This comic novel about an Englishman lost in the surreal high-tech computer country of America's mid-west describes how the hero Fred Jones goes to America to seek his fortune and ends up with his private life out of control, working for the KGB and people wanting to murder him. Humourist, science fiction novelist, crime writer, sceptical journalist, John Sladek won the London "Times" Detective Story Competition, 1972, and the British Science Fiction Award (best novel) for 1983.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very funny, very dark satire of contemporary America, plus robots,
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This review is from: Bugs (Paperback)
Bugs is Sladek at his most darkly satirical. It's about a British man rather bewilderedly encountering the American scene: as such it reminded me of a couple of books by Amises: Kingsley's One Fat Englishman, and much more closely, Martin's Money, which is a near contemporary to Bugs. All those books are satirical, and Money shares with Bugs a truly bitter edge, though Money is longer, dirtier, more vulgarly over the top.
Bugs opens with Manfred ("Fred") Jones, a failed English novelist, trying to find the offices of Vimnut, a Minneapolis company for whom he hopes to become a technical writer. When he finally finds it (this having been complicated by among other things the company having changed its name) he is hired, after certain mixups, as a software engineer. (I am of course a software engineer, and these aspects of the book were pretty funny and fairly true to life.) It seems that his resume was confused with that of Mansour Jones, a black man fully qualified for the job. Fred is afraid to complain that he isn't qualified, and it soon appears that that doesn't matter. Fred's department is charged with developing a robot officer for the military. His coworkers are variously completely insane, completely idiotic, or simply burnt out. Somehow the robot still manages to get built, though in the manner of numerous Sladek robots (robots were probably his chief SFnal device) it turns out to be murderous in a very funny way. Fred himself has more significant personal problems to deal with. His wife has left him because she can't stand America. Still, before long he has three women on a string, without really trying: a Russian spy, the wife of his boss (who keeps asking him to imitate different famous Englishmen), and a beautiful co-worker with whom he falls immediately and desperately in love, to her initial feminist disgust. Fred also keeps getting fired and rehired, he somehow never gets paid by the company, Mansour Jones hounds him about stealing his rightful job, his insane co-worker tries to kill him ... and of course when the robot escapes he's really in trouble. It's a very funny, very dark book.
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