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The Müller-focker Effect

Author: John Sladek

Although there were distinct differences between the new wave in Britain and in America, there were American writers, like Thomas M. Disch and Pamela Zoline, who were far more closely associated with the British New Wave than the American. John Sladek was one of these, a satirist and parodist who saw the world as absurd rather than as a threat. He was merciless in making fun of pseudo-science, occult beliefs, politics, old-fashioned science fiction and the like. Much of this came together in his absurdist novel, The Muller-Focker Effect (it is telling that the title was meant to sound like "motherfucker"). Here disintegrating personality and dubious identity become a vehicle for a satirical attack on big business, evangelical religion, right-wing politics and even men's magazines. The Müller-Focker effect is the ability to store an entire human personality on four computer tapes. These can then be converted into a virus in order to upload that personality into a new body. When the person testing the equipment is caught in an explosion, it becomes the trigger for an escalating story of madness as different organisation battle to get control of the tapes. Why it's on the list: Sladek was one of the key writers of the new wave, though he gave up science fiction for a while after this novel appeared and is under appreciated now as a result. But the freewheeling absurdist comedy of his work (one of his collections, for instance, was called Keep the Giraffe Burning) gave a distinct character to his fiction that few other contemporary writers could match.

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