Store of the Worlds by Robert Sheckley (edited by Alex Abramovich & Jonathan Lethem)
Robert Sheckley was a powerful writer…in small doses. For ten pages at a stretch, maybe even fifteen, he could compete with the best of them. He was as sly as Kurt Vonnegut, as crisp as Joseph Heller, as absurd as Italo Calvino. He would surprise you, amuse you, maybe even educate you. But beware: if Sheckley continued beyond a certain word count, you could sense the fatigue setting in. In a strange reversal of the usual state-of-play, the author would lose interest before the reader. If you were lucky, Sheckley would stop at that point, but often he went on—usually with a painfully sharp rupture in the narrative indicating where the writer had shifted gears. In short, Mr. Sheckley was a sprinter, not a marathon runner, but sometimes he still kept in the race even when he was out of wind.
So do yourself a favor, and start your exploration of this sci-fi master with his short stories—especially those from the mid-1950s, when Sheckley seemed to have a magical touch, an inexhaustible imagination, and an acute sense of when to bring a tale to a close. Fortunately for us, Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich have done us the favor of sifting through this author's many shorter works and compiling a selection of the most exemplary in their 2012 anthology Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley . This is as close to a definitive collection as you will find, and will help you understand why, back in his late twenties and early thirties, Sheckley earned such high-flung praise. No one "is so deft as Sheckley in using interplanetary fiction as a vehicle for Gilbertian satire, topsy-turvy, shrewd, and wholly captivating," Anthony Boucher asserted in 1956. And in 1960, Kingsley Amis cited Sheckley as one of the leading postwar authors, lauding him as "science fiction’s premier gadfly." Brian Aldiss later compared him to Swift and Voltaire.
Sheckley's best work was mostly behind him by the time of Amis's advocacy . This is all the more dispiriting because his wry, satirical bent would seem to have been custom-made for the irreverent spirit of the late 1960s. He ought to have evolved into a counterculture hero, but his sense of dialogue and character development were still entrenched in the formulas and stereotypes of the Truman-Eisenhower era. The kind of leap that Heinlein made with Stranger in a Strange Land , or Vonnegut with Slaughterhouse-Five was beyond him. Instead of reinventing himself, he settled for repeating himself.
But turn to those great mid-1950s stories, most of them published in Galaxy magazine, and enjoy Sheckley at his finest. "Seventh Victim" (1953) the most famous of these, served as the basis for an influential film featuring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress, and though Sheckley tried to recapture its spirit and success in later works, the sequels never surpassed this taught 15-page account of a murder competition in which each contestant much take turns as predator and prey. I saw the film before reading the story, and was surprised when I came to Sheckley's narrative by the light touch he applied to such a gruesome story.
Even when murder is not on the agenda, the protagonists of Sheckley stories are invariably unwitting victims, who only gradually grasp the sticky situations into which they have stumbled. Many of the stories in Store of the Worlds deal with unintended consequences, and Sheckley is at his best in showing how what promised to be oh-so-good proves to be oh-so-bad. In "Watchbird," another Galaxy story from 1953, a new technology to identify and prevent violent crimes ends up by forcing a halt to almost every productive activity. The story is entertaining and briskly told, but also with enough intellectual content to spur a long, hard discussion on the nature of violence and how we compartmentalize it. In "Pilgrimage to Earth" (1956) and "The Language of Love" (1957) he accomplishes the same kind of mordant turnabout on the topic of romance. Here again, Sheckley pushes beyond the dictates of pure escapism, and shows how thought-provoking he could be—but without sacrificing anything in pacing and humor. Both stories clock in just under fifteen pages, that sweet spot where this author could pull off his finest effects.
Other tales here stay closer to science fiction formulas. Sheckley unleashes new variations on stories about galactic warfare ("Shape"), time travel ("Double Indemnity"), first contact ("All the Things You Are"), the colonization of space ("The Native Problem") and clairvoyance ("Protection"). But his most reliable subject—one that would come to the fore in most of his best-known novels, such as Mind s wap and Immortality, Inc. —is human consciousness itself, and the ways it can lead a life separated from its original biological organism. You might even say that Sheckley is obsessed with the nature of the soul—and at times his writings take on a zany theological bent. But for the most part, Sheckley uses this platform to address the absurd rather than the transcendental. Three of the best stories in this collection rely on this starting-point to reach very different ends: "Warm" deals with a man who starts taking the voice in his head far too seriously, and ends up by becoming it; "Morning After" presents a new type of adventure vacation in which the participant is never quite sure whether it is really happening; "The Store of the Worlds" describes a post-apocalyptic world in which individuals with lots of cash can experience a utopian alternative reality, but only inside their mind.
The later and longer stories in this volume, however, painfully reveal the limitations of Sheckley’s talents—maddening limitations, since he still manages to show, in short bursts, his unassailable skills at satire and social commentary. "The People Trap," from 1968, attempts to recapture the vitality of Sheckley's "Seventh Victim" story of 15 years before; again a dangerous competition sets the stage for violence and romance. But even at just 21 pages, this story feels bloated, the unfolding plot meanders and the characters' motivations for key actions almost incomprehensible. In other later stories, such as "Cordle to Onion to Carrot" and "Is That What People Do?" Sheckley betrays the same indecisiveness that undermined so many of his longer works during this period—he simply strings incidents together, hoping that the reader will forgive the gaps and loose ends.
But the editors of Store of the Worlds compensate for this. At first glance, it must seem odd that a survey of Sheckley's entire body of short works should focus so much on a five-year span from 1953 through 1957—indeed, more than half of the book is devoted to that fertile period. After all, Sheckley's entire career as a writer spanned more than a half-century; so why focus on just five years? But during that brief stretch between the invention of the H-bomb and the launch of Sputnik, Sheckley had few peers as a writer of short sci-fi works, and somehow managed to turn abstruse scientific concepts into his own personal playground. Give him credit for setting a standard hard to match—sad to say, most of all by the author himself.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His next book, a history of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.