Everything about Robert Sheckley totally explained
Robert Sheckley (
July 16,
1928 –
December 9,
2005) was an
American author. First published in the
science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable,
absurdist and broadly comical.
Sheckley was given the
Author Emeritus honor by the
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. There are those who were shocked he wasn't given the
Grand Master Award instead. Commented one scholar, "
Kingsley Amis's critical overview of Science Fiction named Sheckley as our field's brightest light. But Sheckley was a humorist, and nowadays this is how our Mark Twains are treated."
Biography
Robert Sheckley was born in
Brooklyn,
New York, and raised in
Maplewood, New Jersey. He was in the
U.S. Army from 1946 to 1948 and served in
Korea. He then attended
New York University. In 1951 he began to sell stories to science-fiction magazines, eventually producing several hundred short stories and novels. He also wrote episodes of the TV series
Captain Video.
In the 1970s he lived on the
Spanish island of
Ibiza. He then returned to
New York City as fiction editor of
OMNI Magazine. After leaving OMNI in 1981 he lived and wrote in the Florida Everglades, Manhattan again, Paris, France, Ibiza again, Connecticut, Portland, Oregon and Red Hook, New York.
Until his death in 2005, Robert Sheckley continued to write at his home in
Red Hook, New York. His early
pen names included Phillips Barbee and Finn O'Donnevan. Sheckley's first four marriages (to Barbara Scadron, Ziva Kwitney, Abby Schulman and writer Jay Rothbell Sheckley) ended in divorce. At the time of his death, he was separated from his fifth wife, Gail Dana. He has four children. His son Jason is from his first marriage. His daughter, novelist
Alisa Kwitney is from his second. His daughter Anya and his son Jed are from his third marriage.
In mid-2004 he participated as Guest of Honour in Eurocon 2004, in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
During a 2005 visit to
Ukraine for the Ukrainian Sci-Fi Computer Week, an international event for
science fiction writers, Sheckley fell ill and had to be hospitalized in
Kiev on
April 27,
2005. His condition was very serious for one week, but he appeared to be slowly recovering. Russian news sources referred to him as "The unkillable Robert Sheckley". Sheckley's official website ran a fundraising campaign to help cover Sheckley's treatment and his return to the United States. However, only a large donation from a Ukrainian businessman allowed him to pay the hospital bill and return home. In New York he also underwent open heart surgery.
Robert Sheckley had vowed he'd write fiction until slumped dead over the typewriter. Indeed, he was still writing the last day he was conscious.
On
November 20 he'd surgery for a
brain aneurysm. He died in a
Poughkeepsie hospital on
December 9 2005.
Works and influence
Typical Sheckley stories include
"Bad Medicine"
(in which a man is mistakenly treated by a psychotherapy machine intended for Martians),
"Protection" (whose protagonist is warned of deadly danger unless he avoids an act that's never explained to him), and "The Accountant" (in which a family of wizards learns that their son has been taken from them by a more sinister trade). In many stories Sheckley speculates about alternative (and usually sinister) social orders, of which a good example is the story "A Ticket to Tranai" (that tells of a sort of
Utopia adapted for the human nature as it is, rather than the human nature as some idealists believe it should be).
One of his early works, the 1953
Galaxy short story "Seventh Victim," was the basis for the film
The 10th Victim, also known by the original Italian title,
La Decima Vittima. The film starred
Marcello Mastroianni and
Ursula Andress. A novelization of the film, also written by Sheckley, was published in
1966. The story is an inspiration for the role-playing game
Assassin.
Another novel,
Immortality, Inc. — about a world in which the afterlife could be obtained via a scientific process — was very loosely adapted into a film, the 1992
Freejack, starring
Mick Jagger,
Emilio Estevez,
Rene Russo, and
Anthony Hopkins.
His 1954 story
Ghost V and 1955 story
The Lifeboat Mutiny were adapted in two episodes of the
USSR science fiction TV series
This Fantastic World.
His 1958 short story
"The Prize of Peril" was adapted in 1970 as the
German TV movie
Das Millionenspiel, and again in 1983 as the
French movie
Le Prix du Danger. Written about a man who goes on a TV show in which he must evade people out to kill him for a week in order to win a large cash prize, it's perhaps the first-ever published work predicting the advent of
reality television.
A number of Sheckley's works, both as Sheckley and as Finn O'Donnevan, were also adapted for the radio show
X Minus One in the late 1950s, including the above-mentioned "Seventh Victim", "Bad Medicine" and "Protection". The radio show
Tales of Tomorrow also in the late 1950s did a version of "Watchbird" and South Africa radio did their version of "Watchbird" on the series SF68.
In the 1990s, Sheckley wrote a well-received series of three mystery novels featuring detective Hob Draconian, as well as novels set in the worlds of and
Alien. Before his death, Sheckley had been commissioned to write an original novel based upon the TV series
The Prisoner for
Powys Media but died before completing the manuscript.
His novel
Dimension of Miracles is often cited as an influence on
Douglas Adams, although in an interview for
Neil Gaiman's book, Adams claimed not to have read it until after writing
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Opinions on Sheckley's work
» "I had no idea the competition was so terrifyingly good." —
Douglas Adams
» "Sheckley at his best is
Voltaire and Soda." —
Brian W. Aldiss
» "Always he crackles with ideas." —
Kingsley Amis
» "[RobertSheckley is] witty and ingenious... a draught of pure Voltaire and tonic." —
J. G. Ballard "If the
Marx Brothers had been literary rather than thespic fantasists ... they'd have been Robert Sheckley." —
Harlan EllisonBibliography
Science fiction and fantasy novels
Millennial Contest series (with Roger Zelazny)
Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991)
If at Faust You Don't Succeed (1993)
A Farce to Be Reckoned With (1995)
Mystery and espionage novels
The Game of X (1965) was loosely adapted as the 1981 Disney film, Condorman: Sheckley also wrote the novelization of this film.
Stephen Dain series
Calibre .50 (1961)
Dead Run (1961)
Live Gold (1962)
White Death (1963)
Time Limit (1967)
Hob Draconian series
The Alternative Detective (1993)
Draconian New York (1996)
Soma Blues (1997)
Other works
The Man in the Water (1962)
Short story collections
Untouched by Human Hands (1954)
Citizen in Space (1955)
Pilgrimage to Earth (1957)
(1960)
Store of Infinity (1960)
Shards of Space (1962)
The People Trap (1968)
Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (also known as The Same to You Doubled) (1972)
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1978)
The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley (1979)
The Sheckley Omnibus (1979)
Is THAT What People Do? (1984)
The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley (5 volumes, 1991)
Uncanny Tales (2003)
The Masque Of Mañana (2005)
Books as editor
After the Fall (1980)
Thrillers (1994)Further Information
Get more info on 'Robert Sheckley'.
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