This image is the cover for the book Shards of Space

Shards of Space

The classic sci-fi story collection features eleven tales of outer space adventure from one of the genre’s greatest talents—“a precursor to Douglas Adams” (The New York Times).

In “Fool’s Mate,” a stalemate in deep space is broken by a crazy man and a set of fake orders. A new longevity drug may lead to an untimely end for its inventor in “Forever.” And in “Prospector’s Special,” a lone explorer searches the deserts of Venus in search of unfathomable treasure.

In these and eight other stories, Robert Sheckley reaffirms his reputation as a master storyteller and the wittiest satirist working in science fiction. Shards of Space also includes “The Girls and Nugent Miller,” “Meeting of the Minds,” “Potential,” “Subsistence Level,” “The Slow Season,” “Alone at Last,” “The Sweeper of Loray,” and “The Special Exhibit.”

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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