M
marlboro
Guest
Judging Robert Sheckley by The Laertian Gamble is like judging Orson Welles by that frozen pea commercial he did in the 80s. In his prime he was a damn fine short story writer. He had a knack for writing imaginative, memorable, and most importantly entertaining stories.
Sheckley could have written a great DS9 book, imo. A 10 story "Fables of the Ferengi" anthology featuring tales of Ferengi astronauts/entrepeneurs would have been amazing. And even though I haven't read them, he also wrote several James Bond inspired thrillers in the early 60s that are supposed to have been pretty solid.
So we had a legendary sci-fi writer who specialized in writing tales influenced by 50s American consumer culture who also liked to write about spies from the 1960s writing about Quark and Bashir, buuuuut he was writing in a format that had been his Kryptonite for the previous 25 years. Which is both a bit sad and darkly comic and seems kind of like a situation that Sheckley would have written one of his characters into. Except John Ordover (probably) isn't a robot or a body swapping Martian.
Until recently my only experience with his work was The Laertian Gamble and a couple of his Hugo nominated short stories like "The Seventh Victim" and "Spy Story." None of which were examples of his best work, imo. It wasn't until I heard a few of his stories on the radio series Mindwebs that I realized that I had misjudged him. I didn't find any stories as brilliant as Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea" or Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" but I did find more than 30 very good yarns in his catalog. How many authors can lay claim to having written more than 30 good short stories?
If anyone is interested in reading some of his best short stories I think the compilation "Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley" is a good place to start. Besides containing several of his best stories, it also has an introduction that I think was pretty insightful. A quote:
"Sheckley...wrote more than his share of stories that refuse to go out of your mind once youve allowed them to enter. By refuse to go out of your mind we mean in the sense of Shirley Jacksons The Lottery or Kurt Vonneguts Harrison Bergeron or George Saunderss Pastoralia or John Cheevers The Swimmer or Ray Bradburys The Veldt or Bernard Malamuds The Jewbird. That is to say, specifically in the sense of stories standing outside the realist tradition, and which seem to form a tradition of their own, however difficult to define except in words charting this distance from the familiar surrealist, antirealist, fabulist and which contain little descriptive power of their own."
Sheckley's stories are in their own little universe. Not realistic, but not totally surreal either. It's an odd, ironic, and (occasionally) dark universe where the Fate's deal out justice with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. If you are looking for "hard" science fiction you aren't going to find it here, but you will find a lot of good stories that have an ineffible quality that makes them stick in your mind.
Of the 200 plus stories of his that I've read there are probably about 40 that I'd recommend. I'll break them into rough categories.
My Favorites:
Beside Still Waters
The Gun Without a Bang
The Petrified World
The Store of the Worlds
The Accountant
Good:
A Wind Is Rising
Paradise II
The Native Problem
Pilgrimage to Earth
Dawn Invader
Double Indemnity
The Mountain Without a Name
Message From Hell
Above Average:
Is That What People Do?
Shape
Warm
All the Things You Are
The People Trap
The Monsters
Hunting Problem
Hands Off
Agamemnons Run
Sightseeing, 2179
The Quijote Robot
Protection
Fools Mate
Death Wish
The Odor of Thought
Something for Nothing
Fishing Season
Robotgnomics
Flawed, but with some interesting elements that make them worth reading:
The Hour of Battle
The Minimum Man
The Battle
The Prize of Peril
Seventh Victim
Final Examination
The Leech
Feeding Time
If the Red Slayer
The Neverending Western Movie
The Demons
The Lifeboat Mutiny
Zirn Left Unguarded,the Jenghik palace in Flames,Jon Westerley Dead
I've only read a handful of his full length novels, but I think I've read enough that I can say that he doesn't seem to feel comfortable working in a longer format. The books are frequently episodic and occasionally nonsensical - and not in a good way. The last paragraph of Minotaur Maze kind of sums up a lot of his novels:
"The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again."
Not that they're all bad. I enjoyed "Immortality, Inc." and "Dimention of Miracles" and "Mindswap" will probably appeal to fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
So, to make a long post even longer, what I'm saying is, don't judge the guy by one (admitedly terrible) novel. He wrote a lot of good stuff and it's a shame that most of it has been forgotten over the years. Do yourself a favor and dig up some of these hidden gems.
Sheckley could have written a great DS9 book, imo. A 10 story "Fables of the Ferengi" anthology featuring tales of Ferengi astronauts/entrepeneurs would have been amazing. And even though I haven't read them, he also wrote several James Bond inspired thrillers in the early 60s that are supposed to have been pretty solid.
So we had a legendary sci-fi writer who specialized in writing tales influenced by 50s American consumer culture who also liked to write about spies from the 1960s writing about Quark and Bashir, buuuuut he was writing in a format that had been his Kryptonite for the previous 25 years. Which is both a bit sad and darkly comic and seems kind of like a situation that Sheckley would have written one of his characters into. Except John Ordover (probably) isn't a robot or a body swapping Martian.
Until recently my only experience with his work was The Laertian Gamble and a couple of his Hugo nominated short stories like "The Seventh Victim" and "Spy Story." None of which were examples of his best work, imo. It wasn't until I heard a few of his stories on the radio series Mindwebs that I realized that I had misjudged him. I didn't find any stories as brilliant as Theodore Sturgeon's "The Man Who Lost the Sea" or Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" but I did find more than 30 very good yarns in his catalog. How many authors can lay claim to having written more than 30 good short stories?
If anyone is interested in reading some of his best short stories I think the compilation "Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley" is a good place to start. Besides containing several of his best stories, it also has an introduction that I think was pretty insightful. A quote:
"Sheckley...wrote more than his share of stories that refuse to go out of your mind once youve allowed them to enter. By refuse to go out of your mind we mean in the sense of Shirley Jacksons The Lottery or Kurt Vonneguts Harrison Bergeron or George Saunderss Pastoralia or John Cheevers The Swimmer or Ray Bradburys The Veldt or Bernard Malamuds The Jewbird. That is to say, specifically in the sense of stories standing outside the realist tradition, and which seem to form a tradition of their own, however difficult to define except in words charting this distance from the familiar surrealist, antirealist, fabulist and which contain little descriptive power of their own."
Sheckley's stories are in their own little universe. Not realistic, but not totally surreal either. It's an odd, ironic, and (occasionally) dark universe where the Fate's deal out justice with their tongues planted firmly in their cheeks. If you are looking for "hard" science fiction you aren't going to find it here, but you will find a lot of good stories that have an ineffible quality that makes them stick in your mind.
Of the 200 plus stories of his that I've read there are probably about 40 that I'd recommend. I'll break them into rough categories.
My Favorites:
Beside Still Waters
The Gun Without a Bang
The Petrified World
The Store of the Worlds
The Accountant
Good:
A Wind Is Rising
Paradise II
The Native Problem
Pilgrimage to Earth
Dawn Invader
Double Indemnity
The Mountain Without a Name
Message From Hell
Above Average:
Is That What People Do?
Shape
Warm
All the Things You Are
The People Trap
The Monsters
Hunting Problem
Hands Off
Agamemnons Run
Sightseeing, 2179
The Quijote Robot
Protection
Fools Mate
Death Wish
The Odor of Thought
Something for Nothing
Fishing Season
Robotgnomics
Flawed, but with some interesting elements that make them worth reading:
The Hour of Battle
The Minimum Man
The Battle
The Prize of Peril
Seventh Victim
Final Examination
The Leech
Feeding Time
If the Red Slayer
The Neverending Western Movie
The Demons
The Lifeboat Mutiny
Zirn Left Unguarded,the Jenghik palace in Flames,Jon Westerley Dead
I've only read a handful of his full length novels, but I think I've read enough that I can say that he doesn't seem to feel comfortable working in a longer format. The books are frequently episodic and occasionally nonsensical - and not in a good way. The last paragraph of Minotaur Maze kind of sums up a lot of his novels:
"The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again."
Not that they're all bad. I enjoyed "Immortality, Inc." and "Dimention of Miracles" and "Mindswap" will probably appeal to fans of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
So, to make a long post even longer, what I'm saying is, don't judge the guy by one (admitedly terrible) novel. He wrote a lot of good stuff and it's a shame that most of it has been forgotten over the years. Do yourself a favor and dig up some of these hidden gems.
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