{"id":25072,"date":"2026-04-21T22:58:45","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/?p=25072"},"modified":"2026-04-21T22:58:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T12:58:45","slug":"top-tens-fantasy-sf-top-10-sf-books-special-mention-8-robert-sheckley-options","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/?p=25072","title":{"rendered":"Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 SF Books (Special Mention) (8) Robert Sheckley – Options"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cover of the Pan Science Fiction paperback edition – the edition I own<\/p><\/div>\n

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(8) ROBERT SHECKLEY –<\/p>\n

OPTIONS (1975)<\/p>\n

One of science fiction\u2019s most unsung qualities, particularly to those not familiar with the genre, is the extent to which it can be a profoundly comic or satirical medium, often subversively so \u2013 which is ironic given that comic science fiction is perhaps the most accessible to readers outside the genre.<\/p>\n

Robert Sheckley was primarily a humorist of science fiction, typically writing absurdist and satirical comedies with a thin veneer of a science fictional premise or setting. Sheckley\u2019s \u201cnumerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical\u201d.<\/p>\n

Sheckley shone through his playful short stories. My personal favorites are his absurdist satires of human mores, typically through the lens of alien observers or human societies on other planets. One such is \u201cPilgrimage to Earth\u201d, in which humanity\u2019s home planet, exhausted of its material resources to offer its former space colonies, resorts to space tourism for more intangible commodities \u2013 \u201cEarth specializes in impracticalities such as madness, beauty, war, intoxication, purity, horror and the like, and people come from light-years away to sample these wares\u201d. Wares such as romantic love \u2013 as a vendor exclaims, other planets have tried it and found it too expensive or unsettling, but Earth specializes in the impractical and makes it pay.<\/p>\n

However, it is in Sheckley\u2019s longer fiction that we find more extended satires or absurdist comedies from science fiction premise \u2013 which brings us to my favorite Sheckley novella, the absurdist and anarchic Options, in which Sheckley plays with story itself. It starts off in a reasonably linear narrative, in a comedic play on an classic pulp science fiction premise \u2013 ostensibly about the marooned protagonist Tom Mishkin\u2019s attempt to get a spare part for his spaceship stored in a cache on an alien planet. To protect him, he is assigned a Special Purpose Environmental Response or SPER robot.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the robot is programmed for another planet. However, that premise becomes an increasingly loose framing device as the non-linear narrative descends into a mass of diversions, non sequiturs and musings \u2013 \u201ca deliberate cosmic shambles, an explosion or disintegration of story logic, a comedy of cliches and crossed lines, and a joke on the very act of story-telling\u201d.<\/p>\n

RATING:
\nA-TIER (TOP TIER)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    (8) ROBERT SHECKLEY – OPTIONS (1975) One of science fiction\u2019s most unsung qualities, particularly to those not familiar with the genre, is the extent to which it can be a profoundly comic or satirical medium, often subversively so \u2013 which is ironic given that comic science fiction is perhaps the most accessible to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[849],"tags":[729,24,141,235],"class_list":["post-25072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-top-tens","tag-books","tag-sf","tag-top-10","tag-top-10-sf-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p65BRB-6wo","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25075,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25072\/revisions\/25075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starkafterdarkonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}