Robert Sheckley (1928–2005)
Happened to run across this memoir/obit of my mentor today. I think I wrote it for LOCUS in 2005.
When I was fifteen I was injured when the chain of a swing broke; I ruptured my spleen. While I was in the hospital, my mother brought me a paperback copy of Untouched By Human Hands, a collection of science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Vladimir Nabokov writes about the “initial push that sets the heavy ball rolling down the corridors of years,” and for me the push was Sheckley’s book. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and I knew in my heart of hearts that my greatest ambition was to become a science fiction writer. Sheckley’s work was masterful; it had a jokey, real-life edge that ¾ to my mind ¾ set it above the more straightforward work of the other SF writers. Most of all, there was something about his style that gave me a sense that I could do it myself. He wrote like I thought.
***
I went to my very first science fiction convention, Seacon at Brighton in 1979, hoping to sell my novel White Light. I met Sheckley at a party; he had a couple of beautiful women in tow. He was soft-spoken, friendly, hip; strangely approachable for being such a hero. Eventually my novel came out, Sheckley read it, and he said he liked it “exceedingly.”
***
A lot of my short stories were influenced by Sheckley. “Faraway Eyes,” “The Man Who Ate Himself,” “Inertia,” and my early novel Master of Space and Time all involve characters called Joe Fletcher and Harry Gerber, whose roots go back to Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories about a couple of guys who get themselves into odd futuristic fixes. In my story, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the words “geezel” and “lesnerize” are both taken from the master, who used them to stand for, respectively, a kind of alien food, and the act of sneezing. And, in my story, “Soft Death,” the character-name “Leckesh” is a near-anagram of Sheckley. In my 2004 novel Frek and the Elixir, I introduced the neologism “shecked out,” meaning “freaked-out or jaded or world-weary.” I asked Bob if this was okay with him, and he responded that, yes, he felt shecked out, but in a darker, more terminal kind of way.
***
I almost sold my story “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” through Bob when he served a stint as the Omni magazine fiction editor in the early 1980s. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, and he had us up to the apartment he shared with his wife of the time, Jay Rothbel. Sheckley suggested a Hamlet quote for the head of the story: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” We went out for dinner. On the way, Bob and I nearly got run down crossing the street. At dinner the waiter began flirting with Jay, behaving like an out-of-control Sheckley robot. Whenever I was with Bob, everything seemed perfect, mythic, in-depth. In the event, Bob was eased out of the Omni job before my story was allowed to run.
***
In 1982, Bob and Jay showed up at our Lynchburg house in a camper van and lived in our driveway for a few days, their electric cord plugged into our socket, and their plumbing system connected to our hose. I could hardly believe my good fortune. It was like having ET land his ship in your yard. I was interested in William Burroughs’s cut-up technique at the time. I’d started a novel named Twinks (never completed) in which ghosts were talking to one of my characters. For the ghosts’ dialog I was making cut-ups of material printed from chapters later in the book — — to give their utterances a precog flavor. I was using the old-school method of printing out pages, cutting them into phrases, reassembling the phrases more or less at random, and retyping what emerged. I had my pile of phrases on a drawing board in a corner of the room behind an armchair, and I showed them to Bob. I remember him leaning over the back of the chair, studying the set-up. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “I’m always looking for new ways to get new textures into my prose.”
***
When I moved to California in 1986 I got to see Sheckley again. His writer, comedian and tummler friend Marty Olson of Venice Beach had dreamed up the idea that Tim Leary would start hosting a PBS series about the future. Sheckley and I were to be the writers. Olson paid my plane-fare to LA, where he and “the Sheck-man” (as Olson called him) picked me up. It was a wonderful goof, hanging out with them, and then driving over to Tim’s house in Beverly Hills. Tim was up for the meeting, with pencils and pads of papers; he was a nice old guy, a freedom-fighter from way back. We were all in full agreement about everything, but the hitch was that we never found a sponsor. But what a day that was for me. For the visit, I’d brought along a CAM-6 cellular-automata-simulating board to plug into Tim’s computer so he could see the wonderfully psychedelic new computer graphics I was working with. He had a weak machine, something like a regular PC instead of an XT or an AT, but I got the graphics to work, and from then on, Tim would throw “cellular automata” into his rants. After the meeting, I mentioned to Bob that Tim had a “Victrola computer,” which he found very funny.
***
Around the same time I co-edited with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson an edgy SF anthology called Semiotext(e) SF (AK Press, Edinburgh 1989). I got Bob to mail me Xeroxed pages from his journals, which we included as a piece called “Amsterdam Diary.” Let me quote a three good bits here.
“How much reading of other fiction writers must I do to convince myself that the finest work done is woven out of the author’s own experience, his own and no others, no matter how much he chooses to disguise or exploit the fact.”
“Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous — — no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6th Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write. In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose — — my own. The directions of its interest may change, even by morning. But what does that mater if I simply follow them, along for the trip rather than the payoff (always disappointing), enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion. Wise-sounding words which I hope describe where I’m really at.”
“Two weeks until my 50th birthday. The thought, the mood, of impending doom. Fifty is well enough — — but what about 60, what about 70? What about death, a second away or 20 more years, but looming up faster every year. They go by faster & faster as one grows older. What happened to the golden inexhaustible summers of my youth? Maybe they weren’t always golden, but they did seem to stretch on forever. I thought I’d never grow up.”
***
Robert did me the signal honor of writing a very warm and hilarious preface for my collection Transreal (WCS Books, Englewood CO 1991). He initially protests, “What is Rucker trying to do to me? Why did he select me for this job? Why is he seeking to undermine me with his mind-experiment, why does he want to invade my mind with the contents of his trashy situation, with the faecid droppings of his clever simian mind?” But then he relents. “This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. This is what Rucker does. Among other things. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy. And so we have it. Rudy the crazed mathematician, like a poet hidden in the light of thought singing songs unbidden ’til the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not…”
***
In return, I got the opportunity to write a preface for Sheckley’s Minotaur Maze (Pulphouse, Eugene OR 1990). I said, “The paramount quality of Sheckley’s writing is the purity of his language. The timing of his cadenced phrases is exquisite. His richly charged clarity arises, I would say, from the excellent moral qualities which Sheckley as a writer exemplifies — — he is a man in love with writing an with the simple sweetness of life.”
One final quote from the Sheck-man himself in Minotaur Maze, one to bring tears to the eyes: “The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again.”
