Time & Perspective Quote by John Sladek

A novelist lives with a voice in the head for months or years, and that voice is fragile. Other voices slip in through reading, altering rhythm, diction, even the shape of scenes. John Sladek, a master of satire who spent his career dissecting genre cliches and pseudo-science, understood how porous the creative mind can be. While drafting, the wrong book can tilt tone, pull pacing off balance, or plant a joke whose cadence belongs to someone else. The mind aligns unconsciously; read Hemingway and sentences shorten; read Dickens and they spool outward. A long project cannot afford that drift.

Sladek’s fiction depends on a very specific calibration. In Roderick or Tik-Tok, the comedy is scalpel-sharp, the critique sly rather than blunt. His detective pastiches and his skeptical study The New Apocrypha show a talent for mimicry, but mimicry is a dangerous gift when you are trying to sustain a singular novelistic voice. If he immersed himself in a contemporary’s prose mid-draft, he might begin to sound like a parody of them instead of a clear expression of himself. Even research reading can be risky: absorbing the rhetoric of occultists or technocrats might smuggle their rhythms into his narration, muddling the satire’s stance.

There is also the matter of momentum. A novel creates its own internal weather. Characters accrue habits of speech; motifs echo; the narrative cadence becomes a metronome. Reading outside that weather can change barometric pressure, steering the story toward plots or moods that do not belong to it. So the rule emerges: curate inputs. During composition, choose texts that feed subject matter without contaminating style, or avoid narrative prose altogether.

Beneath the restraint lies a larger ethic about originality. Being careful about reading is not an ascetic renunciation but a craft discipline, a way of protecting the signal from noise so the book can discover and hold its own frequency.