Silicon and steel: The Reproductive System (1968) by John Sladek

Machines run amok in a comic disaster ahead of its time

In the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann did theoretical work on the idea of an artificial entity which - in imitation of nature - would be able to manufacture copies of itself: a self-replicating machine. In the 1980s, the engineer K. Eric Drexler speculated about the application of this concept to tiny nanomachines. He imagined nano-scale robots entering into an endless loop of self-replication, consuming all of the Earth’s biomass in a reproductive frenzy. To Drexler’s consternation, this doomsday notion was popularised as the “grey goo scenario”, in which the planet would be reduced to a lifeless nanite sludge.

The American writer John Sladek (1937 - 2000) took up von Neumann’s ideas and pre-empted Drexler with his comic science fiction novel The Reproductive System (1968). In Sladek’s anarchic full-length debut in the SF field, it is macro-scale robots - what Drexler would later call “clanking replicators” - that run amok. The product of what used to be a failing Utah toy company, these insatiable machines soon set their sights on the metallic feast of Las Vegas, and beyond. 

A showcase for Sladek’s playful, manic style of SF satire, The Reproductive System is a breakneck comic inferno which skewers the military-industrial complex, consumerism, and scientific hubris. While Sladek is now little known, his absurd novel is seriously relevant in a time of careless pursuit of dangerous technologies in the name of profit.

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An American abroad

Sladek had an unusual life and career. He was born in the small city of Waverly, Iowa but moved north to Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1966, aged 29, he relocated to London and remained in the UK for two decades - it was here that he produced almost all of his published work. He collaborated with other Americans in the country, including Pamela Zoline and his close friend and fellow Iowan Thomas M. Disch. Like those writers and J. G. Ballard, he was encouraged to experiment by Michael Moorcock, during his historic period as editor of New Worlds magazine.

Sladek produced relatively few science fiction novels, but a large body of short fiction gathered in collections like Keep the Giraffe Burning (1977). He also restlessly explored other genres and types of writing, including gothic fiction, thrillers, parodies, detective stories, and even Arachne Rising (1979), a book of hoax astrology which apparently convinced some readers that Sladek - writing as “James Vogh” - had unearthed a suppressed, thirteenth sign of the zodiac.

In 1986, Sladek returned to Minneapolis but published little after this point. After he was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, he told only very close family and friends. He died in March of 2000, “a few days after being told he had no chance of being listed for a lung transplant”. Disch said that “he just sighed away his life”. Today, this unique writer and his work are little-remembered, but given his emphasis on runaway technology, blind greed, and the absurd it could be said that we are living in John Sladek’s world.

Into the comic inferno

The Reproductive System is a comic science fiction novel which proceeds at a rapid pace through its two dozen short chapters. The cast of characters is large, a rogues’ gallery of mad scientists, hapless spies, and clueless industrialists with names like Barthemo Beele, Aurora Candlewood, and Professor Toto Smilax. 

The novel opens in the failing town of Millford, Utah, and in the similarly failing Wompler toy company. This ineptly run family business is hobbled by the obsolescence of its one product, a copyright-infringing walking doll based on the likeness of a half-forgotten ‘30s starlet. The Womplers get the bright idea to “get some money from the govermint”, and soon they are feasting at the infinite money trough of the military-industrial complex. Millford becomes the site of Project 32, a “top-sneakret” operation run with an iron fist by the reclusive Professor Smilax.

Staffed by a ragtag band of scientific eccentrics and dropouts, Project 32 soon creates a litter of semi-intelligent, self-replicating machines: the Reproductive System of the title. Driven by their voracious appetite for the metals they need to reproduce, the System’s machines rapidly go rogue but are seemingly stopped by Cal, a plucky graduate of MIT - that is, the Miami Institute of Technocracy. Soon, the machines are again running amok, consuming a small town and later, conquering Las Vegas: "Nevada counted her towns and came up two short.”

Sladek’s chaotic characters are plunged into an erratic caper with human freedom in the balance, a struggle that ranges from the deserts of the American southwest to the streets of Marrakech, where a covert launch might make France the surprise frontrunner in the space race.

Seriously comic

The hectic structure of The Reproductive System is an asset to its humorous approach. Sladek frequently switches perspective and location, turning his attention from one absurd situation to the next so that none of them outstay their welcome. Many chapters have a distinct internal structure of their own, so that they resemble short stories which - outside of a few digressive episodes - mesh into the larger whole. Standout segments include Chapter XIII, “Wonder Journey”, a psychedelic stream of consciousness odyssey into a Las Vegas reshaped by the coming of the self-replicating robots.

Sladek’s characters are not deep personalities, but rather hooks for him to hang ridiculous names and backstories onto. Toto Smilax, for example, was not only named by his parents after the dog in The Wizard of Oz, but also raised as a dog - which explains only part of his bizarre worldview. This extends to recreational dental procedures he performs on himself. These caricatures flit about a warped, funhouse version of the world in the 1960s. Sladek’s Morocco, for example, is a nest of spies seething with paranoia, strafed by friendly fire and spider-webbed with farcical plot and counterplot. 

For all its absurdity, though, The Reproductive System is anchored by a science fiction concept which is not only solid, but quite prescient. In the novel, as in our world, all too many people are content to defer every thought and decision to witless machines. Smilax has ready analogues in today’s crop of self-professed geniuses, supposed captains of industry desperate to use technology to impose their stupidity and ignorance on the world. The Reproductive System itself, of course, is easy to map onto consumer capitalism - a rapacious force that eats up everything in its path, bent on its own reproduction.

The elements of good SF and the anarchic impulse of comedy do not always mesh; but with The Reproductive System, Sladek found a way.

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• The novel was initially published by Gollancz in the UK, under the title The Reproductive System (apparently Sladek’s preference). The initial US edition used the title Mechasm, and was a part of the first series of Ace Science Fiction Specials.
• After Sladek died in 2000, David Langford was involved with the compilation of a memorial volume titled Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek. Langford described the development of this volume in some detail in a piece for his publication Ansible.
• A key early setting of the novel is Altoona, Nevada. While in reality there are eight US states with a town or city called Altoona, Nevada is not one of them.
• The curious name “Smilax” is taken from a genus of plant as well as a nymph in Greek mythology. Thomas Pynchon also used the name for a character in his novel Inherent Vice (2009).