The Steam-Driven Boy is John Sladek's first collection of brilliant, eccentric, darkly satirical and downright weird science fiction stories. As a bonus it includes his parodies of SF authors, uproariously spoofing Asimov (and the Laws of Robotics), Ballard, Bradbury, Dick, Poe, Cordwainer Smith,...
‘Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing whatever of 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 difficulty giving up their huma...
Wompler's Walking Babies once put Millford, Utah, on the map. But they aren't selling like they used to. In fact, they aren't selling at all and the only alternative to winding the company up is to tap the government for a research grant. And so Wompler Research Laboratories and Project 32 come i...
Bob Shairp--a writer and dreamer--has agreed to be a guinea-pig in a military experiment to find out if his personality can be turned into data and stored on computer. But a computing error quickly destroys Shairp's physical body, leaving his mind stranded in an encoded world. Can the process be ...
The last book by one of the most original, brilliant and under-rated American writers of the 20th century. Like many of Sladek's earlier books, Wholly Smokes is almost impossible to categorize, other than to say it is the fictionalized history of a tobacco company, one which seems to have been pr...