The Official Robert Sheckley Homepage
Robert Sheckley's forte is humor, satire, and general wackiness. He's the original wild man of science fiction. (Telling you that Douglas Adam's "Hitchhiker's Guide" series was modeled on Sheckley's books should give you some idea.) He's fascinated by our inability to communicate, by the shoddy conventions and shabby pretentions of social order, by the infinite mutability of the universe and our perceptions of it.
Long before the New Wave of the '60s broke free both of the conventions of genre science fiction and conventional thought, Robert Sheckley had leapt the barricades and gone into the streets; a solo mission. It's been a hard life -- years of laboring for five cents a word, the censure and neglect of oblivious time, confinement to the Bastille of genre writing -- but it's a life that has immeasurably enhanced many of our own.