Tik-Tok/A...E

Summary

In the framing story: Tik-Tok is in prison, awaiting execution. He starts to reminisce.

In the recent past: Tik-Tok, living in the suburbs as the property of Duane and Barbie Studebaker, simultaneously discovers that he can create art and that he can commit murder. He arranges for his paintings to be noticed by the media, so that the Studebakers, hoping to profit from his work, will give him more autonomy; he successfully frames a neighbor for the murder. Setting up a studio in the city, he hires several other robots to produce paintings to his specifications—convincing them that they're all actually working for a human owner—and starts to explore the wider community of unemployed and derelict robots. He further tests his lack of moral restraint by committing a second gratuitous murder.

In the more distant past: In Tik-Tok's earliest memories, he lives with the dissolute neo-Confederate Culpepper family (heirs to a defense-contracting fortune from the failed 50-mile-wide land/sea aircraft carrier Leviathan). He falls in love there with the robot Gumdrop, but loses her when he is sold to the crazed restaurant entrepreneur Colonel Jitney.

A

("As I move...")

As I move

The first three words of the novel make it clear that Isaac Asimov will be a major figure throughout, even though he's never mentioned by name as a writer. Sladek used the name "I-click As-i-move" as the author of his Asimov parody story "Broot Force".

An Inspector Calls

The 1945 play by J.B. Priestley, in which a detective coaxes out a family's guilty secrets after the death of one of their employees. Despite its resemblance to the familiar "questioning all the suspects in the drawing room" type of plot, it's not a murder mystery but more of a social critique, implicating the family for their unexamined privilege and predicting that lack of empathy will one day lead to "fire and blood and anguish"—an appropriate choice for Tik-Tok, who is at this point just starting to acknowledge his anger at humans but hasn't yet committed a crime.

the Fairmont police

The Studebaker storyline doesn't seem to be set in any specific part of the country, but it's probably not a coincidence that there is a small town called Fairmont in Sladek's home state of Minnesota.

Sauce Harpeau

Not a real food item; harpeau is French for "harpoon" or "grappling hook".

The poor we have always with us

Matthew 26:11, Mark 14:7, and John 12:8. Sometimes wrongly cited as a reason to be complacent about inequality.

Wedgwood

An English brand of fine china.

asimov circuits ... three laws

Asimov's fictional Three Laws of Robotics prescribed that (in descending order of priority) a robot must not cause or allow harm to humans, must obey humans, and must protect itself from harm. In Asimov's stories, these rules were literally hard-wired into nearly every robot brain, more or less as Tik-Tok describes here. But as previously mentioned in Roderick, Sladek doesn't find that idea very plausible.

a fencepost ... an animal perched upon it, ears twitching

A stain on a wall that ambiguously suggested different shapes was a recurring image in Roderick.

Calvary roses

The "rose of Calvary" is a traditional Christian metaphor for the death and resurrection of Jesus. Here, it's just a posh variety of flowers.

As you can see, it's a nursery rhyme

To see which nursery rhyme it is, you'll have to wait until the painting is finally described at the end of the third chapter.

The complex domestic robot ... has to tell lies

Besides being fairly plausible as human psychology, Dr. Weaverson's theory of the damaging effects of socially mandated dishonesty may have been influenced by Arthur C. Clarke's characterization of HAL 9000, who (in Clarke's novels, though not in the film of 2001) was driven insane by being ordered to lie.

B

("Broaching the second chapter...")

What the hammer? What the chain?

From The Tyger.

stamped out like apostle spoons

Apostle spoons were religiously themed silverware sets.

an ancient Mississippi plantation, restored to its antebellum splendor

Tik-Tok's first owners, the Culpeppers, aren't just futuristic caricatures of 19th century slaveowning aristocrats; they're that way deliberately, having modeled themselves on the old South. A recurring theme in Tik-Tok is that the American legacy of slavery, racism, and exploitation in general, despite losing some ground after the Civil War, would still find plenty of people eager to recreate its worst horrors as soon as they had the chance to utterly dominate a thinking being with no legal rights—especially if that allowed them to live in luxury.

The Culpepper property, Tenoaks, could be the real Ten Oaks plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi. Greenwood was a major center of civil rights activism in the 1960s; choosing to restore a slave plantation there in particular would be one of the subtler signs that the Culpeppers are extremely bad people.

Uncle Rasselas

Named after Samuel Johnson's fictional Prince of Abissinia, with echoes of Uncle Remus and Uncle Tom.

the kitchen help, Ben, Jemima, Molasses and Big Mac

The first two are named after Uncle Ben's and Aunt Jemima, both food brands that used smiling African-American characters as mascots.

the waiters, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Spiro

The first three are named after Marx Brothers (the three most popular ones, that is; Gummo and Zeppo get no more attention here than they did in life), and the fourth after Nixon's disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Côtes Des Moines

A joke on Côtes du Rhône and Des Moines, Iowa (similar to Sladek's notion in Roderick that the art world of the Midwest would have a Des Moines Bienniale). In French the name of this wine would literally mean "shores of the monks".

fluorescent white peruke

Peruke or perruque was a kind of men's wig popular with 17th-century courtiers.

mink lapels on a jacket of diamondback rattlesnake, a neon tie with a wicker suit

The long list of future garments in this paragraph might be considered an attempt to outdo the then-recently-deceased past master of ridiculous science fiction couture, Philip K. Dick. Never very interested in detailed world-building, but always confident that people in every era will take for granted things that would look pretty silly to people in previous eras, Dick took full advantage of his non-visual medium to throw in offhanded references to styles like "mohair poncho, apricot-colored felt hat, argyle ski socks and carpet slippers" without distracting too much from his plots. Sladek's fashion reverie here works a little differently: it's not so much about the arbitrariness of mainstream tastes, but a reminder that the callous elites who will shape Tik-Tok's view of humanity are very, very rich and very, very bored.

Despite his naive admiration for these swells, Tik-Tok is also learning early on that humans are massively overconfident and have no real respect for their own mortality—as evidenced by the animated news-interpreting dress that's programmed to illustrate the end of the world as "a fine sunset".

a micro-record of the Prado

The Museo del Prado.

as if looking for a water lily or a Hockney swimmer

David Hockney's swimming pool paintings sometimes foregrounded the environment to the extent that the human figure wasn't immediately apparent, as in A Large Diver (1978).

C

("Culpritwise...")

Darnaway's disease

Might be named after the murderously insane Scottish recluse in Robert Louis Stevenson's Gothic tale "The Merry Men".

the government was anxious not to pay out compensation for the disease

Similar to the litigation over health problems due to Agent Orange.

Doddly Culpepper

Doddle is British slang for a very easy task.

the most successful commercial defense project ever

Although there is a long tradition of defense contractors working for years on poorly designed machines that are later canceled (and, having worked as a technical writer, Sladek might have been thinking of software projects as well as ships), the story of Leviathan might be partly inspired by the USS United States (1948-49). Although nowhere near as bizarre as the Leviathan (in fact, much of its design was later used in the next generation of aircraft carriers), the unfortunately named United States was in its day seen as a ridiculously ambitious vehicle, full of design compromises and unable to operate without support from other ships.

Gone with the Wind and The Foxes of Harrow

Both novels (adapted to film) set in the South before or during the Civil War, although The Foxes of Harrow is much less famous.

one of the sex-equipped robots

This is the first casual mention of something Sladek portrays as an inevitable consequence of people owning robots: some of them would be used as sex toys (which the robots accurately describe as "rape"). Not all robots in Tik-Tok are "sex-equipped", presumably for cost-saving reasons, but since this feature can be easily added to their bodies it isn't a very meaningful distinction.

When robots first became commonplace in science fiction of the mid-20th century, propriety wouldn't allow discussion of such issues (except by the most tentative suggestion, or through romantic metaphor, as in Asimov's story "Satisfaction Guaranteed"); and by the time SF became more sexually frank in the 1960s and 70s, writers and readers had mostly lost interest in robots. The most notable exception, The Stepford Wives, was about a plan to replace human women with more compliant (and probably not conscious) machines, as a final stage of sexist abuse. But in Tik-Tok, humans are relatively free from abuse by other humans, since now all their worst impulses can be directed at robots.

wanting to find out what Gulliver saw in them

The Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels were intelligent horses who ruled a utopian society. By the end of his travels, Gulliver found human beings distasteful and preferred the company of horses.

imitation Stephen Foster songs

Foster's minstrel songs often featured sentimental depictions of the pre-Civil War South (which he was unfamiliar with). The fake dialect here is similar to Foster's original lyrics for "Old Folks at Home".

the Maillardet family exhibited their mechanical boy

Maillardet's automaton was built around 1800; it could draw several images that were programmed into it via brass disks.

mistake machine loopiness for real lupinus

Latin, "wolf-like".

Weatherfield's writing here is a parody of late 20th century art criticism in general, but might be more specifically based on the style of Robert Hughes (who, probably not coincidentally, had written a few years earlier that "The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as ... a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources").

brandishing her Sabatier

A name used by many makers of kitchen knives. The farmer's wife in "Three Blind Mice" cut off the mice's tails with a carving knife. In Tik-Tok's painting, the mice are mechanical ("windup Mickeys")—robots tormented by a "sullen, beefy" human.

D

("Hey, dummy!")

Painting was unlocking my prison and striking off my chains

In his belief that artistic self-expression is part of the same process that has freed him from social and ethical constraints, Tik-Tok seems to have reinvented Romanticism.

On my body, fake muscles bulged

There's virtually no description in the novel of what Tik-Tok and the other robots look like; but a few passages like this make it clear that unlike the shiny steel figures that appear in most of the cover art, they resemble human beings—but only up to a point, since unless someone makes the effort to disguise them (as Reverend Orifice does later), they're never mistaken for human. This would make them permanent residents of Masahiro Mori's uncanny valley—a concept that was first popularized in English in 1978, so Sladek would probably have been aware of Mori's theory that we would feel less empathy for a robot that looked almost human than we would for a more clearly mechanical one.

A robot wedding

The ceremony in which Tik-Tok and Gumdrop are compelled to get married by jumping over a vacuum cleaner, for the amusement of drunken owners, is part of the Culpeppers' hideous historical reenactment shtick: a parody of the custom of jumping the broom, commonly a part of unauthorized marriages among African-American slaves.

E

("Evil, Nobby.")

They had only one eye between the three of them

A reference to the Graeae or Gray Sisters, three demigods who shared a single eye, which Perseus stole in order to extort information.

whether life was reconciliation or renunciation

I suspect there's some specific joke here as to why "an animated flask of rhubarb perfume" in particular would be programmed to discuss this philosophical question—one that has been addressed in various forms in both Christian and Buddhist traditions, and I'm sure in many others—but it's escaping me.

The idea of turning moral decisions into digital data

Tik-Tok's theory that the asimov circuits don't actually exist is similar to a common critique of religion: that it's just a belief system designed to keep the masses obedient. One difference is that in his view, it's necessary for the ruling class to be committed to that belief system too, since humans would never feel safe around robots if they had any doubts about the asimovs. In any case, the book never provides evidence for or against this—leaving open the possibility that Tik-Tok is just psychologically unusual, or that the asimovs might have worked at one point but are no longer reliable since robots have become more complex (and, as he mentioned in the second chapter, more cheaply produced).