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It's a little odd to discover a writer so soon after his passing. A couple of days back I located another short story anthology, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? and I'm almost halfway through it. Sheckley certainly had the story-crafting skills of a Bradbury, along with the more wayward imagination of RA Lafferty and just a touch of Dick-ian existential paranoia (this last in stories such as The Petrified World and The Store of All Worlds).

I recently read a novel by SHeckley -Options. Here's my review:

OPTIONS was written in 1975, and the cover says it was Robert Sheckley's first novel in 8 years, at the time. I haven't read his earlier novels yet - only a few short story collections - so I can't really compare. It's a fast-moving, fun and weird book, though. It starts in vaguely normal SF mode with Tom Mishkin, spaceman, forced to land on the supposedly uninhabited planet Harmonia to pick up a replacement component for his spaceship. Things rapidly go awry from then on though. There are several absurdist interludes as Mishkin's sense of reality is constantly shifted (possibly by a dream drug he is given to ingest at the beginning of the story, when he discovers the malfunctioning component). There are authorial intrusions, encounters with all manner of surreal characters, including an ignorant, incompetent robot, a three-headed giant worm with mob connections, the Duke of Melba, an invisible person who opines that 'invisibility is like blindness', an interstellar bill collector and more. At one point, an attempt is made to introduce a new Hero, since Mishkin seems unsuited for the job, but the replacement is found just as unsatisfactory.

When various devices to help Mishkin fulfill his quest fail, the author finally takes matters in hand and attempts to create a parallel storyline set on earth, in South America, to somehow deliver the component to Mishkin. Even this scheme falls apart, as one character succumbs to a fatal plague while two others fall in love and run away. In the, end the author regretfully informs Mishkin that there seems to be little more he can do for him, and the spaceman is left to a fate that may or may not be simply a childhood game...

I really enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it as a fast, funny and surreal read, and leave it to you to make of it what you will. Is it a commentary on the quest-oriented, fait accompli-riddled plots of so many hack SF writers, a wry ripping-apart of the heroic ideal in much SF, or just a fond look at a very fallible, ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances which may or may not be of his own imagining - if not the author's own? You figure it out.

Yep. I can't think of too many current SF writers who pack so much into such a small space.

Here's a later Sheckley short story online: Reborn Again