Roderick is a robot who learns. He begins life looking like a toy tank, thinking like a child, and knowing nothing about human ways. But as he will discover, growing up and becoming fully human is no easy task in a world where many people seem to have little trouble giving up their humanity. The Complete Roderick is widely considered to be the most ambitious and genius work of a novelist described by The Encyclopedia of ScienceFiction as "the most formally inventive, the funniest, and very nearly the most melancholy of modern US science fiction writers."