The Tin Men

I'm not quite sure why I picked this off the shelf in the library, but am so glad I did. It is the one of the best and most deadpan satires I've ever come across. The plot centres on an academic department that has a new building that will be opened by the Queen. This impending opening unleashes chaos, absurdity, and self-replicating committees, distracting the heads of department from their usual novel-writing, sporting activities, and obsessive graphing of their IQs.

Probably my favourite and the funniest parts of the book describe the work of Goldwasser, head of the Newspaper Department, who finds it surprisingly easy to automate the headlines. Quote:

Say, for example, the randomiser turned up

STRIKE THREAT

By adding one unit at random

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to the formula each day the story could go:

STRIKE THREAT BID
STRIKE THREAT PROBE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA

And so on. Or the units could be added cumulatively:

STRIKE THREAT PLEA
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE
STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE STORM

Or the units could be used entirely at random:

LEAK ROW LOOMS
TEST ROW LEAK
LEAK HOPE DASH BID
TEST DEAL RACE
HATE PLEA MOVE
RACE HATE PLEA MOVE DEAL

Such headlines, moreover, gave a newspaper a valuable air of dealing with serious news, and helped to dilute its obsession with the frilly-knickeredness of the world, without alarming or upsetting the customers.

That is one of the most witty and astute commentaries on newspapers I've ever come across. This book was first published in 1965 and has aged magnificently. Only yesterday I read a piece about how the Daily Express has four basic headlines that it reuses endlessly! Moreover, if you've ever worked in an office you will recognise the odd personality quirks, miscommunications, and incredibly awkward social gatherings parodied here. I laughed to myself many times. Highly recommended. show less

I last read this fifty years ago. I remembered pretty accurately almost everything involving the experiments with ethical robots -- a hilarious set of experiments putting a robot on a sinking raft that has to make a moral choice whether to toss whatever is also on the raft or sacrifice itself. What I remember almost nothing of was the "the queen is coming" plotline and the usual collection of comic characters -- the director who has power but almost no power of speech or thought, the would-be author who spends his entire time writing the book reviews to go on the book's jacket, etc. These are funny and smoothly done, but they lack the ingenuity of the SFnal elements, irrelevant though those elements ultimately are to the show more plot.

Well-received at the time, still worth a read today. show less

This is a rare reread for me, which I mean to but rarely do. It's a short, dated-yet-relevant satire on academia & academics, technology, bureaucracy, etc., etc. It's set around the privately sponsored, new ethics wing of a robotics research institute, due to be opened by the Queen. That sets pretty much everything up - and the book is pretty much a brisk romp through the different permutations of personality clashes and misunderstandings that that scenario offers.

There's just enough philosophizing on computer consciousness, and axiomatic ethics, and computer-generated English to give this book more serious literary pretensions than, say, a Tom Sharpe, but I'd say that's the book's closest cousin.

There's a lot to admire and respect in show more this book, and there's a lot more to enjoy. Overall, the humour can be a little over-egged here and there, and the situations can boil over into farce, but it manages to hold itself up as a slight novel of ideas. show less

Not exactly hilarious, but fairly funny. More or less The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sort of humour.

All you need to know is... this is one of the funniest books ever written.

An hilarious satire.