SHECKLEY, Robert

(1928-)

   US writer, born and educated in New York, where he set some of his fiction, publishing his first story, "Final Examination", for Imagination in 1952. RS's career falls into 3 periods: the 1950s, the1960s, and afterwards. In the first period he produced short fiction prolifically for several years in various magazines, though his supple, witty, talkative, well crafted work was especially suited to GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, where much of it appeared. This work remains, perhaps,his best known. In the second period he wrote several novels which combined "zany" plots, metaphysical speculation and comic SATIRE. In the third period he has rested. The Collected Short Stories of Robert Sheckley (coll in 5 vols 1991), though incomplete, gives a good view of the entirecareer.RS's first collection, UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS (coll 1954; with differing contents 1955 UK), is one of the finest debut volumes ever published in the field, and contains several tales which have remained famous, including "The Monsters" (1953), the title story (1952), and the superb "Specialist" (1953) which, with an energy and adroitness typical of his early work, posits a Galaxy inhabited by a variety of cooperating races who can merge their specialized functions to become, literally, SPACESHIPS. The story describes the search for a new Pusher, a beingcapable of shoving the ship to FASTER-THAN-LIGHT velocities - unsurprisingly for the 1950s, Homo sapiens turns out to be a Pusher species. Also in the collection is "Seventh Victim" (1953), much later filmed as La DECIMA VITTIMA (1965), in turn novelized by RS as The Tenth Victim * (1966); see below for its feeble continuation into a series.Further successful collections followed swiftly: Citizen in Space (coll 1955), Pilgrimage to Earth (coll 1957), Notions: Unlimited (coll 1960), Store of Infinity (coll 1960) and Shards of Space (coll 1962). Later compilations include The Robert Sheckley Omnibus (coll 1973 UK) ed Robert CONQUEST and Is THAT What People Do?: The Selected Short Stories (coll1984). RS's stories are unfailingly elegant and literate; their mordant humour and sudden plot reversals separate them from the mass of magazine sf stories of the time, for the wit and surprises usually function to make serious points about the calamitous aspects of life in the later 20th century. At the same time, RS clearly found it worthwhile during these early years to express the corrosive pessimism of his wit within the storytelling conventions of sf, to dress his nihilism in sheep's clothing. The second period began with Immortality Delivered (1958-9 Gal as "TimeKiller"; 1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959), filmed in 1992 as FREEJACK, and continued with his best novels, The Status Civilization (1960), Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962; vt The Journey of Joenes 1978 UK) andMindswap (1966). In these books the typical Candide-like RS protagonist began, at times unduly, to dominate. In short stories, the occasionally venal naivete of this character did not much impair the rhythm of the tale; but in the novels his lethargy tended to be translated into plots which lacked drive. The typical RS full-length story is episodic, befitting the protagonist's lack of drive, and structured as a kind of guided tour of a particular sf milieu RS wishes to expose to satirical view; dumped into this disconcerting circuit, his typical protagonist must scramble about - sometimes comically - in order to survive and to gain some orientation. The protagonist of the first novel, after dying in a car crash, awakens 150 years hence in a whirligig USA where most forms of psychic phenomena, including life and death, have been verified. The Status Civilization is genuinely successful, embodying its satiricaldespairs in a shaped narrative set on a prison planet, where social hierarchies have turned topsy-turvy and conformity means being always wicked. In Journey Beyond Tomorrow the RS protagonist is an innocent who suffers a variety of alarming adventures after leaving his quiet NEAR FUTURE Pacific island; the novel takes the form of a series ofremembrances enshrined as myths 1000 years later. In Mindswap the protagonist switches minds with a Martian and is subjected to reality displacements galore. That was the end of RS's easy years.Dimension of Miracles (1968) - in which the protagonist wins in error a prize whichshunts him back and forth across a Galaxy whose reality is disconcertingly arbitrary - may be thought to signal the slow onset of the third RS period, which was marked by novels either uneasy (like Miracles) or absent-minded, like Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera (1983). RS also continued his Victim sequence, begun in 1966 with The Tenth Victim, in 2 uninspired sequels, Victim Prime (1987 UK) and Hunter/Victim (1988 UK). The best novel of the period was probably Options (1975), a tale whose sfapparatus could be taken as a delusional frame, or understood as a series of dramatic projections - generated by the protagonist - of the various forms his life could be read as taking, rather after the fashion of Barry N. MALZBERG, whose treatment of sf themes as metaphors for all-too-humanproblems RS's late work most resembles. But The Alchemical Marriage of Alistair Crompton (1958 Gal as "The Humours"; exp 1978 UK; vt CromptonDivided 1978 US) - about the attempts of a paranoid schizophrenic to reassemble his mind, which has been split off into three widely separated receptacles - is also strong. The quality of RS's short fiction was less variable, though his increasing tendency to write almost ABSURDIST stories (FABULATION) was not perhaps to the taste of the sf market in general - asense reflected in the fact that many of them were first published in slick magazines such as Playboy rather than in sf magazines, though "A Suppliant in Space" won the Jupiter AWARD for the Best Short Story of1973. The People Trap (coll 1968) contains a mixture of old and new stories, but most of the fiction in Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (coll 1971; vt The Same to You Doubled 1974 UK) is typical of his latework-spasmodic, hilarious, despairing. Further examples can be found in The Robot who Looked like Me (coll 1978 UK) and The Wonderful World ofRobert Sheckley (coll 1979). It may be that RS's inability to take seriously the simpler, more adventurous forms the genre can take, which he regularly and affectionately parodied when young, has had a paralysing effect on the mature writer, who sometimes sounds like a tongue-tied Kurt VONNEGUT Jr. If this is so, it is a considerable loss to the sf field thatone of its sharpest wits can no longer pay it serious attention.

   JC

   Other works: Futuropolis (1978), nonfiction; The Status Civilization, and Notions: Unlimited (omni 1979); After the Fall (anth 1980); The PeopleTrap/Mindswap (omni 1981); Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains * (1990) with Harry HARRISON; Watchbird (1990 chap); Minotaur Maze (1991); Xolotl (1991 chap); Alien Starswarm (1991 chap); Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991) with Roger ZELAZNY.Crime fiction/thrillers: 8 novels, from Calibre .50 (1961) to The Alternate Detective (1993).

   See also: ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CITIES; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; ECONOMICS; ESCHATOLOGY; FORCE FIELD; GAMES AND SPORTS; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; LEISURE; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; OMNI; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; REINCARNATION; ROBOTS; SEX; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; TABOOS.