Writer blended satire with science fiction

Robert Sheckley, a short-story and novel writer who was among the first to fuse satire with science fiction, creating a sub-genre called “galactic humor,” has died. He was 77. Sheckley, who had been fighting emphysema, died from complications of a brain aneurysm Dec. 9 at Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., said Ziva Kwitney, his former wife.

Considered a master of satire and irony, Sheckley also was one of the first science-fiction writers to give mechanical devices the ability to think for humans, according to a 2003 feature in Locus, a magazine that covers science fiction news.

He wrote more than 15 novels and about 400 short stories, but the exact number is unknown. In the 1950s and 1960s, Sheckley was so productive that magazines required him to use a pseudonym to cut down on the times his byline appeared.

His fiction has been translated into 10 languages and is extremely popular in Eastern Europe. Four of his stories were made into films. The best known is 1965’s “The Tenth Victim,” starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. It was based on a 1953 story about a futuristic world in which game-show contestants hunt and murder each other for cash.

At his funeral, his son Jason read Sheckley’s melancholy short story “Beside Still Waters,” about a man and his robot who grow old together.

Widely traveled, Sheckley said he yearned to return to the island of Ibiza, east of Spain, where he belonged to a community of artists in the 1970s.

Source: Charlotte Observer, Written By: Valeria J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times)