Customer Reviews

The Muller-Fokker Effect

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This book is funny and kind of like Kurt Vonnegut, but meaner, wilder, more dense, vicious, and full of word games. One of the secondary characters is paranoid about Communist spies and "decodes" just about everything he sees for propaganda and orders. I suspect that the typos in the book could be arranged and deciphered into some kind of message. I just read it, and it's already one of my favorite books.

It is, I think, the quiet brilliance of Sladek's word-play that is the most endearing thing about this novel. The plot is about a man who has accidentally been downloaded onto computer tape...or perhaps about the crazed billionaire who collects the reels of tape...or perhaps about the frustrated Men's Magazine publisher...or perhaps about the man's son, Sturgemore, nicknamed "Spot"...or perhaps about a televangelist who replaces himself with an audioanimatron...which happens to be programmatically controlled by one of the reels of tape...

Sladek weaves plots the way Penelope weaved wool on her loom: just when you think you might know what will happen next, it all unravels before your eyes. I think, in the entire novel, only one person really sees what is going on: our computerized protagonist. (Or, just maybe, the drunk Interpol agent!)

And, to drive the point home, firmly yet with love, there is a massive riot in Washington at the end, erupting over race, religion, sexual orientation, and even species-discrimination gets into the act. All of the various plot-lines collide -- violently.

The litany of the lucky millionaires, and the visit to Bibleland, pay for this book just by themselves!