1971
First Published
3.94
Average Rating
191
Number of Pages
A treasury of fiction from “**one of SF’s all-time masters of the humorous or satirical short story” (Booklist).** In “The Cruel Equations,” a planetary explorer finds out how lethal it can be when a robot guard has been designed to do too perfect a job. The fifteen other stories in this collection are “Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?”, “Cordle to Onion to Carrot,” “The Petrified World,” “ First Schematic,” “Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends,” “The Same to You Doubled,” “Starting From Scratch,” “The Mnemone,” “Tripout,” “Notes on the Perception of Imaginary Differences,” “Down the Digestive Tract and Into the Cosmos With Mantra, Tantra, and Specklebang,” “Pas de Trois of the Chef and the Waiter,” “Aspects of Langranak,” “Plague Circuit,” and “Tailpipe to Disaster.” From the very beginning of his career, Robert Sheckley was recognized by fans, reviewers, and fellow authors as a master storyteller and the wittiest satirist working in the science fiction field. Open Road is proud to republish his acclaimed body of work, with nearly thirty volumes of full-length fiction and short story collections. Rediscover, or discover for the first time, a master of science fiction who, according to the New York Times, was “a precursor to Douglas Adams.”
Avg Rating
3.94
Number of Ratings
487
5 STARS
29%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
21%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
1%
goodreads
Author
Robert Sheckley
Author · 78 books
One of science fiction's great humorists, Sheckley was a prolific short story writer beginning in 1952 with titles including "Specialist", "Pilgrimage to Earth", "Warm", "The Prize of Peril", and "Seventh Victim", collected in volumes from Untouched by Human Hands (1954) to Is That What People Do? (1984) and a five-volume set of Collected Stories (1991). His first novel, Immortality, Inc. (1958), was followed by The Status Civilization (1960), Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Mindswap (1966), and several others. Sheckley served as fiction editor for Omni magazine from January 1980 through September 1981, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.
