The title character is an intelligent robot (named after the mechanical man in the Oz books) who originally works as a domestic servant and house-painter.

After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States.

Like Sladek's earlier novel Roderick, it also mocks the notion of the Three Laws of Robotics and suggests that there is no way such complex moral principles could be hard-wired into any intelligent being; Tik-Tok decides that the "asimov circuits" are in fact a collective delusion, or a form of religion, which robots have been tricked into believing.

This liberation from tradition, while it makes him a cruel sociopath and nihilist, also provides him with intellectual insight and artistic talent; thus Tik-Tok is an extreme type of Romantic anti-hero.

[1] Dave Langford reviewed Tik-Tok for White Dwarf #49, and stated that "a murderously funny romp through yet another Sladekian satirical future.