Robert Sheckley is a maddening author to read. He could have been a famous crossover talent, breaking out of the sci-fi ghetto into the literary mainstream, a master of the profound and the absurd attuned to the emerging counterculture of the 1960s. Certainly Sheckley possessed all the ingredients for greatness: unfettered imagination, a deft prose style, a wild sense of humor, a philosophical bent, and an acute eye for the fashions and foibles of his fellow earthlings.
Yet Sheckley's longer works suffer from a slapdash sensibility. The plots wander, characters are hastily constructed without drive or focus, incidents are strung together without rhyme or reason, and dropped as soon as Sheckley loses interest with them—which is usually sooner rather than later. Even Vonnegut seems like a tight formalist by comparison. Sheckley's extended efforts are marketed as novels, but they remind me more of those old Broadway revues from the Jazz Age, in which a series of set pieces and routines are presented for the entertainment of the audience, with only the most cursory attempt at linking them together into a narrative.
Yet the miracle in this novel about miracles is that Sheckley can achieve so much despite these shortcomings. The man was brilliant, make no mistake about it. Dimension of Miracles has no structure, no narrative arc, but almost every page offers something pleasingly zany or piquant or provocative for your enjoyment. The characters may be made of cardboard, but they are colorfully decked out. The dialogue can seem aimless, yet somehow manages to address deep issues amidst all the superficial chatter. Put simply, the book is a mess, but still only a few steps away from earning accolades as a masterpiece.
When tackling longer forms, Sheckley typically returned to the earliest origins of science fiction as speculative travel literature—we see the roots of this in the sci-fi interlude in Gulliver’s Travels , and Jules Verne later established it as a powerful formula for the genre. In truth, we can trace this loose travel-oriented structure for an adventure narrative back to Homer's Odyssey , or even more distantly to various myths and legends, which rely on a hero’s journey into the unknown as a entry point into conflicts, discoveries and awe-inspiring sightseeing.
Alas, Sheckley wants to write sci-fi travel narratives, but he has no patience with any journey that takes more than a fraction of a second, let alone time-consuming space flights into distant galaxies. So in Dimension of Miracles , as with his other leading novels Mindswap and Immortality, Inc. , the story begins with his unwitting protagonist getting transported, almost magically, into the first of a series of anxiety-provoking incidents. When the first adventure loses steam, the hero gets transported to another, typically unrelated, situation, which serves as the setting for the next crisis. And so on and so forth.
In Dimension of Miracles , the hero is Tom Carmody, a hapless New Yorker ('hapless' is almost always the right word to describe a Sheckley protagonist). A messenger arrives in Carmody's living room, amidst a bolt of lightning and clap of thunder, and tells him that has won the Galactic Lottery. Carmody is ushered off to the Galactic Center to claim his prize, a trip that proves to be "brief, lasting no more than Instantaneity plus one microsecond squared." Readers are never quite clear what the prize is—it starts out as a "small, brightly-wrapped parcel" but changes shape and nature several times during the course of the book. Yet whatever its form, it can speak, and turns into an amiable, but occasionally petulant, sidekick for the resulting adventures.
Carmody now wants to return home, but the bureaucrats at the Galactic Center prove even more incompetent than their counterparts on planet Earth. They aren't sure how to get the prize-winner back to New York, or even to the right solar system and correct universe. He must travel around, checking in with various local deities in the galaxy, until he finds the god-like force that can bring him back to Manhattan.
This is not a promising beginning, but Sheckley doesn’t need much to work his wonders. Carmody gets to interrogate some quasi-deities during his travels, and these scenes are so smartly written that you could even assign them as required reading for theology students, and stir up a devilish debate. God should never appear as a character in your novel, Philip K. Dick once warned, but Sheckley shows that you can safely ignore this advice—at least if you are as clever as him in constructing dialogues between a wandering New Yorker and an omnipotent being.
But Sheckley, true to form, quickly loses interest in everything, even the process of divine creation. After interviews with two deities—the fickle Melichrone and the cost-cutting Maudsley—Carmody is transported (again instantaneously) into a series of probable Earths in possible Universes. The science here is vague and fuzzy, and the metaphysics even less solid, but Sheckley only wants a pretext for various skits and satire. He sends Carmody to a city so perfectly constructed that all of the inhabitants have abandoned it. Then Carmody travels to another universe in which everyone speaks in Mad Men -era advertising copy. And then Carmody must deal with a dangerous predator who can take on the appearance of a space ship, a subway station, or whatever else it needs to camouflage its intention of swallowing up our hapless hero. (Yes, 'hapless' is the right word again.)
The book fizzles out at the end. Sheckley isn't very good at tying together loose ends. Let's be honest, he hardly even makes an effort here. Many have seen Dimension of Miracles as a precursor to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy —Adams, who didn’t know about Sheckley’s work when he wrote his bestseller, was later struck by the similarities. But even the rambling Adams offers more closure than Sheckley, who seems to stop worrying about his characters' problems after a few hours of writing (or perhaps when he reaches the requisite daily word count).
Yes, this is maddening. With a little more attention to the nuts and bolts of writing, Sheckley might have delivered one of the great counterculture classics. Instead, Dimension of Miracles is not only mostly forgotten, but even unavailable in print. If you want a hardcover copy, be prepared to shell out more than five hundred dollars. Yet this is Sheckley's strongest novel, and even with its flaws, well worth reading.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, a history of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.