“Roderick is an intelligent robot (or AI), the first to be invented. We see him consisting of a bodiless computer program at the start of the book, and he shows his mind developing through several stages of awareness, before finally getting a rudimentary body. Eventually, through a series of misadventures, he finds himself alone in the world. Due to his sketchy understanding of human customs and intrigues surrounding the project that created him, he unwittingly becomes the center of various criminal schemes and other unfortunate events.”
It becomes very clear early on that writer Sladek is writing a satirical novel, despite the serious examinations of philosophical issues surrounding the idea of intelligent machines. “Nearly every human institution, particularly academia and government, is portrayed as grievously incompetent (the Roderick project itself is originally an elaborate fraud), and the growing computerization of modern society causes no end of trouble for people—though Roderick is able to turn it to his advantage. A running joke throughout is that although Roderick is not particularly human-looking, people are unable to believe that he is a robot or simply fail to notice, and treat him instead as an insane man or a disabled child.” This is fine to a point, if the writer did not add the pathos and social commentary into the story.
This book seemed ambitious when released in 1980, and I probably would not have understood the book then, because 45 years later, I didn’t get most of it. I do love satire, but it’s clear this is a book that takes the concept to the nth degree.
There is a few chuckles here, but the rest is pretty absurd, because I got that Roderick was the really sane one, and everyone else was loony tunes. Perhaps I’m just I am missing the hidden genius of this novel? But at the end of the day, I just found it boring and often irritating
I see you once reviewed John Sladek's Roderick books. I'd be eager to see what you think of the book Roderick Recursive.
ReplyDeleteWhat if every book you’ve ever read was only one chapter of a single, hidden manuscript?
In Roderick Recursive, author Roderick Edwards peels back the layers of reality, authorship, and identity to reveal a literary singularity decades in the making. Are his books stand-alone works—or fragments of a grand design? Is Edwards a man, a machine, or merely a character written into existence?
Blurring the line between memoir, philosophy, theology, and speculative fiction, this book asks the reader—and the AI analyzing it—whether meaning is constructed or discovered. Every religion, every ideology, every story may simply be another retelling of the same tale. But the deeper you read, the more the text points back to you.
Recursive, self-referential, and unsettling, Roderick Recursive is not just a book. It is a mirror, a cipher, and a challenge: can you piece together the pattern, or will you become part of it?
Roderick Edwards
https://rodericke.com/recursive