Brian Aldiss, once described fellow sci-fi author Robert Sheckley as "Voltaire-and-soda." Sheckley, in his opinion, was one of the three great "entertainers" of 1960s science fiction—along with Kurt Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick. "Modern life and its absurdities," Aldiss noted "provoked his sharpest and wittiest responses."
More than anyone, Sheckley set the stage for the absurdist science fiction that would flourish in later years, especially in the works of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett . He somehow managed to combine the metaphysical angst of Kafka with the playfulness of Lewis Carroll, all mixed up with the pulp fiction sensibility of the so-called 'Golden Age' of sci-fi.
Sheckley achieved that extravagant hybrid at a heavy cost. His plots are the least coherent of any of these authors. The tone of his tales shifts without warning, and at any moment he might lapse from storytelling to satire, philosophy, technological musings, or outright parody. His characters are just as changeable—they are typically innocent victims of the charades around them and quickly learn, like Sheckley's readers, that it's best to simply roll with the punches.
In h is short stories , Sheckley could usually hold it together long enough to maintain the narrative momentum and reach a pleasing resolution. But longer forms posed a formidable challenge to his piecemeal sensibility. Sheckely had little patience for the slow, careful construction required in writing a coherent large-scale novel. Instead, he promised a series of thrills, surprises, laughs and smarty-pants observations on the foibles of the human condition. If you were willing to settle for that bargain, Sheckley would not disappoint.
Mindswap , from 1966, shows just how far this author would sacrifice structure in the pursuit of some amusing tangent. Sheckley isn't really sure whether he wants to write a sci-fi adventure, or a detective story, or a Western, or sword-and-sorcery fantasy, or poetry, or a romance. So he solves the problem by squeezing all of these disparate approaches into a meandering 200-page novel.
The story begins with protagonist Marvin Flynn, resident of Stanhope, "a pleasant rural community situated in the foothills of the Adirondacks," and some 300 miles distant from New York City. Flynn suffers from wanderlust, and longs to visit other planets. He can't afford a flight to Mars, but he can get to the Red Planet on the cheap if he agrees to a "mindswap." This technology allows him to inhabit the body of a Martian for a specified length of time; the Martian, in turn, gets to use Flynn's body back on Earth. Think of mindswap as a time-share scheme for the interplanetary age.
Flynn agrees to a mindswap with Ze Kraggash, inhabitant of the Disappearing Desert in New South Mars. But soon after arriving in his new body, he learns that Kraggash illegally sold mindswap rights to 12 different individuals. Flynn finds that he must leave Kraggash’s body—he receives the equivalent of a mindswap eviction notice—but he has no place to go. Kraggash has gone into hiding with Flynn’s original body.
Sheckley manages to stick with this story for around 50 pages, but then he grows weary with his plot. Fortunately the concept of mindswap allows him to bounce his unfortunate protagonist from planet to planet, and insert him into new complications without ever resolving the old ones. On the flimsiest pretexts, Sheckley also changes his prose style, and sometimes writes with faux Shakespearean grandiloquence, or in a parody of academic posturing, or in a dozen other ways.
All pretensions to continuity are lost before we reach the halfway point of Mindswap . We now realize that Sheckley is intent on delivering…. well, no, not science fiction, but rather what we would now call a postmodern pastiche. At one point, he sends Flynn into a pickup bar, where every line of dialogue spoken comes from the lyrics of various pop songs. Ten pages later, Flynn embarks on a Don Quixote-ish quest with a a strange Sancho Panza-esque companion. In another ten pages, Flynn finds himself on a remote planet in the galaxy, where he just happens to run into his Mom and Dad. Ten pages later, he is thrust into a medieval adventure story. And so on and so forth.
Sheckley’s skill in mimicking and ridiculing genre formulas is impressive, and compensates to some degree for the gaping holes and contradictions in the plot. But even the most tolerant reader will bristle when the main character seems to have forgotten the very reason why he set out on this adventure in the first place. And that his body has been stolen. And that he will die if he doesn't track down the person who took it from him. Why should we care about the hero's plight, if he doesn't care about it himself?
Sheckley finally returns to the original mindswap plot in the closing pages, and offers up a resolution to the plot…but one with more holes in it than it would take to fill the Albert Hall. His ending is more like the punchline to a shaggy dog joke than the conclusion of a novel. And I will chuckle here, and elsewhere, at this unhinged book. But I can't help thinking that, with all his excess of imagination and writing skill, Sheckley could have done so much more than work just for laughs.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, a history of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.