Caught on tape: The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) by John Sladek

Another comic inferno from another stupid timeline

John Sladek’s first science fiction novel, The Reproductive System (1968), is a comic inferno of self-replicating machines running amok. For his second trick, the UK-based American writer doubled down. The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) is a radical intensification of Sladek’s approach, a manic satire bursting at the seams with more, more, more of everything: crazed characters, strange technologies, witty wordplay, and bizarre happenings - all in more settings, viewed from more warped perspectives.

In Sladek’s madcap near-future plot, several individuals and factions scramble to acquire and use a set of four tapes containing the fractured personality of corporate drone Bob Shairp. These tapes are put to various uses, from animating a robot duplicate of a fanatical evangelical preacher to powering a dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Army logistics system. While Shairp, reduced to pure mind, attempts to pull himself together, Washington D.C. comes under assault from an army of idiotic white supremacists.

Even more so than Sladek’s first novel, The Müller-Fokker Effect captures something of the spirit of today’s deeply stupid timeline, depicting an America collapsing under the weight of ignorance, racism, and rogue technologies.

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Disintegration nation

Bob Shairp works for the National Arsenamid corporation as a technical writer (a job Sladek did for a number of years). One day he is replaced in his role by a mildly uplifted dog, and then made into the test subject for an experimental mind uploading device. The procedure is successful, in that Shairp’s mind is copied onto a set of four “Müller-Fokker tapes”, named for their elusive inventor who is thought to have defected to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Shairp’s body is immediately destroyed in a raid by deluded local racists. In this way, poor Bob completes a transition from corporate man to non-corporeal man.

Worse, the four tapes are soon sold off as surplus and scattered to various eccentric new owners. The novel is only minimally concerned with disembodied Bob. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic look at an increasingly crazed United States. The narrative pinballs between numerous bizarre characters, several of them satirical analogues for real figures. Glen Dale is a frustratedly virginal equivalent for Hugh Hefner, ailing preacher Billy Koch is a version of Billy Graham, and Shairp’s wife Marge is recruited as the template for a character resembling Betty Crocker.

Shairp’s son is sent off to a comically regimented military school, the only two members of a dying anti-communist group lurch towards a superannuated love affair, and semi-literate fascist Wes Davis may just get a shot at the presidency. All the while, the Müller-Fokker tapes, which Shairp needs to be whole again, continue changing hands…

Make it make sense

Clearly, The Müller-Fokker Effect will frustrate any reader who insists on a clear and direct style of narrative drive. Even more so than The Reproductive System, this is a manic story, frequently digressive and at times almost cryptic. Episodes focusing on Bob Shairp’s bodiless musings exemplify quite well the experimentalism of the SF “New Wave”, and for better or worse they have little bearing on the outcome.

This is a playful novel, stuffed with references, jokes, wordplay, and the occasional dose of typographical trickery. At one point, Shairp’s homeless consciousness is rendered in the form of a flow chart, as if he is clutching to the ordered familiarity of his former day job. Those familiar with SF of this era will catch some well-worn techniques, such as what Shlock Value has called the “Party Where Everybody is Trying to Be More Weird Than Everybody Else”. There are three of these in The Müller-Fokker Effect.

It is happening here

Being primarily a raucous satire, The Müller-Fokker Effect is a novel steeped in the political and cultural scene of the late 1960s. However, as James Davis Nicoll has stated, it could be rewritten as “a modern day satirical take on current fads and public figures without having to alter the events of the plot significantly”. This may be the most interesting use case for the novel: as a historical document which sets our own times in a new light.

Sladek was responding to his own times, but in a way which anticipates today’s realities, a demonstration of the sometimes troubling repetitions in American history. The political violence in the novel can be seen as a response to the widespread protests of 1968, but also resembles the chaos of January 6, 2021. Sladek deploys humour even in the racist insurrection of the novel’s climax, in which fascist groups disintegrate into countless micro-factions, locked in farcical, mutual recrimination. 

Although The Müller-Fokker Effect is a more anarchic and intense satire than The Reproductive System, there is an unavoidable sense of diminishing returns. Unfortunately, Sladek’s second SF novel “gained little response” (SFE) and he would not release another novel for a decade. In the intervening time, he continued to publish short stories, including in F&SF and New Worlds magazines. Some of these are collected in The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (1973) and the curiously titled Keep the Giraffe Burning (1977). Sladek would eventually return to long-form SF with his most ambitious, and most troubled, novel: the robot saga Roderick (1980 - 1983).

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• The novel references Thomas M. Disch multiple times; Sladek and Disch were good friends and collaborators, who were both born in Iowa and had lived in the UK.
  
• The 1974 French edition of the novel has a superbly bizarre cover featuring a skull-faced Statue of Liberty and Spider-Man shooting up with heroin.
• For more examples of the “Party Where Everybody is Trying to Be More Weird Than Everybody Else”, see The Final Programme (1968) by Michael Moorcock, and The Masks of Time (1968) by Robert Silverberg.