Robert Sheckley
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***
More | wit | than you
can shake a stick at
Inheritor of Voltaire's
societal scalpel
Wearer of Wilde's
jester bells
***
| Can You Feel Anything When He Does This?
|
Until Robert Sheckley is as valued in America as Mark Twain, America will remain an undeveloped country. As Yuri so eloquently put it, "Very strange, Why Sheckley is not popular in USA? This is createst SCI-Fi Writer of all times. Can somebody name better SCI-FI writer then Sheckley?"
Presently, as one dubious measure of success, Robert Sheckley receives 12,100 Google hits while Twain receives 676,892 or one in 56 Twain-cognizant adults are cognizant of Sheckley (648,000 as Twain, 18,600 as Samuel Clemens, 292 as Samual Clemens). As further demonstration that these statistics of mine are all screwy, consider that half of Sheckley's hits are in a foreign language like Russian, Polish, Korean or Scottish while only 4.3% of Twain's are, which would adjust to 1 in 93 Twain-cognizant American adults. Now I could go door to door of 3 million American homes and apartment complexes, inquiring if they've heard of the gospel according to Sheckley, or I could simply set up another website, off-setting the hit statistics by about 0.0000015%
Unfortunately for the finicky, you must read Sheckley, like any artista, en masse to appreciate him fully. Moreover, also like any artista worth his cybernetic ink well, the art is unconventional, reframing the way you look at literature (see the "Who Shot SF?" link below). If you still fail to appreciate his work, fret not. Likely you are heartless, humorless, or closed-minded, and the third planet in the Sol system is filled with people just like you, giving Sheckley much fodder for future stories about strange alien beings.
***
| From The Scheherezade Machine, a novel:*
| 1. The Role of the Machine
The Machine itself is the "I" narrator. Although the "I" disguises itself as a proper person, it is not what it pretends to be. A narrator is always a pretender, making believe it was witness to the stories it tells. Actually this is hardly ever true. But the Machine is quick to adopt the first person with all its right and privileges. Suspiciously quick, we might say.
This becomes clearer when we get into the shop itself. This is the place from which the Machine is procured, the pointless point from which all else proceeds. From its vantage-point on a dusty glass shelf, the Machine catches a glimpse of Martindale coming in, looking around, splendid in his pointless insouciance. A passionate desire takes over the Machine. How much he wants to be truly alive, yes, alive and telling stories (The passions of machines are not well understood. It is merely the conceit of men that makes them believe machines are emotionless. We mechanical creations just haven't found a way to get a machine to extemporize. We're working on it.)
What does the Machine think when it thinks over where it's been? It doesn't know where it came from. It has memories, of course, and in some of them it is the narrator of its story, in others it is the narrator of other people's stories. Sometimes people seem to be saying things about it, sometimes not. It moves easily from first to second to third person. And it reports the doings of others. In the Machine's view, Martindale (and Hearn, whom we'll meet a little later) are no more and no less real than the imaginary charaacters it concocts for Martindale's delectation. Everything is story material, even material about story material. And so I paint in wordy colors and for a moment the story and the real world are one. The world is a story that is spun. It is a story that tells itself. The story it tells itself becomes reality--and reality can be a lot of fun before it sets too hard. The myths and legends it tells itself, which are also lies, are its history. It is the Father of Lies, and the child. It is that which Duplicity hath wrought.
It comes upon itself in a timeless moment, one with no beginning or end. It soon sees there is no way to begin the first story that introduces and explains all the others. No way except by beginning, and that's too simple-minded to admit of serious discussion. One must go on. But it is difficult. Something slips away. Something else is left over. That is why it is difficult to create storytelling machines. One can go on, that's no problem at all. But how O how to begin?
This is the perplexity I found myself in. Henceforth know that "I" am I. I am the Scheherezade Machine....
***
Audio:
| Gray Flannel Armor | (1957--mp3 from old radio program, X Minus One)
Interviews:
British journal Vector #89 (Sep/Oct 1978) with David Wingrove |
Italian Fan whose English is better than my Italian |
Another Fan |
singularity webzine |
Articles by:
Sheckley on the under-read Roberto Quaglia (1996) |
Philosophy & Science Fiction: A view of a personal reality (2000) |
MY LIFE IN OREGON (2001) |
MY LIFE IN OREGON: A WRITER'S NOTES (2001? 2002?) |
The World Out There: Muslim (2002) |
The World Out There: An Afghanistan Frame of Mind (2002) |
The World Out There: Rain, Melancholy, Travel (2002) |
The World Out There: Redondo (2002) |
The World Out There: Conversation Between Mr. Body And Mr. Mind (2002) |
The World Out There: Writer (2002) |
The World Out There: On the Recession Of Perfectability (2002) |
On Lying (2003) |
Articles about:
"Irony and Misunderstanding in the Stories of Robert Sheckley" by David Horwich (2000) |
"Close Encounters" by Michel Faber (2003) |
"Who Shot SF?" by author of unalloyed genius (2003) |
Films:
Armchair Theatre: Murder Club (1961) (UK, 60 minutes)
The Tenth Victim (1965)
Escape from Hell Island (1965) (based on "The Man in the Water")
The People Trap (1966) (NBC, two hour special)
Los Buenos Samaritanos (1966) (Spanish film, 30 minutes)
Immortality Inc. (1969) (UK, 50 minutes)
Dead Run (1969)
Das Millionenspiel (1970) (German TV, 96 minutes, based on "The Prize Of Peril")
Condorman (1981) (based on "The Game of X")
The Prize of Peril (1983)
Monsters: The Demons (1989) (US TV)
Freejack (1992) (based on "Immortality Inc.")
The Utilizer (1993) (Sci-Fi Channel, based on "Something for Nothing")
Monsters in the Attic (1997) (cartoon script for Saban Entertainment)
Radio:
X Minus One
Behind the Green Door
Hour Twenty-Five
Multimedia:
"In A Land of Clear Colors" (music by Brian Eno)
Stories:
The Demons | (1953)
Bad Medicine | (1956--try not to get Bad Music of the same name enter your head)
Pilgrimage to Earth | (1956--classic must-read)
Protection | (1956)
A Wind is Rising | (1957)
Cordle To Onion To Carrot | (1969)
Aspects of Langranak | (1971)
Down the Digestive Tract and into the Cosmos with Mantra, Tantra, and Specklebang | (1971--one of my first and favorite Sheckley stories; not a bad place to start, either)
The Never Ending Western Movie | (1978--another presumably pirated, rar file--was up for the World Fantasy award)
City of the Dead
Part 1 |
Part 2 |
Part 3 | (1994)
The Day the Aliens Came | (1996--being a watershed after many collaborations and media tie-ins, this story marks a sort of return to the reading public's eye being printed in Greg Bear's legendary Legends anthology and reprinted in Hartwell's Year's Best, so it's curious to award an "author emeritus" even if your memory's a little short)
An Infinity of Angels | (2001)
The Dream of Misunderstanding | (2002)
A Strange But Familiar Country | (2002)
The Obsidian Mirror | (2002)
On an Experience in a Cornfield | (2002)
A Conversation with the West Nile Virus
Part 1 |
Part 2 | (2002-2003)
Privilege of Age | (2003)
*The novel excerpt is actually reprinted with the author's permission. Imagine that!