and quot;Sheckley is… totally expert at spotting the wondrous within the commonplace, at zeroing in on a human frailty and making it the real hinge-pin of a tale rather than the exotic posters which are hung upon the door. It is the little tiling rather than the big thing upon which everything turns, just as the kicker in “The Demons” is not the understanding of the functioning of the demonology one obtains by the story’s end. — Or the things Sheckley does with viewpoint in “The Monsters,” “A Ticket to Tranai” or “Skulking Permit.” All of his stories are rigidly logical. Everything follows from premise. And they are also fun. Sheckley is a humorist who plays with ideas.This is a very powerful combination. It worked at times in poetry for John Donne in a very special way. And Mark Twain is well- remembered for that sort of thing. Science fiction and fantasy, as categories, may well be deemed specialized forms of satire, in that their modus involves the use of the future or some alien setting for purposes of exaggerating some facet of present society, some aspect of consensus reality, into a story feature. With Sheckley’s stories this exercise is more overt and hence, takes a step nearer the humor which is implicit within all fantastic tellings. And in keeping with the fact that his notions are often of a philosophical sort, the tone of his humor tends to the ironic rather than the belly-laugh variety.His wry twistings of reality, his skewed angles of vision in the setting up of the situations about which he writes are absolutely unique. By the end of the story he has made you see something as you’ve never seen it before. And he gets right into it. There is no wasted motion, no throat-clearing. In fact, his openings could be used as textbook examples of effective techniques for catching a reader’s interest. and quot; ROGER ZELAZNY

The Collected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley Volume #4 PDF

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