SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS | OTHER WORKS | SHORT STORIES "Mr. Sheckley - as might be expected of a writer who can wring praise from as diverse a group of peers as Kingsley Amis, Harlan Ellison, John le Carré, and J.G.Ballard - has an engagingly madcap manner all his own." -The Wall Street Journal THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS Want to be immortal? You can in 2110 A.D. Just go to the Hereafter Insurance Corporation and hook yourself up to The Machine. There's nothing to fear. That is...if it happens to be working right, and if nobody slips another mind into your body when you're not looking, and if you're not on a poltergeist hate-list.... IMMORTALITY, INC. is the trenchantly witty novel of a future where everything has improved except the bumbling human race, which just can't let itself enjoy a good thing when it finally gets it. THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A NEW ARRIVAL ON OMEGA AVERAGED THREE EARTH YEARS Barrent had been tried, convicted, and memory-washed on Earth - an Earth strangely altered and stratified by fear of the radical and non-conformist. Now he was serving his sentence on Omega - a prison planet walled by a ring of hovering guard-ships from which there was no escape. Omega was a world of horror, a savage, ruthless way of life. But it was only a momentary ordeal, a prelude to a return to Earth and the subtle terrors of its own status civilization. TOMORROW...AND THE DAY AFTER Citizens worship the Almighty Machine. Passion is a beatnik, love the new frontier. Both God and Satan have been driven underground. The insane are treated by making their delusions real. Jail is a place to break into. Government is lost in the mapless Octagon. AND SCIENCE HAS GIVEN BIRTH TO superstition. WHERE? IN AMERICA. WHEN? LESS THAN FORTY YEARS FROM TODAY. MOVE OVER, CANDIDE, STEP DOWN DR. LAO, TRAVEL FAST, GULLIVER - THIS ONE TOPS YOU ALL! "Sensational, bizarre, satiric." -The New York Times "A wild ride with a powerful imagination!" -The Indianapolis News "Unusual!" -Jersey Journal "Sardonic wit...genuinely funny...highly imaginative...An ending with a delightful twist." -The Knickerbocker News "BRILLIANT, WITTY, AMUSING, SATIRICAL." -Publisher's weekly The 21st Century is a world without war. But not without killing. The Big Hunt, "a safety valve for humanity's latent aggressive instincts," pits licensed international citizens of the future against each other in a vicious but legal duel of death.At a Pop Art exhibit in New York, beautiful "victim" Catherine Meredith guns down her Oriental opponent with a metal, rapid-fire brassiere. At a Grand Prix House Show in Rome, "hunter" Marcello Polletti blasts his "victim" with dynamite-spiked spurs.Now the lots are drawn again, and it's Ursula vs. Marcello. For one, the fame and money of ten kills...for the other, a surprise ending. Which will be The 10th Victim? Earth Hunt It had to be somewhere, Carmody knew that much. It was waiting for him, just as he had left it. But where? He only knew he was in the center of a galaxy in a universe of galaxies. Within them lay endless varieties of the planet Earth. And there was only one way to find his Earth again. He would have to visit each one. And he would have to hurry. Because his search for home had turned into a race with death...ROBERT SHECKLEY author of Mindswap and The People Trap, has been acclaimed as one of the most superbly imaginative writers to appear on the science-fiction scene in many years. YOU PAYS YOUR MONEY...AND YOU TAKES YOUR CHANCES At least that's what you do if your name is Tom Mishkin, and your spaceship is suddenly grounded by a mechanical malfunction, and you're forced to trek across an alien planet to get the needed part for your ship. And you find that the alien planet, Harmonia,is populated by a bizarre and sometimes dangerous collection of creatures...like a robot that looks like a cast-iron tarantula, but with the biggest streak of cynicism (and incompetence) you ever saw on a robot - or the five-headed man-eating snake, with Mob connections and a dese-dem-dose vocabulary - or the myriad other odd creatures that inhabit Tom Mishkin's brave new world. THE BIZARRE CASE OF ALISTAIR CROMPTON He is a tortured soul. Separated at an early age from two conflicting personalities, Alistair Crompton has hatched a daring scheme to reintegrate himself. Installed in different host bodies and dispatched to distant planets, the two other Alistairs have developed lives of their own: Loomis - as grossly self- indulgent and amoral as Alistair is moderate and prim. Stack - as vicious and impulsive as Alistair is meek and cautious. What happens when the original Alistair reengages himself first with Loomis, then with Stack? Discover for yourself in this odyssey by one of the grand masters of science fiction. It's mind-bending. "Once again the publishing industry has recklessly loosed Sheckley on us! Dire warnings are of no use. Readers may try in vain to flee before the berserk humor of he who may truly be called the Groucho Marx of fantasy fiction...or give themselves up to the singular torture of being tickled to death. DRAMOCLES scoops up the weary remains of the space opera genre, slops them together with the yawn-inducing historical romance genre, and mystically manages to create a cockeyed category all its own. If the word 'antic' were still in favor, it might serve. But then, so would the words 'deranged' and 'risible-affecting'. On the other hand, illiterates won't know those words, and they wouldn't like this book very much, anyhow..." -Harlan Ellison HUNT WORLD! It is a dying Earth's defiant answer to a seemingly hopeless future. While the world's remaining population struggles to survive on a planet made barren by humanity's own greed, a small, select group of men and women seek wealth and glory in the challenge of death itself. They are the Hunters, and they are also the Victims, coconspirators in a mutual duel of destruction played out for the world's vicarious entertainment. One by one, they have come to the small Caribbean island where the Hunt is held> And two by two, the Hunt computers have assigned them their roles - Hunter and Victim - to kill or be killed by any means fair or foul. HERE AT LAST IS THE NOVEL THAT REVEALS HOW THE HUNT REALLY BEGAN! His wife, an innocent victim, was slain in a senseless act of terrorism. And now, Frank Blackwell was a perfect recruit for the underground operation known to a select few as the Hunt. In a world on the brink of exterminating itself, the men and women of the Hunt sought to create order out of deadly chaos, choosing Victims with care. Blackwell was chosen to exterminate one of the world's major gunrunners, a man who almost single-handedly could supply the equipment to launch the Third World War. It was a once-in-a-lifetime assignment that would see Blackwell stalked by the top assassins of every undercover power around the globe - in a fast paced game of blood and betrayal! HE'S THE PERFECT STARSHIP TROOPER:big, strong, and not too bright. He's the perfect hero: willing to do almost anything to save his neck (it's one of the body parts that's still his own). Tsuris, the Mystery Planet, has a mysterious secret weapon, and Bill must get it. But Bill has something the Tsurisians want. They have a lot of brains, but not enough bodies. They'll take any body that comes along - and put one of their brains in it! Can Bill escape with his own brain? Can he find the secret weapon? Can he get a drink? People feared, back in the Middle Ages, that the world would end with the millennium. Nor were they incorrect. It does this every millennium, only nobody notices-except for the Forces of Good and Evil, who vie for control of the universe every thousand years. Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming concerns the efforts of one Azzie Elbub, demon, to win the Millennial Evil Deeds award for the year 1000, given to the being whose acts do the most toward reshaping the world. Azzie's proposal to the Powers of Dark is simple: He will create a Prince Charming and a Sleeping Beauty. In time-honored fairy-tale fashion, the prince will fight his way through numerous perils to reach the side of the spellbound princess... The last Millenial contest-between the forces of Good and Evil for control of the universe-didn't work out quite so well for Evil and its rooters. But it's time for the next round, and this time the demon Mephistopheles is carrying the ball for the forces of Darkness. But all is not as it seems. The harried archdemon mistakenly signs up a medieval cutpurse named Mack the Club, thinking him the learned Dr. Faust. The demon Azzie, still stinging from Evil's last defeat (and not being chosen to head the current effort), takes events into his own claws. And the pious angel Michael-well, let's just say some of his tactics in the titanic struggle to come are not quite cricket.... In Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming and If at Faust You Don't Succeed, the masters of comic fantasy Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley told of two Millennial contests between Good and Evil. Well, now it's that quiet time between Millennia, and the demon Azzie is becoming bored and restless....Then inspiration hits. On a devilish sabbatical in Europe, Azzie discovers that morality plays are all the rage. He decides to strike back by producing an "immorality play," in which seven nondescript human pilgrims will be allowed by magic to attain their hearts' desires. But the forces of Good are determined to close the play before it opens. ALIEN TREASURE:A MISSION IMPOSSIBLE This time the humans are taking the offensive! Stan Myakovsky is a once-famous scientist fallen on hard times. Now he dodges spaceship repo men and dreams of the marketability of his cybernetic ant. Then a woman named Julie Lish walks into his life. She is beautiful, mysterious, and totally amoral. She is also skilled in the arts of thievery and Oriental self-defense. What's more, she has a plan so outrageous there might be one chance in a million to pull it off. When a mysterious alien woman from the planet Laertes convinces Dr. Bashir to gamble for her at Quark's gaming tables, things seem innocent enough. Yet the more Dr. Bashir wins, the more things go wrong in the Federation: Ore ships vanish. Planets lose their atmosphere. Suns go nova. The cause and effect is hard to understand, but is proven by the bizzare Laertian science called Complexity Theory. When Bashir tries to stop gambling, a Laertian warfleet appears to force him to continue, while on the planet Laertes itself Major Kira and Science Officer Dax must battle their way through chaos and danger to find a way to stop the Laertians - and save Deep Space Nine and the Federation from utter destruction! Arthur Fenn is an ordinary young professor with an esoteric specialty, Comparative Mythology, He is in financial trouble and suddenly finds himself in possession of a magical spell that allows him access to the realm of the gods. He may be a professor, but he's got no common sense-so when he goes there, he makes the mistake of inviting a con-man god and his companions back to earth. What develops is a fantastic mess full of rich opportunities for humor, satire, and surprise. SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS | OTHER WORKS | SHORT STORIES Site maintained by kneptune.com.