This image is the cover for the book Notions: Unlimited

Notions: Unlimited

In “Gray Flannel Armor,” a man named Hanley finds perfection in a rigidly regular structure of social interaction—including for romance—and devises a system that the whole of humanity adopts.

The eleven other stories in this collection are “Gray Flannel Armor,” “The Leech,” “Watchbird,” “A Wind Is Rising,” “Morning After,” “The Native Problem,” “Feeding Time,” “Paradise II,” “Double Indemnity,” “Holdout,” “Dawn Invader,” and “The Language of Love.”

From the very beginning of his career, Robert Sheckley was recognized by fans, reviewers, and fellow authors as a master storyteller and the wittiest satirist working in the science fiction field. Open Road is proud to republish his acclaimed body of work, with nearly thirty volumes of full-length fiction and short story collections. Rediscover, or discover for the first time, a master of science fiction who, according to the New York Times, was “a precursor to Douglas Adams.”

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley was one of the funniest writers in the history of science fiction. He did screwball comedy, broad satire, and farce. He could also be deadly serious, but he was always entertaining and always had something pointed to say about our world using the skewed versions of reality he created in his fiction. Starting in the early 1950s, he was an amazingly prolific short story writer, with a lot of his stories appearing in Galaxy Magazine. He launched his novel-writing career with Immortality, Inc., which he followed up with a sequence of excellent books: The Status Civilization, Journey Beyond Tomorrow, and Mindswap. He continued to produce novels and short stories in abundance until his death in 2005.

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