Sheckley is shamefully neglected -- as so often are the true originals. In book after book, "Untouched by Human Hands," "Mindswap," "Store of Infinity," "Shards of Space," "Notions: Unlimited," like a fine chef he's thrown into the stew pot the best ingredients available, humor worthy of Mark Twain or Fritz Leiber, social satire on a par with William Tenn, extrapolation scenarios such as "The People Trap" and "Something for Nothing," stories of space travel fully as comic and reverent as Stanislaw Lem's, picaresques like "Journey of Joenes" carrying Fielding around and the like into the future.
Has Sheckley's work changed for me over all these years? Absolutely. As an adolescent and young adult I was much taken with the idea of his work, with its cleverness. Years later that cleverness came to seem to me a burden, a freight that sometimes set the story to groaning on its supports, but at the same time I'd reached a perspective from which I was able to appreciate the surety and subtlety of the writing, to admire the abandon, the absolute freedom of it. Nowadays I tend to perceive him as our Voltaire.
Has Sheckley's work changed for me over all these years? Absolutely. As an adolescent and young adult I was much taken with the idea of his work, with its cleverness. Years later that cleverness came to seem to me a burden, a freight that sometimes set the story to groaning on its supports, but at the same time I'd reached a perspective from which I was able to appreciate the surety and subtlety of the writing, to admire the abandon, the absolute freedom of it. Nowadays I tend to perceive him as our Voltaire.
