novels suffered mainly from being written about 50 years after the fashion for puzzles of detection. I enjoyed writing
them, planning the absurd crimes and clues, but I found I was turning out a product the supermarket didn’t need any more –
stove polish or yellow cakes of laundry soap. One could starve very quickly writing locked-room mysteries like those. SF has
much more glamour and glitter attached to it, in these high-tech days. (Interview, Science Fiction Review #46, 1983)


Maps assembles all the previously uncollected solo fiction known to have been published by John Sladek, while excluding stories
featured in the four collections published during his lifetime: The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (1973), Keep the Giraffe Burning (1978), Alien Accounts (1982) and The Lunatics of Terra (1984). (The US The Best of John Sladek consists entirely of selections from the first two.)


There are two partial exceptions to the latter rule. “The Future of John Sladek”, written for the Bananas magazine feature “Monumental Supplement: The Future”, thriftily incorporates his Alien Accounts story “198-, a Tale of ‘Tomorrow’” – but also extends it. “Some Mysteries of Birth, Death and Population that Can Now Be
Cleared Up” was heavily cut and rewritten as “Great World Mysteries” (1982), collected in The Lunatics of Terra; the even more frenetically comic original seems well worth preserving.


Just to make life more complicated for bibliographers, a third permutation of the “Mysteries” material appeared in 1983 as
“John Sladek’s List of Seven Great Unexplained Mysteries of our Time (with Explanations)”. As well as re-using text from both
earlier versions, this addresses three further questions that were merely posed in “Some Mysteries …”:


The trouble with science today is that it has answers to all the wrong questions. No one is asking whether the laser is or
is not a beam of coherent energy in the visible spectrum. No one is desperate to know what it is that ontogeny recapitulates,
or whether E really equals mc2. It is high time that scientists came out of their ivory laboratories, stopped messing around with silicon chips and transactional
analysis, and tackled some of the real mysteries of our time:


1. What’s so great about the Great Pyramid? Nearly everything. It contains millions or billions of pounds of stone or is it tons, I haven’t got the exact figures here
but it’s very big. Modern scientists have discovered that if you put a razor blade under the Great Pyramid, it will remain sharp throughout the night! Because of the great weight of the Pyramid, however, this experiment has not yet been carried out. Still, rumours have it
that a consortium of razor-blade companies are trying to buy up the patent and suppress it.


2. How did Nostradamus manage to predict the rise of Clement Attlee? Oddly enough, he didn’t. This is one of the rare instances where the great sage of Provence made a wrong prediction. On the
other hand, writing in 1556, he was right about millions of other future events, such as:


(a) Napoleon’s invention of brandy, 1769.

(b) Nepal invades Peru, 1999 (or World War Three, 1966).

(c) Martian invasion of California (undetected) last year.

(d) Stock market steady for a time.

3. Could Stonehenge be a primitive computer, used by the Druids for figuring payrolls? That must remain a mystery, an imponderable conundrum, a riddle wrapped in a dark enigma, an impenetrable veil of cloud-shrouded
o’ercast secret of Sphinx-mute Nature. (The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists ed. Maxim Jakubowski and Malcolm Edwards, 1983)


Happily, the mass of assorted material in Maps shows Sladek’s wide range. His enthusiasm for parody is much in evidence, mimicking the awful glibness of religious tracts
in “Bill Gets Hep To God!”, reviewing Michael Moorcock via a condensed non-story in “The Entropy Tango”, and running riot in “Machine Screw” – where a million Hollywood scenarios about
escaped Frankensteinian menaces are boiled down to a gleefully salacious reductio ad absurdum. “What kind of decent American would go and – and rape a Cadillac convertible?” Some tics often found in 1960s New Wave SF are affectionately pastiched in “Comedo”, with its brief
chapters, sinisterly obsessive details, discontinuities, and non sequiturs; but auctorial cheerfulness somehow keeps breaking
in.


“Machine Screw” and the joke news story “Robot ‘Kiss of Life’ Drama” also share the ever-recurring Sladek theme of robots;
the word itself fleetingly appears in “Down His Alarming Blunder”. Another repeated theme, logical quibbles and paradoxes, flavours items like the self-referential “The Misinterpreted Letter” and “Page”, not
to mention a minimalist poem called “The Monkey’s Paw Effect” which may as well be quoted in full at this point:


Today I am thinking about “The Monkey’s Paw”

And today I am

(Just Friends #1, 1969)


“Peabody Slept Here”, which like “Machine Screw” is an excursion into the theoretically raunchy territory of men’s magazine
fiction, offers a more genial time-travel romp that deals almost sardonically with the expected wish-fulfilment fantasy of
the easy lay. Sladek’s last published story “Reinventing the Wheel” also plays around with the past, demurely suggesting that
alternative history moves (as it were) in cycles. His more characteristically comic-melancholy, alienated view of life pervades
“Love Among the Xoids”, an evocation of contemporary outsiders who form what the Encyclopedia of Fantasy would call a wainscot community or pariah elite. A horrified fascination with what the American Dream has become – central
to his SF novels, from The Reproductive System in 1968 to Bugs in 1989 – drives the black farce of “Dining Out”.


The fruitier and nuttier fringes of pseudoscience, wittily explored at book length in his nonfictional The New Apocrypha (1973), are revisited in “Some Mysteries of Birth, Death and Population that Can Now Be Cleared Up” and “Stop Evolution In
Its Tracks!”. And the darkness underlying his finest comedies – such as Roderick (1980) and Roderick at Random (1983) – fuels wild satire in the semi-fictional essay “Goodbye, Germany?” and holds unremitting, uncomic sway throughout
his long, grisly reworking of the Hansel and Gretel story, “Blood and Gingerbread”. A Grimm tale, indeed.


Additional bonus items gathered here in Maps are fourteen poems and playlets written by Sladek early in his career (including an apparent novel extract most easily classified
as a prose poem), eleven lightweight but entertaining collaborations with his close friend Thomas M. Disch, eight specimens
of commercial fiction written under pseudonyms, and a final handful of more or less autobiographical pieces under the heading
“Sladek on Sladek”.


The early Disch collaboration “The Floating Panzer” is a broad James Bond spoof which the surviving author now regards as
“genuinely … unexciting.” Sladek produced a solo sequel, “The Mogul and the Maneaters”, never published and since apparently
lost. Three previously unpublished stories that they wrote together are described by Disch as follows:


… “United We Stand Still,” a lowbrow lampoon of featherbedding practices in American unions, inspired in part by John’s job
as a railway switchman, and two “Green Magician” adventures (the Green Magician was the hero of my solo tale, “Dangerous Flags”), “The Marching Raspberries” and “Sweetly Sings the Chocolate
Budgie”. Those two are in a vein of gorblimey gadawfulness that never had a market then but are prescient of such latter-day
media hits as PeeWee’s Playhouse … I am tickled to think that those ancient rejections may find their happy ending! (E-mail,
February 2001)


In fact the Green Magician mutated into the Pink Avenger for “The Marching Raspberries”, but the vein of whimsy is hideously
similar.


The six short-short stories opening the “Sladek Incognito” section appeared in Titbits, a weekly British tabloid magazine combining media-star adulation, shock horror exposés and pictures of nice girls in (frequently
nothing but) tights. For a few years from 1967, Titbits regularly ran short fiction. SF writers swarmed aboard when the feature was launched as “Into the Fantastic … a season of
science fiction”. By the time Sladek discovered this market the theme had switched to thrillers, each story building towards
a sting-in-the-tail surprise finale in one page. The Sladek/Disch “The Way To a Man’s Heart” filled this specification neatly
and was reprinted in the second “season of thrillers” issue.


It would seem that Sladek intended all his subsequent solo contributions to appear as by Dale Johns, but ever-slapdash Titbits ran the first three under his own name. Of course they are potboilers, accurately aimed at a market that wanted nothing more,
but gleams of talent and ingenuity shine through. “The Switch” draws on his railway experience, as mentioned above by Disch.
In his own words:


I left school in 1960, to take up the series of jobs which usually characterize writers and other malcontents – short-order
cook, technical writer, railroad switchman, cowboy, President of the United States. (Back flap biography, The Müller-Fokker Effect, 1970)


Meanwhile, the admired SF magazine If published the two 1968 “John Thomas” stories (Sladek’s bibliographer Phil Stephensen-Payne speculates that using the author’s
first and middle name only may have been an error). “In the Oligocene” later had French and Spanish translations credited
to John Sladek. “Publish and Perish”, which appeared one month earlier, did not – but if two stories appearing in successive
months with the same byline incorporated into title art by the same illustrator (“Brock”) were in fact by different authors,
one feels that Ifs editor would have commented on the oddity.


Significant omissions from Maps consist mostly of miscellaneous nonfiction: essays, speeches, book reviews, letters, and even a few recipes. The recipes,
incidentally, are straightforward and practical despite titles like “Caligula Salad with Muttered Dressing”, and “Accursed
Steak Pie” with its helpful preamble:


It is said that James II was so taken with this dish that he drew his sword and on the spot created it Duchess of Williamsborough.
His successor revoked the title and ordered the luckless pie to be imprisoned in the Tower, guarded by yeomen called “beefeaters”.
(Cooking Out of This World ed. Anne McCaffrey, 1973)


It would be carrying fictional completism to a silly degree to reprint, say, the two one-page bridging passages written to
fill gaps in the MS of Philip K. Dick’s Lies, Inc – an expanded version of The Unteleported Man, published 1984. And as Disch observes, however wide you fling the net it’s hard to capture Sladek entire:


An almost impossible goal since he did so much borderline and ephemeral material, including gift “booklets” for friends on
their birthdays and such. Profligacy of talent is one of the luxuries genius can allow itself, but it’s the bane of editors.
(E-mail, February 2001)


Also omitted are the “Plastitutes” visual features which he devised for New Worlds and Frendz: strip cartoons mingling stock characters from Letraset commercial-art transfers with other images clipped from ads, plus
varyingly surreal captions and dialogue. “Good gosh! IBM is just like a woman!” “Nancy was almost a bean …” “So Brad and
Sally exchanged sexes for the evening –” “The refrigerator was happy to see them, for it had been blinded by a new improved
father …” And so on. The flavour of these pieces is sufficiently represented here by the similar one-page “Plastitone”, from
the 1968 launch issue of Sladek’s and Pamela Zoline’s Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry. (“Anyone using the name Ronald Reagan without our permission had better watch it.”) All its human figures can be found in
contemporary Letraset catalogues.


Another oddity discovered during Maps research was that Sladek’s 1966 story “Is There Death on Other Planets?”, collected in The Steam-Driven Boy, was published in different form in the little Minneapolis magazine region (issue 4, Fall 1965). Though generally similar, the 1965 draft strove for humour through anachronistic dialogue of the “Prithee,
varlet” persuasion, later wisely removed. For example, when the hero protests that he can’t become a spy because he doesn’t
look like one, the response is:


(1965) “’Sblood,” spat the man in the green hat. “Thy ignorance passeth all understanding. ’Tis but as the great n-tuple spy Waldmir Vichlier said, to wit: ‘More than anyone else, a spy must look like anyone else.’ …”


(1966) The man in the green hat sighed. “You’ll do. As the great n-tuple agent Waldmir said …” (etc.)


John Sladek was born in Iowa on 15 December 1937, grew up in Minneapolis, lived in London for most of his creative writing
life, and returned to the American Midwest when his marriage to Pamela broke down in the mid-1980s (although they remained
on good terms). Thereafter, though continuing to write, he worked as a technical author and published little fiction. The
major exception was Bugs, his final novel to see print, in which by no coincidence at all an English immigrant seeks work as a technical writer in
the Midwest and helplessly sinks into the fantasticated comic inferno of modern America.


Sladek married Sandra Gunter (Sandy Sladek) in 1995, enjoyed good years with her, and died from an inherited lung condition
on 10 March 2000. It was far too soon; he was only 62. As Disch said:


… it was just bad genetic luck. His lungs became gradually less and less elastic – pulmonary fibrosis. For a while he lived
on the hope that he might be assigned a place in the waiting line for lung transplants. Isn’t it dumbfounding to think that
there can be such a procedure? But within a few days of his learning that that was not in the cards he just sighed away his
life. (WNYC radio broadcast, 2000)


The characteristic self-deprecating summation he might have made of his own life was affectionately imagined in John Clute’s
obituary:


It is possible to hear the voice of John Sladek describing the career of John Sladek. The voice is slightly husky, hums and
haws as it awaits a moment of inspiration from its owner, then lifts suddenly above the American prairie of its twang as something
extremely hilarious comes down the line. It would be (I will not try to sound like John in full flow, he was too funny and
too savage and too sad to be copied) a joke, sometimes a very great joke.


– Oh, yeah (he could be imagined saying), I remember John Sladek. He was the guy who called the first novel he would acknowledge The Reproductive System, and it wasn’t non-fiction. He was the guy who brought out a second novel with a different firm, and called it The Müller-Fokker Effect, and it wasn’t ever bought because nobody ever dared to try and pronounce it at W H Smith’s. He was the guy whose masterpiece, which was called Roderick, was too big to go into one volume, so his publisher (this was his third sf publisher, by the way, and probably his fifth overall) released it in two vols, the first hardback, the second, three
years later, mass market paperback: demolished, disappeared, invisible. This is the novel David Hartwell of Timescape Books
published the first two thirds of volume one of in the States, as a pb original to be completed in two further instalments
– just before Timescape Books became an ex-desk at Simon and Schuster, which was all the American market got to see of Roderick for years.


– Oh, yeah (he might have continued), I remember John Sladek. He was the guy who published two really good detective novels, starring series detective Thackeray
Phin, with different publishers. He was the guy who published lots of short stories – but the best of them appeared in three mass market paperbacks with titles like Keep the Giraffe Burning, which was not about the desertification of Chad. He was the guy who wrote about Scientology in The New Apocrypha, and his publishers pulled his pants down so the insolent praetorians of The LRON could whup his ass for talking out of turn.
He was the guy who did a novel with Tom Disch called Black Alice – which was not about bussing – and guess what they called themselves? Thom Demijohn. Which is not a name but a portaloo. The Thom Demijohn, “For Loving
Couples”. Bestseller written all over that one! He was the guy who wrote (as James Vogh) a “nonfiction” spoof called Arachne Rising: the Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac, and for the first time in his life his readers believed him. (Ansible #153, April 2000; revised Foundation #79, Summer 2000)


That perpetually self-mocking tone had caused some slight concern in SF circles when Bob Shaw’s 1984 novel Fire Pattern featured a cameo appearance of a sceptical writer about the paranormal, called John Sladek. The protagonist phones this man
in hope of useful information on the supposed phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, but receives only flip answers like
“Well, it’s a whole new category of event that the insurance companies can refuse to pay off for.” Sladek’s sarcastic exit
line is: “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you that spontaneous human combustion is done with mirrors.”


Naturally readers wondered why Bob Shaw, one of the nicest men in the SF world, should be needling a colleague in this way
– until Shaw explained that Sladek had (by invitation) written all his own dialogue for the scene, a parodist unable to resist
spoofing even his own scepticism.


Following Gene Wolfe’s principle of hiding a bonus story where the people who don’t read introductions will miss it, the preceding
pages have been larded with tasty Sladek quotations, fragments and even a “whole” poem. Here, now, are John Sladek’s previously
uncollected stories – and more.


David Langford

April 2001

How to Read the Programmed Book


Begin at the section marked Start.

From time to time you will have to decide what happens next, by choosing a number and turning to that section.


When you have reached The End, go back to your last choice and take a new route, if you like.


There are 21 endings.


A diagram of routes is at the end of the book.

Sta