About the Book
Big Engine is proud to publish a final collection of the late John
Sladek's fiction, assembled by David Langford and a team of helpers
with the full co-operation of Sladek's estate.
Sladek's satire
still bites, his stories still compel with their unique mix of wit and
melancholy, his obsessive inventiveness still amuses and impresses.
Langford has gathered all the solo stories - the science fiction, the detective puzzles, the mainstream (or what passed for it with Sladek), the unclassifiably off-beat "non-fact" pieces - that Sladek is known to have published but did not appear in his previous collections.
Also included are poems, playlets, pseudonymous fiction, all the short collaborations with Thomas M. Disch (including three never previously published), and some witty autobiographical essays - testimony to a hugely talented man who stood a little aside from science fiction but for two decades helped shape it, because his achievement was impossible to ignore.
