"I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them." -- Robert Sheckley
Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was a Hugo- and Nebula-nominated 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.
"A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind.""A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.""As far as the mechanics go, working with other people on received ideas was for me a very interesting technical problem. I can't say that any of my collaborations engaged my heart, but they engaged the craftsman in me.""Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.""I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.""I don't much like to look back with the idea that I was doing it wrong then or I'm doing it wrong now.""I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.""I knew I was doing something right because it was selling so I didn't want to interfere with it.""I like to think that I have no single view nor any single situation that I think things arrive from. I try to give examples of what I think are interesting questions for me.""I was forever reading outside of the field as well as in it.""I was never able to write seriously about heroes because I was very aware that I was not one and that in my background there was not this heroic thing.""I'm not so interested any more in how a great deal of science fiction goes. It goes into things like Star Wars and Star Trek which all go excellent in their own way.""I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.""I'm quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man's real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.""I've always thought of absurdism as a French fad I'd like to belong to.""It takes me a long time to get with a landscape. It took me 20 years before I wrote anything about Ibiza, and I haven't written about Oregon yet, although I've been there 20 years - possibly I'm almost due.""Once you find you can't walk as far and as fast as you were able, life becomes more complicated.""Science fiction is very healthy in its form.""So I wrote what I hoped would be science fiction, I was not at all sure if what I wrote would be acceptable even. But I don't say that I consciously wrote with humour. Humour is a part of you that comes out.""The absurdist stuff wasn't terribly popular at the time I was doing it.""There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out."
Robert Sheckley was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. In 1931 the family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey. Sheckley attended Columbia High School, where he discovered science fiction. He graduated in 1946 and hitchhiked to California the same year, where he tried numerous jobs: landscape gardener, pretzel salesman, barman, milkman, warehouseman, and general labourer in a hand-painted necktie studio. Finally, still in 1946, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to Korea. During his time in the army he served as a guard, an army newspaper editor, a payroll clerk and guitarist in an army band. He left the service in 1948.
Sheckley then attended New York University, where he received an undergraduate degree in 1951. The same year he married for the first time, to Barbara Scadron. The couple had one son, Jason. Sheckley worked in an aircraft factory and as an assistant metallurgist for a short time, but his breakthrough came quickly: in late 1951 he sold his first story, Final Examination, to Imagination magazine. He quickly gained prominence as a writer, publishing stories in Imagination, Galaxy, and other science fiction magazines. The 1950s saw the publication of Sheckley's first four books: short story collections Untouched by Human Hands (Ballantine, 1954), Citizen in Space (1955), and Pilgrimage to Earth (Bantam, 1957), and a novel, Immortality, Inc. (first published as a serial in Galaxy, 1958).
Sheckley and Scadron divorced in 1956. The writer then married journalist Ziva Kwitney in 1957. The newly married couple lived in Greenwich Village. Their daughter, Alisa Kwitney, born in 1964, would herself become a successful writer. Applauded by critic Kingsley Amis, Sheckley was now selling many of his deft, satiric stories to mainstream magazines such as Playboy. In addition to his science fiction stories, in 1960s Sheckley started writing suspense fiction. More short story collections and novels appeared in the 1960s, and a film adaptation of an early story by Sheckley, The 10th Victim, was released in 1965.
Sheckley spent the bigger part of 1970s living on Ibiza. He divorced Kwitney in 1972 and the same year married Abby Schulman, whom he had met in Ibiza. The couple had two children, Anya and Jed. In 1980, the writer returned to the United States and became fiction editor of the newly established OMNI magazine. Sheckley left OMNI in 1981 with his fourth wife, Jay Rothbell, and they subsequently travelled widely in Europe, finally ending up in Portland, Oregon,where they separated. He married Gail Dana of Portland in 1990, but was separated from her at the time of his death. Sheckley continued publishing further science fiction and espionage/mystery stories, and collaborated with other writers such as Roger Zelazny and Harry Harrison.
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. Mosnews.com His condition was very serious for one week, but he appeared to be slowly recovering. Sheckley's official website ran a fundraising campaign to help cover Sheckley's treatment and his return to the United States. Sheckley settled in northern Dutchess County, New York, to be near his daughters Anya and Alisa. On November 20 he had surgery for a brain aneurysm. Sheckley died in a Poughkeepsie hospital on December 9, 2005.
Sheckley was a prolific and versatile writer. His works include not only original short stories and novels, but also TV series episodes (Captain Video and His Video Rangers), novelizations of works by others (A Call to Arms, after the film), shared universe stories, and collaborations with other writers. He was best known for his numerous (several hundreds) short stories, which he published in book form as well as individually. 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 is 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 the most famous of Sheckley's stories was the AAA Ace Series involving a series of stories involving two partners in the far future encountering various unusual problems. Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Experience: Robert Sheckley
In the 1990s, Sheckley wrote a series of three mystery novels featuring detective Hob Draconian, as well as novels set in the worlds of Deep Space Nine 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 The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, Adams claimed not to have read it until after writing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
One of Sheckley's 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 may also have been the inspiration for the role-playing game Assassin.
Sheckley's 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.
The 1954 story "Ghost V" and the 1955 story "The Lifeboat Mutiny" were adapted into two episodes of the USSR science fiction TV series This Fantastic World.
The 1958 short story "The Prize of Peril" was adapted in 1970 as the German TV movie Das Millionenspiel, Millionenspiel, Das (1970) (TV), 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 is perhaps the first-ever published work predicting the advent of reality television. There are many similarities between Sheckley's story and Stephen King's novel, "The Running Man", published in 1982, of which a film adaptation was later made.
The short story "Watchbird" was adapted for the short-lived TV series Masters of Science Fiction. It never aired in the US, but was reported to have aired in Canada. It was included on the DVD set for the series.
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.
