- Sheckley, Robert.
The People Trap and Mindswap.
New York: Ace Books, [1952–1966, 1968] 1981.
ISBN 978-0-441-65874-9.
-
This “Ace Double”
(albeit not in the classic
dos-à-dos format, but simply
concatenated) contains a collection of mostly unrelated short stories
by
Robert Sheckley,
and the short novel Mindswap, which
is an extraordinarily zany story even by the standards of the year
in which it was written, 1966, which was a pretty zany year—perhaps
Sheckley foresaw just how weird the next few years would get.
I bought this book because it contained a story I've remembered
ever since I first read it four decades ago (and, even then, a decade
after it was first published in Galaxy in 1953), “The
Laxian Key”. In a century and a half of science fiction, this
is the only exemplar of which I'm aware of a story based upon
economics which is also riotously funny. I won't give away the
plot, but just imagine the ultimate implications of “it's free!”.
These stories are gems from the era in which science fiction was truly
the “literature of ideas”—it's the ideas
that matter; don't look for character development or introspection:
the characters are props for the idea that underlies each story. If you like
this kind of thing, which I do enormously, here is a master at work
at the apogee of the genre, when you could pick up any one of the
science fiction magazines and find several stories that made you look
at the world through glasses which presented reality in a very
different light.
This book is long out of print, but used copies are readily
available, often for less than the 1981 reprint cover price.
December 2008 