The Robert Sheckley Megapack

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

I only met Robert Sheckley once, in 1980, when he was a guest at Philcon, a science fiction convention held in Philadelphia. Along with Ben Bova (who was the convention’s principle speaker), Sheckley had an off-site autographing at a local bookstore, and I dutifully carted several books there to get them signed. In the bookstore, they were sitting and chatting with each other…because no one else was there. I was the only who had yet arrived to meet them and get my books signed. (This is not unusual—many bookstore autographing sessions are sparsely attended. I’ve had several myself where only a couple of people showed up over the course of an hour.)

At that time, Sheckley was the fiction editor at Omni magazine, and Bova was the general editor. Both were quite cordial, took time to speak with me and answer some questions, and both signed an issue of Omni and a few books I had acquired at the convention. I’ll never forget it, since I was only 16 years old at the time, an aspiring writer myself (I made my first professional sale a few months later), and they were both approachable, friendly, and welcoming—exactly what professional writers should be.

At the time, I mostly knew Ben Bova from his editorship of Analog magazine (he succeeded legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr.), and I had never read anything of Sheckley’s, though I recognized the name from Omni (which I also read).

So here is a collection of 14 of Robert Sheckley’s short stories and one novel (The Status Civilization). Sadly, I never ran into him again so I could tell him how much I enjoyed the books I acquired that day: the novel Immortality, Inc. and the collection Untouched by Human Hands, which contains some terrific short stories. Great works by an under-appreciated writer.

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC