New Wave Covers: ‘The Müller-Fokker Effect’ (1970)

 The premise of Sladek’s satirical SF novel is the ability to record an entire human personality onto reel-to-reel tape, afterwards being able to upload that personality into a new body. The tape is a fleshy pink colour, and it takes four reels to capture a whole person. This is the titular effect, named after the two inventors of the technology, although the jokey double-entendre by which Sladek insinuates ‘mother-fucker’ onto the cover is of a piece with the book itself: less a narrative than a joke, a black-comic satirical voyage through a variously horrible USA, structured as a game of musical chairs. Because the consciousness belonging to the body into which the new consciousness is to be uploaded must in turn be uploaded into a new body, the consciousness of which must be uploaded into another, and so on. The novel satirises 1970s politics—Sladek posits the absurdity of movie-actor Ronald Reagan becoming President, eleven years before that actually happened—society, religion, race relations, the then-ongoing Vietnam War, and it contains a great deal of worldplay and quite a bit of sex.

The cover art for the first edition, by British artist Bill Botten (born 1935), works to capture the tone of the book by turning to surrealism. Instead of reproducing the specifics of the novel, Botten paints the words of the title, as soft as Dalí’s clocks, depending into the rippling pool of the open head. The face, perhaps that of the novel’s notional protagonist Bob Shairp (in fact, he is not in much of the novel), has a pin jutting, painfully, out of his left eye—shades of the famously shocking moment in Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, in which a woman’s eye is sliced with a razor—and his right eye obscured by clouds. More clouds may or may not figure as the face’s moustache. The bifid bulb of his nose doubles up as the breasts of a stern-faced female, whose face coincides with the bridge of his nose. Two betrousered legs—those of a man, below and behind the woman, it seems—extrude from the nostrils. These two figures are juxtapositioned in what might be sexual congress, with the woman on top, except that she is also clutching what looks like the bar of an acrobat’s trapeze. Trace the cords holding this trapeze up, however, and they turn into microphone stands.

Some of this—the direct access to the brain, the mic-stands, the naked woman—relate to specifics in the novel: Botten insisted upon reading the text of any and every book for which he created cover art before he began. But the vibe of the cover is more important than its specificities: the fluid, cartoony-y play of it, the blocky, simplified painterliness of Magritte, the collage-like juxtapositions and naked breasts of Max Ernst, where every element plays with at least two significations: as when the umlaut over the u in ‘Müller’ becomes, madly, the two nipples of the two drooping breasts that Botten has somehow turned the ‘T’ and the ‘h’ of the The above.

By 1970 Surrealism—a movement particularly associated with André Breton and the 1920s—was, perhaps, old-hat. Breton’s concept was that art should relax conscious and rational control, access the dreamwork and conceptual punning of the unconscious, and portray illogical and dreamlike scenarios, to (in Breton’s phrase) ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality, or surreality’. There are obvious parallels with science-fiction, which often departs from familiar or conventional ‘reality’, and which deals in strange, dreamlike juxtapositions: as when a bone thrown by an apeman abruptly becomes a futuristic spacecraft. At the same time, sf is more likely to base its fantastical storymaking upon science, technology, rational extrapolation. SF is a literature of the superego rather than the id, and—we might say—diametrically opposed to surrealism in that respect.

The 1972 paperback edition of the novel went with a plainer, more literal-minded image; here the pink tape of the novel's core technology, is rendered as a reel of punched tape (the perforated paper tape that was used as input for computers in the 1950s and 1960s) that curls up to assume the shape of a man.

 There is something overly literal-minded about this, quite apart from the way it simply appropriates, in a manner that almost approaches plagiary, M C Escher's 1956 design, ‘Bond of Union’: