The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

This is Sladek's most New Wave novel - a lot of things happen, coming out of an initiating event, to a whole lot of people, and it is Satirical and Cutting and True To Our Times. Of course, Our Times were 1971, so it may strike modern readers as even quirkier or less relevant now than it did to readers then. (And the hardcore SF types mostly disliked it then, to be fair.)

The Müller-Fokker Effect is a novel that was not entirely written to thrust out that punny title - which would have seemed much more shocking in 1971 - but I have to think that was a huge part of it. It's a "look at all of these idiots" novel, about how the whole world is full of fools and knaves and con men and charlatans and every other kind of horrible person you can think of.

(It's available as a standalone, but I read it in the SF Gateway Omnibus with two better novels, the fun Reproductive System and the magnificent Tik-Tok.)

As much as it has a center, that's Bob Shairp, a technical writer for National Arsenamid - often called "National Arse" in dialogue, to give you a sense of the level of 1971 wordplay going on here - who is voluntold to be part of an experiment National Arse is doing with the US military, to record a human mind onto special Müller-Fokker tapes. Only four of those tapes exist, since Dr. Müller-Fokker has disappeared, supposedly defected to the Soviet Union.

All four tapes are used to record Bob, but a group of white-supremacist terrorists - deeply misunderstanding what's going on, in a very Sladek touch - attack during the experiment, killing Bob's body after his mind is recorded.

We get a bit of Bob's jumbled thoughts, here and there, during the novel, but more important is what happens to the four tapes, which are sold as government surplus and go in different directions, to let Sladek satirize various aspects of American society at the time: primarily nudie magazines, a typically corrupt evangelist, advertising, those white supremacists, and the military (including a military school for Shairp's son). Sladek gives us a lot of short scenes with a large cast, which somewhat crosses over among the various milieus that the tapes drop into, but they all are venial and self-centered and generally lousy people in their own ways - plus fairly dumb, too, of course.

The tapes separate, and then come back together in the end, so Bob can be resurrected and reunited with his wife. That gives the novel an ending, but it's not the point of the book: the point is all of the crazy stuff in the middle between Bob's death and resurrection. Bob is barely a character, and is dead most of the book.

That crazy stuff is OK but gets a bit tedious. The satirical targets are deeply obvious, so even when Sladek does hit them solidly, it doesn't feel particularly major. For example, the (frustrated, virginal) Hugh Hefner figure here learns, more than halfway through the novel, that women have pubic hair, which is shocking to him! This joke was only just barely plausible in the mid-'60s and was well past its sell-by date by the time this novel was published.

And none of the characters are appealing: yes, they're quirky and specific, but they are all horrible people and the reader is unlikely to care about what happens to any of them. (A lot of things do happen, some of which are horrible and a few of which are fatal - none of it really resonates beyond just a shrug and a page-turn.) All in all, The Müller-Fokker Effect is an interesting catalog of the nuttier aspects of American society circa 1971, as seen through a very dark lens, so it's of interest to cultural historians - but I can't really recommend reading it as a novel for pleasure in 2025.