Friday, August 15, 1997

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley is a living icon. A national treasure. A man who began writing stories in the 1940’s and ‘50s and was one of the major creators of the genre of science fiction.

Bob was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and raised in New Jersey. He studied at NYU after serving in Korea. He began writing stories and selling them to science-fiction magazines after graduation, producing several hundred stories over the next several years. He became a bohemian writer on the Spanish island of Ibiza in the 1970s, haunting Paris and London as well. He returned to NYC ten years later as fiction editor of OMNI magazine.

Bob has written about sixty-five books to date, including twenty novels and nine collections of short stories. He often worked in collaboration with Roger Zelazny. He wrote fifteen scripts for the "Captain Video" television series, and sixty scripts for "Behind the Green Door," narrated by Basil Rathbone. He won the Jupiter Award for the best science fiction story of 1974. Was named Visiting Scholar, Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in 1983. In 1991, he received the Daniel F. Gallun award for contributions to the genre of science-fiction.

Several of his books have been made into movies. His first novel, published in 1958 was Immortality, Inc. That became the movie, "Freejack," starring Mick Jagger, Renee Russo, Emilio Estevez, and Anthony Hopkins. He wrote the story for "The Tenth Victim," starring Marcello Matroianni and Ursula Andress. Outside of science-fiction, his most famous work is The Game of X.

Harlan Ellison wrote: "If the Marx Brothers had been literary rather than thespic fantasists….they would have been Robert Sheckley."

www.sheckley.com

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