The Reproductive System

John Sladek?s The Reproductive System is a science-fiction satire about machines that reproduce themselves, which is already rude enough before humanity gets involved. It begins with the sort of brilliant technological idea that makes engineers beam, administrators approve funding, and readers quietly edge toward the exits: self-replicating robots. Because if there is one thing history has taught us, it is that making a machine capable of making more of itself will certainly remain under sensible supervision. The device at the centre of the chaos is meant to be clever, useful, rational and probably filed under ?progress.? Naturally, it begins producing more machines, then more complications, then the sort of expanding mechanical nuisance that turns a good invention into a species-level paperwork crisis. Sladek has great fun with the human talent for building systems nobody fully understands and then acting injured when the system takes the instructions seriously. This is not solemn, chrome-plated science fiction with everyone gazing at the stars and using words like destiny. It is comic, sharp, deranged and deeply suspicious of technological optimism. The future here is not a shining avenue but a workshop full of badly anticipated consequences. Scientists tinker, institutions blunder, machines multiply, officials fail to grasp the obvious, and human stupidity proves, once again, to be the most renewable energy source. The title is beautifully clinical, which makes the absurdity worse. The Reproductive System sounds as if it might be found in a biology classroom, but Sladek applies the phrase to machinery, bureaucracy and society with equal malice. Reproduction, after all, is not automatically a blessing. Sometimes what reproduces is error. Sometimes it is paperwork. Sometimes it is a robot with more confidence than judgement. Sometimes it is the same human folly, freshly manufactured in bulk. Sladek belongs to that gleefully subversive line of science-fiction writers who looked at the genre?s love of technology and asked whether the readers had considered suing. His machines are not merely gadgets; they are satirical instruments, exposing the vanity of inventors, the emptiness of institutional language and the absurdity of assuming intelligence will be present just because complexity has arrived. The robots may be mechanical, but the real automation is human incompetence repeating itself. For readers of satirical science fiction, rogue-machine stories, black comedy, anti-bureaucratic mischief, self-replicating technology and old Gollancz oddities with bite, The Reproductive System is splendid shelf material. It is clever, brisk, strange and maliciously funny in that particular way where the joke keeps pointing at civilisation and asking who approved the design. Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Gollancz hardback about machines making more machines and people making the usual mess of things. No guarantee it will not reproduce if left near other SF books, though frankly the shelf could probably use the company. …