Editing John Sladek (section)

== Life and work ==
Born in [[Waverly, Iowa]], in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the [[New Wave (science fiction)|New Wave]] movement and published his first story in the magazine'' [[New Worlds (magazine)|New Worlds]]''. His first [[science fiction]] novel, published in [[London]] by [[Victor Gollancz Ltd|Gollancz]] as ''[[The Reproductive System]]'' and in the United States as ''[[Mechasm]]'', dealt with a project to build [[clanking replicator|machines that build copies of themselves]], a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In ''[[The Müller-Fokker Effect]]'', an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. ''[[Roderick (novel)|Roderick]]'' and ''[[Roderick at Random]]'' offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek revisited robots from a darker point of view in the [[BSFA Award]] winning novel ''[[Tik-Tok (novel)|Tik-Tok]]'', featuring a [[sociopathic]] robot who lacks any moral "[[Three Laws of Robotics|asimov circuits]]", and ''[[Bugs (novel)|Bugs]]'', a wide-ranging satire in which a hapless technical writer (a job Sladek held for many years) helps to create a robot who quickly goes insane.

Sladek was also known for his parodies of other science fiction writers, such as [[Isaac Asimov]], [[Arthur C. Clarke]], and [[Cordwainer Smith]]. These were collected in ''[[The Steam-Driven Boy and other Strangers]]'' (1973). Under the [[pseudonym]] of "James Vogh", Sladek wrote ''[[Arachne Rising]]'', which purports to be a nonfiction account of a thirteenth sign of the zodiac suppressed by the scientific establishment, in an attempt to demonstrate that people will believe anything. In the 1960s he also co-wrote two pseudonymous novels with his friend [[Thomas M. Disch]], the Gothic ''The House that Fear Built'' (1966; as "Cassandra Knye") and the satirical thriller ''[[Black Alice (novel)|Black Alice]]'' (1968; as "Thom Demijohn").

Another of Sladek's notable parodies is of the [[anti-Stratfordian]] citation of the ''[[hapax legomenon]]'' in ''[[Love's Labour's Lost]]'' "[[honorificabilitudinitatibus]]" as an [[anagram]] of ''hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi'', [[Latin]] for "these plays, F. Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world", "proving" that [[Francis Bacon]] wrote the play. Sladek noted that "honorificabilitudinitatibus" was also an anagram for ''I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch'', thus "proving" that Shakespeare's works were written by [[Ben Jonson]].

Sladek returned from England to [[Minneapolis]], [[Minnesota]],<ref name="sfencyclopedia" /> in 1986, where he lived until his death in 2000 from [[Diffuse parenchymal lung disease|pulmonary fibrosis]].  He was married twice, to [[Pamela Sladek]], which ended in divorce in 1986, and to Sandra Gunter whom he married in 1994.  He had a daughter from his first marriage.<ref name=langford />