Roderick/Book One

This was originally published as Book One of Roderick, and is also Book One of the combined edition The Complete Roderick.

Summary

In an obscure Midwestern university, a computer science team develops Roderick, the first true artificial intelligence. Unknown to the researchers, the funding for their project was actually part of an elaborate scam, causing the university to drop the project and disavow their work. Lead researcher Dan Sonnenschein secretly ships Roderick out of town, but not before attracting the attention of a ruthless (but inept) assassin sent by the shadowy anti-robot group The Orinoco Institute. Meanwhile, the campus is disrupted by a visit from the dictator of Ruritania, and terrorized by a serial killer.

Chapter I

University of Minnetonka

John Sladek attended the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis/St. Paul; his fictional university is located absurdly in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a small city which in the 1980s had a population of less than 40,000 and was mostly notable for the presence of a couple of large corporate offices.

Boreas ... impregnate the mares

Boreas, Greek god of the north wind, "was said to have fathered twelve colts after taking the form of a stallion, to the mares of Erichthonius, king of Dardania." (Wikipedia)

Dean of Persons

Universities can have many deans of this and that, but "Dean of Persons" is as far as I know not a real title anywhere. The joke may be either that this dean's job has expanded to cover so many types of employees that no more specific word would work, or that this is really the Dean of Students but that the university's very vague attitude toward education has made them reluctant to use the word "students".

The Heart of the Matter

The 1948 novel by Graham Greene, about the ethical and romantic problems of a British military administrator in Africa during World War II.

Digamma Upsilon Nu

Typically for this author's humor, digamma is an archaic letter that is no longer used in Greek. But the main joke here—which is confirmed much later in a throwaway line in Part 2—is that (although its shape has changed many times) one way to write digamma looks more or less like an uppercase F, so the initials would appear to spell out "FUN". That's not quite right though, because upsilon only looks like a "u" in lowercase, so the capital letters would be more like "FYN"; that could either be a mistake, or a further joke about the FUN boys' lack of knowledge of Greek.

blow, blow and crack its nuts

King Lear, Act III, Scene ii: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!"

Wee Interdenominational Kirk O' Th' Campus

"Wee kirk" is Scots dialect for "little church". Sladek was probably thinking of the Wee Kirk o' the Heather, a popular wedding chapel in Las Vegas with no apparent connection to anything Scottish except for its kitschy name.

Avrel Stonecraft

Maybe a stretch, but this name sounds a little like "a Wollstonecraft"— that being the maiden name of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Also, this is a very untrustworthy person, and the name Avrel is derived from "April"; April fool?

Kix boxes

Kix is a breakfast cereal that has been around since 1937, originally manufactured in Minnesota.

There a like because they both sound like they begin with R

The question that Roderick (or whatever piece of Roderick's mind is under development) is trying to answer doesn't appear here, but based on his guesses it's clearly the Mad Hatter's riddle from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

In that book, the Hatter admits that he didn't have any answer in mind, and Alice scolds him for "asking riddles that have no answers." (Carroll didn't have any answer in mind either, though he later proposed two.) However, Roderick has made a worthy effort and found seven answers, starting with superficial ones and working his way up:

• they start with the same sound;
• they both have more than one syllable;
• a raven is a bird, a secretarybird is a bird, and a secretary desk is a writing desk;
• a raven's feathers have quills, and a writing desk could have quill pens;
• Poe wrote "The Raven" at a desk (Sam Loyd proposed this answer to Carroll);
• they're both "inky";
• they're alike because they're in the same riddle and "otherwise you would not ask me why."

Besides being an opportunity for Sladek to indulge in more wordplay, this is also a semi-serious exercise in imagining how a real artificial intelligence might respond to a deliberately irrational language problem. Roderick is demonstrating that he can not only find multiple connections through vocabulary and context, but also think about the questioner's motives based on how he thinks riddles should work; he just doesn't know that some people, like the Hatter, don't play fair.

Thomas Disch uses the same riddle, spoken by a dream version of Thomas Aquinas, in Camp Concentration.

Luke Draeger ... on the Moon

This fictional astronaut is never mentioned again in Part 1, but becomes a major character in Part 2.

Orinoco Institute

The name might refer to the town of Oronoco, Minnesota, whose existence is somewhat ironic since it is a very small town named (with a spelling error) after a very large river. Orinoco was also a character on a popular children's TV show in the UK (where Sladek was living at the time), The Wombles.

Gooood niiight bayyy

Rogers is singing "Lullaby of Broadway", the tune he heard in an elevator a few pages earlier: "Good night, baby / Good night, the milkman's on his way / Sleep tight, baby / Sleep tight, let's call it a day."

just sitting there ... like that pope whatsit in the Francis Bacon painting

Bacon painted many variations on "that pope whatsit", such as Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X and Figure with Meat—all of which are so violently grotesque that only a very odd and/or very unimaginative person would think of them as examples of someone "just sitting there."

the Stanford Shakey

Shakey (named after its physically unsteady structure) was an early robotics project that was noteworthy for its ability to do simple reasoning toward a goal, such as planning the best way to get to an object rather than requiring specific directions.

the well-known observer effect

In keeping with Rogers's frequent use of jargon he doesn't understand, the observer effect is the exact opposite of what he's saying: rather than "the effect on you", it means the effect that you have on the system you're observing.

With Leo Bunsky it was his heart

We never meet Leo at Minnetonka U because he died of heart failure in an earlier stage of the Roderick project, but we haven't seen the last of him.

silhouette of an old Bell transistor

Possibly something like this photo. The invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, replacing the large and unreliable vacuum tube with a small solid-state component, made all modern computer technology possible.

star-gazing κυβερνήτης

Greek (kybernetes) for "pilot" (it can also mean "governor" or "captain", but Sladek is referring here to steering a ship). The field of cybernetics—a broad subject that includes information science and computer science—is named after the root of this word.

mistook Venus (rising now naked from the white foam) for a flying saucer

Sladek is combining the planet Venus, rising over the horizon at night, with the mythological origin of the goddess as seen in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

Venus has always been the cause of many UFO reports due to its surprising brightness. Although Sladek's narrator sees this as a sign of people in a technological age being unfamiliar with the night sky, it's not just a 20th century phenomenon: the Oakland Tribune reported in 1896 that Mars and Venus were being mistaken for a mysterious "airship", causing an irritated astronomer to complain that "People want to believe in the airship, and it is astonishing the way that they deceive themselves."

Chapter II

face with a loop of string in the back .... black nose .... the ears ... look like two ping-pong paddles

As in the earlier riddle game where we saw Roderick's answers but never saw the riddle, we have to guess here what image Roderick is looking at. It sounds like a Mickey Mouse mask.

this person Skinner, what he did with pigeons

The behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner used pigeons in several of his learning experiments, including one where he trained two pigeons to play a very simple version of ping-pong (basically just pecking the ball to make it roll back and forth).

Skinner's extremely mechanistic model of learning—in which all learned behaviors are simply conditioned responses to rewards and punishments, and there is no such thing as understanding, or free will, or even consciousness—doesn't seem to apply to Roderick, who is clearly presented as being conscious (at least once the book switches to a close third-person point-of-view narration) and who learns without being rewarded. Or is learning its own reward for him?

decigeons

Misspeaking "decisions" because he had said "pigeons" a moment ago is a very human thing for Roderick to do.

This mistake shows up again later when Roderick draws a "decigeons tree"—implying that these early test runs, even though the program is being "RESET" after each round, will still somehow leave a trace in the final version of Roderick's mind.

The great Ptoleby ... the Sud's life cycle

Ptolemy built on the work of previous astronomers and mathematicians to create a system for calculating the paths of planets and stars, which was able to produce accurate results despite being based on a completely wrong model of what the planets and stars were and where they were. He was also influential in systematizing beliefs about astrology—although, unlike McGuffey, he did not believe that the positions of the planets had more influence on a person's life than other, more tangible Earthly factors.

The quote here about "the Sun's life cycle" is from his Tetrabiblios, Book I, 10: "the sign which begins with the vernal equinox, that of Aries, is the starting-point of them all, making the excessive moisture of the spring the first part of the zodiac as though it were a living creature, and taking next in order the remaining seasons, because in all creatures the earliest ages, like the spring, have a larger share of moisture and are tender and still delicate." The commentary to this translation points out that "The sign of Aries, defined as the 30° beginning with the vernal equinox, is, of course, very different from the sign considered as the actual constellation. This gave rise to an argument against astrology, first expressed by Origen."

born with a retrograde Mercury

One of the best-known astrological notions in popular culture—now even more so than in Sladek's day—is that during times when Mercury appears to be moving in the opposite of its usual path, its influence causes problems related to communication and business (since those are associated with the god Mercury in mythology). Ptolemy thought that Mercury really was changing direction while it traveled around the Earth; in reality this is an illusion due to both planets orbiting around the Sun in the same direction but at different rates.

Ptolemy doesn't mention the Southern hemisphere .... it's not important

Lyle's question to Dr. McGuffey is one of the simplest and most popular challenges to the premises of astrology (although not one that Origen, living in the northern hemisphere, would have thought of): the traditional meanings of the constellations and planets, although supposedly representing universal truths—sometimes tied to the climate, such as the association of Aries with spring—are derived from European and North African sources who didn't know that the other half of the world has opposite seasons and different constellations. Modern astrologers have thought of various ways to rationalize this, but McGuffey here takes the simplest possible approach by just embracing Eurocentric racism.

Although popular pseudoscience was always one of Sladek's favorite targets (both in fiction, and in his 1973 nonfiction book The New Apocrypha), he focused extra attention on astrology when he wrote Arachne Rising in 1977 under the pseudonym James Vogh. Arachne Rising was a straight-faced prank in which he attempted—with some success—to convince readers that mainstream astrologers had been "suppressing" the existence of a 13th zodiac sign. He followed this with two similar spoofs, The Cosmic Factor and Judgement of Jupiter, before giving up these endeavors as "a gigantic waste of time."

Business Appreciation and Applied Ethics

Applied ethics is a real field of study, but the term was popularized by Peter Singer later in the 1980s. Sladek is more likely making a joke about the University of Minnetonka's lack of academic depth: calling a course "Applied X" often means that the subject X is considered too abstract or difficult for this group of students, so they will instead be learning a smaller, simpler set of skills designed around the requirements of their chosen occupation. In other words, these business students are learning only the minimum amount of ethics that a businessman really needs.

most people couldn't even find Ruritania on a map

Ruritania, although it originally comes from The Prisoner of Zenda, has been so frequently used by other writers that it is now basically "generic fictional country name" with no fixed location.

au fond

French for "in essence" or "deep down" or "fundamentally" (literally, "at bottom"). This shows up frequently throughout the book as a verbal tic of pretentious people; I don't know if Sladek was parodying any particular writer.

build up each movement all along the line

Although Allbright fails to turn his free-association about the Rockettes and the Campus Ripper into poetry, we'll see later in Part 2 that he eventually repurposed it as a scholarly essay, ghostwritten for the person who (unknown to him) was the actual Campus Ripper.

She's getting married again

Ben's ex-wife is Indica Dinks, who will appear in Book Two.

Allen Jones original litho ... Hope it doesn't give people the impression I'm some kind of fetishist

A British Pop artist who tends to focus on idealized female forms, often in sadomasochistic attire. My guess is that Rogers has one of Jones's leg-oriented works, such as Leg-Splash, Sheer Magic, or Yours.

Donovan's Brain

A disembodied telepathic brain in the 1942 novel of the same name.

Moxon's Master

An 1899 short story by Ambrose Bierce, about a chess-playing robot that shows no emotion until losing a game of chess makes it murderously angry.

Bacon's Brazen Head

Roger Bacon was only one of many scholars who were credited with, or accused of, creating a robotic head out of brass or bronze.

peacock fountain of Al-Jazari

This was a real invention by the 12th century engineer Ismail al-Jazari: not a robot, but sort of a combination of a sink and a cuckoo clock, using mechanical figures to dispense soap and towels.

Aquinas, the Swine of Sicily ... accosted by a stranger made entirely of wood, metal ...

Thomas Aquinas (whom Sladek's friend Thomas Disch referenced frequently in Camp Concentration) studied at the University of Paris under Albertus Magnus, who was (probably wrongly) thought to be an alchemist. This story is a garbled version of one in which Aquinas found a lifelike automaton in Albertus's workshop, panicked and destroyed it.

Jim still had his uses

Automation may have made Jim redundant as Dr. Boag's secretary (though he still makes excellent coffee), but we will meet him again near the end of the book.

Tom and Sam Beckett

Thomas Becket, 12th century Archbishop of Canterbury, and the unrelated playwright Samuel Beckett.

styrene on melamine, melamine on nybro, nybro on formica

Types of plastic used widely in the 1970s for furniture and kitchenware.

They burned Stendahl's The Red and the Black

The joke is that this novel is being burned for being either communist (red) or anarchist (black), but those colors had no such meaning in Stendahl's time (he used them to symbolize secular and Church interests, respectively).

just to see Monstro

Monstro is the whale in Pinocchio; this is the student whose father is determined to get him interested in cetology.

expunged the pencilled word ASS

This is left over from Allbright starting to write ASSEMBLY LINE earlier in the scene.

A.M. Turing

Alan Turing invented many fundamentals of computer science while working for the British government. His death is commonly thought to be suicide after he suffered severe persecution for homosexuality.

Claude Shannon ... discovered the spirit of Aristotle in a handful of switches and wiring

Shannon created an early version of digital electronics in 1936, by applying the principles of Boolean logic to circuit design. Boolean logic is not the same as Aristotelian logic but is at least related in spirit.

Pascal, inventing the first calculating machine at the age of eighteen

Blaise Pascal started work on his calculator at 19, but didn't complete it until three years later.

the world is completely destroyed 75,231 times per second

I can't find a reference for this belief. Buddhist tradition does include the idea of various worlds or modes of existence being destroyed and recreated, but not the kind of continuous rate of recreation that Ben seems to be talking about.

Farewell, Walton!

In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein dies shortly after making this speech. This is immediately followed by his creature ("gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions") appearing in Captain Walton's cabin, raging and grieving over the corpse.

invisible flicker at Buddhist worlds (in the VHF band)

The previously mentioned frequency of 75,231 cycles per second, or about 75 MHz, would be in the Very High Frequency range if it were a broadcast signal. VHF frequencies are used for television in the US.

The dark figure of Sidonia

Unclear, possibly a reference to Sidonia von Borcke, an aristocrat executed for witchcraft and immortalized as "Sidonia the Sorceress" in a popular 19th century novel.

a signature on the white plaster: Felix Culpa

Latin for "fortunate fall". In context, this could be taken as a joke about the ski accident that has made "the girl in the ski sweater"'s leg cast so popular. However, there's also a character who goes by this name, although we won't hear it again until the last chapter of Book Two.

a Pisgah perspective

Moses was said to have viewed the Promised Land from "the top of Pisgah", though he never got to the land himself.

Chapter III

use of the pendulum

Aikin is talking about the belief that a pendulum can answer questions or discover locations through dowsing.

His experiments tell him that the next Campus Ripper victim will be found at the Student Union, which is incorrect... but that is where a student commits suicide later in this chapter.

Teilhard de Chardin, Buckminster Fuller ... a kind of engineering approach to consciousness

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's theology included the idea that "evolution is an ascent toward consciousness", while Christ is "the unifying centre of the universe"; Dollsly, in a questionable mental leap, has decided that this is an engineering metaphor. The architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller is best known for popularizing the geodesic dome and the phrase "Spaceship Earth".

Professor Fether .... Dr. George Tarr

Sladek's joke on tarring and feathering is also a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether", in which the doctor and professor don't exist but were made up as a joke by rebellious mental patients. The story has been adapted many times, most recently as Stonehearst Asylum.

the Blackfeet boy, Kut-o-yis

Kut-o-yis/Katoyis, or "Blood Clot Boy", is a legendary hero who was created accidentally by throwing a clot of blood into a pot of boiling water.

Dr. Hannah goes on to list at least a dozen other mythological and historical stories from different eras and traditions that all more or less refer to some kind of artificial or magically created person or animal, or an artistic representation of one:

• Pumiyathon, another name for Pygmalion
• the automatons made by Hephaestus and Daedalus
• the sacrificial effigies used in Roman Vestal rituals and in the Daedala
• medicinal effigies used by the Ewe people, Dayak people, and Baganda
• the "steam-driven wooden pigeon", etc.

None of these are any more relevant to the Roderick project than Blood Clot Boy is; bursting with anthropological knowledge, but lacking any decision-making ability, Dr. Hannah seems to be unable to evaluate any information except by compulsively listing all of the myths it reminds her of.

Friends of mine out West, they're into the environment

These are Indica and Hank Dinks, who will appear in Book Two. The only person from the Roderick project that Allbright knows is Dan; he doesn't know Ben, so he's unaware that Indica is Ben's ex-wife (and based on how Indica later describes Allbright, it's really only Hank who is a friend of his).

William Burroughs ... inventor of the soft machine

The Soft Machine was Burroughs's fourth novel, the first of his "Nova Trilogy". The title refers to the human body.

The C-charged brain is a berserk pinball machine

A quote from Burroughs's Naked Lunch, in which the mad scientist Dr. Benway is describing the effects of cocaine. Benway goes on to say that "C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine." Allbright's earlier quote about the "study of thinking machines" was from the same Benway passage.

Chapter IV

Maggie's drawers

Military slang, thought to date back to World War I, for "you missed the target" (though Sladek is using it more generally to mean "nothing" or "failure"). It refers to a red flag that the monitor at a shooting range would wave from a distance to the shooter as a failure signal; the connection with underwear was due to the music hall song "The Old Red Flannel Drawers that Maggie Wore."

Pianola ... Vonnegut

The Shah is referring to Kurt Vonnegut's dystopian novel Player Piano, set in a near future where automation has made most workers superfluous. As the Shah points out (in what must surely be the least subtle literary reference ever, as it is literally explained by the character who is the reference), his visit to Minnetonka in Roderick is an echo of the subplot in Player Piano where the Shah of Bratpuhr visits the US.

However, Vonnegut's character is a somewhat sentimentally depicted spiritual leader who believes in the inherent dignity of all citizens, and serves as more or less a mouthpiece for the author to criticize the spiritual emptiness of industrial America. Sladek's Shah of Ruritania, on the other hand, is a brutal despot who just wants to acquire all the nicest and most expensive things he can, and is envious of all the industrialization and automation he has seen (one of his goals is "that his only son [Idris] should be processed in a place such as this").

W. Gaddis ... J.R.

J R is a 1975 novel by William Gaddis, whom Sladek cited as one of his favorite authors and an influence on Roderick. I haven't read it, but it's probably safe to say that the Shah has a very inaccurate notion of what it's about.

Mr. Wilde suggested shooting all the piano players

The Shah has misunderstood an anecdote that Oscar Wilde liked to tell from his tour of the US about how, in a bar in a Rocky Mountain mining town, he saw a sign that said "Please don't shoot the pianist; he is doing his best."

Chapter V

the only way you could have got a vote eight-seven in your favor

The detailed vote breakdown on the next page is presented without explanation, leaving it to the reader to puzzle out why Dr. Tarr is wrong.

Basically, Tarr doesn't understand that the committee has used a form of ranked-choice/instant-runoff voting which, due to the way they treated the "neither (no award)" choice, allowed Fong's project to gain second-place votes even from voters who had no first-place preference. Three people voted for "FOT" (1. Fong, 2. neither, 3. Tarr), versus six for "TOF" (1. Tarr, 2. neither, 3. Fong); however, of the six people who put "neither" in first place, five of them put Fong second (OFT) while one put Tarr second (OTF). Since neither Fong nor Tarr had a majority of the 15 first-place votes, the second-place votes were added in, giving Fong an 8-7 victory.

Whether this is a reasonable result or not depends on what the meaning of the "neither" choice was supposed to be: did the "OFT" voters mean that they'd rather not fund any project, but that if they absolutely had to pick one they would prefer Fong, or did they think that the order of the second and third choices made no difference because anything ranked below "no award" is worthless and should never win? As Sladek was probably aware, this is a common source of confusion in voting for the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Awards, which similarly use ranked-choice ballots with a "no award" option.

I had scurvy last year

A vitamin C deficiency would be a predictable result of subsisting on peanut butter.

Micro-Ham

Might be the name of a ham radio hobbyist magazine, or just a magazine for microcomputer electronics hobbyists since "ham" originally just meant "amateur".

as hollow as that chess-playing Turk

The Turk, often called "the Mechanical Turk", was a famous 18th-century fake robot. It appeared to be a machine that played chess under its own power, but it actually had a human operator inside a hidden cabinet.

God Is Good Business

This book is fictional but seems to be an example of the prosperity gospel genre, a uniquely American offshoot of fundamentalist Christianity that has been around since at least the mid-20th century, teaching that financial success is both caused by and evidence of being a good Christian.

guys fuckin' clocks

It is almost literally physically painful to acknowledge this pun, or anagram rationalization, or whatever you want to call it, but the obscene drawing described here with the DALI LAID DIAL caption is of course based on Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory. Good grief, Sladek.

One might assume that the graffiti artist was Allbright: that kind of compulsive free-association is in character for him, and I'm not sure there are any other characters hanging around Minnetonka U who are creative enough and rude enough. However, Allbright does at times seem to be partly an excuse for the author to throw in any word games he already felt like playing (although this may also be a sign that the author felt a little guilty about doing so, since Allbright is a basket case and this is what he does instead of writing his poetry). To David Langford's question about whether the "thread of compulsive intellectual doodling that runs through [his] work" might have something to do with his lapsed Catholicism, Sladek said "Whence the ciphers and anagrams, I don't know" but added that "Catholics (among others) behave as though the world were one enormous cipher text in which every thing means something—but only to God or Fate."

this Graham Greene yarn I'm reading

The Heart of the Matter (mentioned at the beginning of Chapter I).

I'm Dr. De'Ath, he's Dr. D'Eath

Despite being problematic for a doctor, these are both real last names; see for instance Charles De'Ath and Tom D'Eath.