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    The Complete Roderick
    Unavailable
    The Complete Roderick
    Unavailable
    The Complete Roderick
    Ebook799 pages12 hours

    The Complete Roderick

    By John Sladek

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Never before published in its entirety in the United States, The Complete Roderick is John Sladek's masterpiece. Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity.

    The Complete Roderick is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by The Encyclopedia of ScienceFiction as "the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Group
    Release dateJan 4, 2005
    ISBN9781590209325
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for The Complete Roderick

    3/5

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    • 4/5
      What a wonderful, frustrating read!The Complete Roderick is a very funny book, at times with delicious absurdity, but more often than not in a bleak, satiric way that takes aim at an amazingly diverse range of targets. Think "I, Robot" meets "Catch-22," and you won't be far wrong. It also offers lots of oddball supporting characters, who seem to pop in and out without ever going anyplace.The book has many moments of brilliance, including chapters that could stand alone as miniature masterpieces. But unfortunately it doesn't hang together all that well as a novel. It also eventually begins to feel rather repetitive. How many times do we really need to go through O'Smith being thwarted in an effort to knock off our protagonist?This is a book that could have been a masterpiece, but doesn't quite get there. It might have worked better as a shorter episodic "mosaic" novel. Or benefited from some aggressive editing.Still, I am glad I read it.