Meeting of the Minds

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Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley (1928 - 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical. Sheckley was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. Sheckley was a prolific and versatile writer. His works include not only original short stories and novels, but also TV series episodes (Captain Video), novelizations of works by others, stories in shared universes such as Heroes in Hell and collaborations with other writers. He was best known for his several hundred short stories, which he published in book form as well as individually. In many stories Sheckley speculates about alternative (and usually sinister) social orders, of which a good example is the story "A Ticket to Tranai" (which tells of a sort of Utopia designed for human nature as it actually is, which turns out to have terrible drawbacks). Sheckley's early stories include the far future AAA Ace detective agency series. In these tales, the two partners face unusual problems often related to human incompetence or laziness. In the 1990s, Sheckley wrote a series of three mystery novels featuring detective Hob Draconian, as well as novels set in the worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Alien. Before his death Sheckley had been commissioned to write an original novel based on the TV series The Prisoner for Powys Media, but died before completing the manuscript.