John Thomas Sladek (December 15, 1937 - March 10, 2000) was born in the USA, but is best known as a British writer, having moved to England in 1966 at the beginning of his greatest creative period, during which he produced such impish comedies of speculative fiction as The Reproductive System [Mechasm] and The Müller-Fokker Effect. By 1989 he had migrated back to Minnesota.
Sladek's most mischievous project (which he later dismissed as "a gigantic waste of time") was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to spoof pseudoscientific bestsellers by writing one of his own: Arachne Rising (1977), written as "James Vogh", was a deadpan explication of a "long suppressed" Zodiacal sign, Arachne the Spider. He had already pooh-poohed occultsploitation writers in 1973's The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs.