Name: SHECKLEY, Robert Aged: 77
Born: July 16, 1928 Where: Brooklyn, NY
Died: December 9, 2005 Where: Poughkeepsie, NY
Interred: Cremated; ashes to Artists' Cemetery at Woodstock.
Married: Barbara Scadron When: - div
Married 2: Ziva Kwitney When: 1957 - div
Married 3: Abby Schulman When: c1969 - div
Married 4: Jay Rothbell When: - div
Married 5: Gail Dana When:
Awarded: Nebula Award in 2000 for Lifetime Achievement.

A fantasy humorist working in the science fiction field, but a little more serious about it than Douglas Adams. He was noticed right away and across the years achieved small successes in many areas...shorts, novels, collections, mystery/crime, TV scripts, films, slicks...but like all who use humor, Sheckley never rose to a specific top. Its hard to do that when your mind makes fun of everything. He was too sane to be serious about success.

Born in New York (Brooklyn), raised in New Jersey (West New York), served in the U.S. Army in Korea, and earned a BA at New York University. All of that makes a young man conflicted. Sheckley decided to laugh about it and share his perspective for pen money. He was successful almost right away. Two early short stories that made him famous were "The Specialist" (1953) and "The Store of the Worlds" (1959). His short story collections are marvels to read and very little of his work has missed being either collected or anthologized, many times over. Sheckley's novels are a mixed bag of F&SF and Crime, with several defying classification. Arguably the best, but at least the most famous, and made into a movie (Freejack) was Immortality, Inc that used a theme of body snatching/mind transfer that was widely imitated later...and will likely come to pass in the future.

Several hee-haw novel collaborations were written with authors Harry Harrison (1) and Roger Zelazny (3). The "out" is that each author has deniablity.

Robert Sheckley was not exactly a Golden Age SF writer...but he was one of those writers who appeared in the last decade of that era and helped to move SF from the pulps to pbs, slicks, TV scripts, and novelizations. Writers in his category included, Charles Beaumont, Robert Silverberg, Chad Oliver, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, etc. They were closely followed a decade later by what has been termed "New Wave" writers (1960s) and co-existed with same, more or less.

Sheckley was very prolific and left a well documented body of high average work. Things you can find currently that will give you a good idea about this writer are Dimensions of Sheckley, four novels and a novella, NESFA Press (2002), and The Masque of Maņana, a collection of 41 short stories, also NESFA Press (2005).

PEN NAMES: Phillips Barbee, Ned Lang, Finn O'Donnevan

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

OBITUARY: Various.

Send relevant email to George C. Willick