New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek
Reviews and Comments
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Michael Dirda in The Washington Post Books department, 1 May 2019: “[...] John Sladek could hardly restrain his restless and kaleidoscopic genius. Sladek, who died in 2000, produced the best parodies in sf (try ‘Solar Shoe-Salesman,’ which sends up Philip K. Dick); deadpan satire (Arachne Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac); intricate locked-room mysteries (featuring detective Thackeray Phin); a wonderfully entertaining study of pseudoscience (The New Apocrypha); and the brilliant Roderick, or The Education of a Young Machine and Tik-Tok, the latter a tour de force of gallows humor, reminiscent of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. As you might guess, New Maps: More Uncollected John Sladek, edited by David Langford (Ansible Editions), is a companion volume to Maps (2003). Together these wide-ranging collections gather stories, essays, book reviews, journalism, poems, playlets, recipes, comics and numerous other Sladekian oddments. Included in New Maps is a Ronald Reagan cut-out paper doll and the delightful ‘Seven Unexplained Mysteries of Our Time (With Explanations).’ If you were to mix Dave Barry’s humor with Georges Perec’s limitless ingenuity, you’d still fall short of the actual John Sladek.”
Ian Hunter in Interzone #282, July/August 2019: “Sladek was one of those writers who could write anything, from satire to locked room mysteries to studies of pseudoscience and black, black humour. [...] his laser-guided insightful eye with a twinkle in it is missed [...] Hats off to David Langford for pulling this together [...] for as it is often said, if you haven’t read Sladek, you are in for a treat.”
Jonathan Cowie in SF² Concatenation (undated): “What does come across is a fiercely intelligent, no nonsense person that occasionally, just occasionally, has a twinkle of fun in his eye. / I have to say that his book and film reviews are less reviews and more critiques. It is likely that today’s SF readers will have themselves read some of the works ‘reviewed’, which makes Sladek's take interesting in that you can see whether or not you agree. I have to say, more often that not I did but also I found that he gave me something I never thought of: an interesting new perspective irrespective of whether or not I concurred. / And the man can write. He has a sharp, penetrating way with words.”