THE CHAIR IS BITING MY LEG...

How did I miss that ? Robert Sheckley, the 5th Marx Brother, the yiddish Merlin, the I Ching's sophomoric counterpart, the zen master who fought madness with madness, the man who put the fiction in science fiction, the first and only Douglas Adams, has been dead for 4 months and I've known nothing about that until now... God be praised for this postponement, as opposed to the excellent friend who brutally broke me the news (she didn't know it was one to me).

They say Sheckley wrote science fiction. If he ever did, it never was anything more than a clever jump on a then fashionable bandwagon, a modern encoding for his own unique, metaphysical epic of the absurd. His short stories were no shape of things to come, but timeless, hilarious and incredibly wise fables featuring the smallness of man in his ridiculous and touching quest for sense in a big, bad, and especially indifferent world where only chaos is real. Yes, Sheckley was a profound Chinese philosopher in Jewish clothing, and a classy, razor sharp stylist spicing up everything with a cruel, grinding, and sometimes tender humor. Robert Sheckley was a writer.

Sheckley wrote so many tight, bright, tiny masterpieces that his works will look like an Ali Baba's cave of gems to the layman who'll feel like venturing into the labyrinth of his spells. I'll quote the ones which jump to my mind right now, in a stream of consciousness :

- "Options", a novel which is really a patchwork of short stories, is without a doubt his key masterpiece and the title that will always jump to my mind first thing when thinking of Sheckley, whatever the course of my stream. An astronaut, mockingly called Mishkin, runs into some trouble with the engine of his rocket and goes to the shop round the corner to get himself the thingy that he needs to fix it. It's the beginning of a quest through all kinds of alternate universes, each depicting a possible meaning of life, or a related symbol, riddle or staging. One of the highlights must be the brief, memorable dialogue between Mishkin and the four men quietly playing cards on a bridge suspended above the abyss...

- "The Leech" is the story of a tiny seed from outer space who simply feeds and grows on anything it touches - and, even more, of the powerful but not very smart general who fights it with sophisticated, delicious bombs, and of the very smart but not powerful scientist who warns him quite pointlessly not to do it.

- "A ticket to Tranai" tells the story of your favorite utopia come true. On this dream planet, you'll find everything you've ever dreamed of, freedom, fun, sex, land, everything. Of course the place is a decent enough embodiment of hell - but it's still enthusiastically depicted in apologetic mode by the unruffled narrator as he summons glimpses of Guernica for the reader.

- "All The Things You Are" is a hymn to American imperialism and the wisdom of bringing democracy to savages. In this humorous and for once optimistic tale, the Earthlings are not obnoxious and murderous, but pitiable and naive. Eager to do their best and to be good role models, they cause one disaster after another, until their lame and awkward ways finally touch the heart of the savages and even turn out into something unexpectedly good. Yes, the short story was written before the war in Iraq.

- "The Laxian Key" is a wonderfully uncluttered sketch of the logics of capitalism. Arnold and Gregor (Sheckley's Laurel and Hardy) discover a machine which can manufacture a gray powder out of nothing and forever, and they also find that this worthless substance is in fact the food of the inhabitants of a whole planet. On top of all that, the secondhand dealer is willing to sell it for zip, because the machine can only be stopped with a Laxian key, and he has lost the only existing one. Of course Arnold and Gregor could care less about that useless thing, and they buy the gray powder factory in glee and bring it to the accurate planet, hoping for riches and fame. But the natives get mad at them and give them the boot in no time, for their whole planet is already gray with the stuff, all of their houses are gray from the damn thing, they're drowning in it, and their one and only dream, the only thing they'd ever buy, but at any cost, would be... a Laxian key.

And then there are two incredible short stories, whose names unfortunately stubbornly elude me at the moment, but whose genius is up to the others' :

- A terrifying short story on the nature of reality : a man is about to go meet his girl, he's happy, it's a day like any other day, and for once in a Sheckleyan world nothing wrong happens thank you. Except that, all of a sudden and all by himself, the guy starts to think about who this girl really is, behind her good looks... and he gets sucked into the depressing, destructive obsession that's she's made of atoms, that she’s just four pails of water and a bagful of salts, and he can't stop until he gets to meet his own nothingness and unreality. Yikes. This tale was something. Maybe that's why I forgot the title !

- An impressive exemplification of Bergson's dialectics of strength through the overcome obstacle : a pioneer is sent on a planet to colonize it with some help from a robot who's supposed to be the next best thing after God. But the robot proves a consistent source of disasters and the clumsiest and stupidest device you can think of. The reader first thinks he's in a typically Sheckleyan situation. Not at all ! Little by little, the man discovers that the robot is not faulty at all, but deliberately designed to behave in the worst possible fashion : the idea is to test the possibilities of survival on the planet in the most terrible conditions.

And here takes place a personal memory that still makes me smile : this particular short story caused me to create the one and only troll I ever made up in my online life. It was an ambitious troll, meant to behave in a robot-like fashion in order to mirror and increase the flaws of a friend for him to fight them. It was short lived and lasted for two or three days before it died a deservedly obscure death without my friend even realizing that it was supposed to be a pain in his ass. I don't have the soul of a troll.

Robert Sheckley's last years were unfortunately saddened by the gloomy situation that has plagued science fiction since the 80's. Under Reagan, the publishers decided that the genre wasn't supposed to be subversive, nor literature at all for that matter, and began to encourage Hollywood bound type of mindless crap, putting an end to the golden age that the previous decades had witnessed and letting but very few new authors of any worth have their way. From then onwards, some of the most glorious names had to write conventional drivel to keep up with the times, and sadly Sheckley was one of them. Respect prevents me from telling more, even though the shame is not on him. Suffice to say that the last ten years of Robert Sheckley's life have been butchered on the altar of global capitalism, and that this crime alone is enough to damn it.

As for "I See A Man Sitting In A Chair, and the Chair is Biting His Leg", written with Harlan Ellison, it's not particularly good. But its title fits the way the news of Robert Sheckley's death made me feel.

Meet Mister S :

http://www.sheckley.com/

http://sheckley.tripod.com/