Store of the Worlds in Bookforum

…Sheckley’s work is unabashed termite art. He illuminates standard sci-fi’s cutout characters and quasi-magical contraptions with a hallucinatory, Technicolor vibrancy, spinning yarns more fabulist than plausible, banged out as permutations of his own pet obsessions, among them mind control, extraterrestrial psychology, and the cruelties of love. Writing in 1956, his contemporary Damon Knight criticized ‘the stripped quality of his … work, and its utter divorcement from fact and logic’—aspects that today read more like pleasurably conscious choices than defects. And indeed, Knight conceded that, ‘like it or not, what Sheckley does is art.’

—Ed Halter reviews Robert Sheckley’s Store of the Worlds in the current issue of Bookforum. If you think the prose of the review is weird and wonderful, you should check out Sheckley’s stories.

Based on Robert Sheckley’s 1953 short story the “Seventh Victim”—included in Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley,—Elio Petri’s The 10th Victim is a psychedelic trip to the future where civilization’s strategy to end wars is a legalized, cathartic “Big Hunt”, where two strangers are designated “hunter” or “victim” and then have to kill or be killed. Marcello Mastroianni with bleach, cropped hair (it’s the future!) is victim and Ursula Andress with bullet-shooting bra and back-less dresses is the hunter. Need I say more? Scenes not to miss: Andress shooting someone with her bra (in fact, all the outfits);  Mastroianni bringing Andress over to his ex-wife’s house, only to be interrupted by both his ex-wife and his current lover; the two of them wrestling in the Roman Forum; and the list goes on. Highly recommended, both the Sheckley book and the movie.

When the Future Stops Teasing Us: John Clute on Sheckley’s Store of the Worlds

Dawn in 2012, or the last sentence of a Sheckley story from 1953 or so, are whistle-blowers on anyone who jumps cover, commits to an Attempted Escape, forgets that the House Always Wins. Unlike most Utopias—unlike all those doomed Five-Year Plans Guaranteeing Purchasers an out from the Law of Answered Prayer—most of the great Sheckley stories, bar a few cheerier tales featuring aliens or humans who are safely off-planet, are about what happens to human beings when the future stops teasing us. The heart of his best work is all about comeuppance, what happens in the latter years of the Age of Anxiety when the spell fails and you hit vacuum like Casey, what happens when the gods grant your wish. The heart of a Sheckley story is how it ends.

—from John Clute’s, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, review of Robert Sheckley’s Store of the Worlds on the blog Strange Horizons.

Robert Sheckley, Michael Dirda, and bullet-shooting bras

If Sheckley is known beyond the confines of science fiction, it is probably for “Seventh Victim,” made into a 1965 movie called “The 10th Victim” (and still fondly remembered for Ursula Andress’s bullet-shooting bra). In a future society, war has been eliminated, but man’s killer instincts remain. So some outlet for his aggression must be found. The outlet is a game, of sorts, overseen by the Emotional Catharsis Board. In it, people alternate being hunters and victims, the object being to kill — or be killed. A hunter knows the name of his victim, but the victim doesn’t know the identity of his hunter. What happens, though, when you’re Stanton Frelaine and the person you’ve been assigned to murder is Janet-Marie Patzig, a beautiful young woman with whom you find yourself falling in love?

—from Michael Dirda’s review of Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley in The Washington Post. You can read the rest of the review here.

Store of the Worlds
Stories by Robert Sheckley
Edited and with an Introduction by Alex Abrambovich and Jonathan Lethem
on sale: May 1, 2012

Contents

The Monsters
Seventh Victim
Shape
Specialist
Warm
Watchbird
The Accountant
Paradise II
All the Things You Are
Protection
The Native Problem
Pilgrimage to Earth
A Wind Is Rising
Dawn Invader
Double Indemnity
Holdout
The Language of Love
Morning After
If the Red Slayer
Store of the Worlds
Shall We Have a Little Talk?
Cordle to Onion to Carrot
The People Trap
Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?
Is That What People Do?
Beside Still Waters

above: covers from our in-house Sheckley paperback collection

There’s was a lot of excitement at the office yesterday when we discovered that Robert Sheckley has two big fans. And we are fans of his fans. We also liked the “five minutes of us burbling,” though wished it was “five minutes of blurbling” for Store of the Worlds: The Short Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited and introduced by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich and due out May 1st. 

neil-gaiman:

Mr Gaiman and Mr Hodgman continue their conversation about Audio Books. Here they talk about the upcoming audiobook release of Robert Sheckley’s DIMENSION OF MIRACLES and why it sometimes feels like a strange cross between Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy AND Mad Men at the same time.

(It’s about five minutes of us burbling.)

“There is no form. Man produces gestalts, and cuts form out of the plethora of nothingness. It’s like looking at a set of lines and saying they represent a figure. We look at a mass of material, extract it from background and say it’s man. But in truth, there is no such thing. There are only humanizing features that we - myopically - attach to it. Matter is conjoined, a matter of viewpoint.”

— 

Robert Sheckley, “Warm” (Galaxy Science Fiction June 1953)

“Warm” is collected in our forthcoming Sheckley story volume, The Store of the Worlds, coming this spring.