Is That What People Do? Short Stories

by Robert Sheckley

An anthology of Sheckley's classic science fiction tales includes Warm and The Seventh Victim as well as a selection of new works that reflect the author's ability to create a bizarre disturbing new universe, much like our own

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Collections, Fantasy, Humor, Speculative Fiction

402 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

One of science fiction's great humorists, Sheckley was a prolific short story writer beginning in 1952 with titles including "Specialist", "Pilgrimage to Earth", "Warm", "The Prize of Peril", and "Seventh Victim", collected in volumes from Untouched by Human Hands (1954) to Is That What People Do? (1984) and a five-volume set of Collected Stories (1991). His first novel, Immortality, Inc. (1958), was followed by The Status Civilization (1960), Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962), Mindswap (1966), and several others. Sheckley served as fiction editor for Omni magazine from January 1980 through September 1981, and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.

Reviews

[Mike]

A lot of the stories are cynical about marriage, relationships, or women, so I went and looked up the author's Wikipedia entry.

Not at all to my surprise, he was married five times.

DNF at about 50%, when the misogyny went right over the top.

Got this as a freebie from Open Road, and like most of their books, it needs better proofreading for basic things like missing periods at the end of sentences, and more significant issues like "I" read as "1" and question marks read as apostrophes or numbers. There's one sentence that's completely incomprehensible because of multiple words misread by the scan, and I'm fairly sure some of them would not pass a spellcheck.

I'm thinking about ditching Open Road's Portalist newsletter, since most of their list is crusty old SFF like this, and the half-assed job they do of the proofreading is starting to wear on me.

[Ko-So-Wa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a long time to get to this book (had for over a decade) and I have no idea why! It was a great read. Only a few stories I didn't like but that's always expected with short stories. I like his writing style and I'm happy this was my first Sheckley experience.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread of a volume of classic reprints, mostly from the 1950s. Some are great, some are pretty dated (but still good stories). Sheckley at his best was a master short-story writer.

https://www.freesfonline.net/authors/... turns up 24 stories of his stories online.
Here's one classic, "Prospector's Special" (1959): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51768
And another, "Watchbird" (1953): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

Have fun!

[Viacheslav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Sheckley is following in the footsteps of Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut concluding his short story "How Pro Writers Really Write—Or Try To" (1982) with the phrase, "And so it goes," adding to it "- you win some and you lose some."

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Sheckley is one of my favorite writers. I periodically give his books away and buy or borrow them again. This is an out-of-print collection of Sheckley's short stories in our library system's central storage that had some of my favorite stories, and some of those I missed before. In this collection, my favorite story that I had seen before is "The Monsters", about human astronauts as seen by nonhumanoid aliens with a radically different morality compared to humans'. It reminded me of Voltaire's Micromégas. Among the stories that I missed before, my favorite is "The Petrified World", which is a riff on Zhuangzi's dream of a butterfly.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

40 stories:

The Eye of Reality (1982)

Vintage Sheckley:

The Language of Love (1957)
The Accountant (1954)
A Wind Is Rising (1957)
The Robot Who Looked Like Me (1973)
The Mnemone (1971)
Warm (1953)
The Native Problem (1956)
Fishing Season (1953)
Shape (1953)
Beside Still Waters (1953)
Silversmith Wishes (1977)
Meanwhile, Back at the Bromide (1960)
Fool's Mate (1953)
Pilgrimage to Earth (1956)
All the Things You Are (1956)
The Store of the Worlds (1959)
Seventh Victim (1953)
Cordle to Onion to Carrot (1969)
Is That What People Do? (1978)
The Prize of Peril (1958)
Fear in the Night (1952)
Can You Feel Anything When I Do This? (1969)
The Battle (1954)
The Monsters (1953)
The Petrified World (1968)

Uncollected Sheckley:

Five Minutes Early (1982)
Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension (1982)
The Skag Castle (1956)
The Helping Hand (1981)
The Last Days of (Parallel?) Earth (1980)
The Future Lost (1980)
Wild Talents, Inc. (1953)
The Swamp (1981)
The Future of Sex: Speculative Journalism (1982)
The Life of Anybody (1984)
Good-Bye Forever to Mr. Pain (1979)
The Shaggy Average American Man Story (1979)
Shootout in the Toy Shop (1981)
How Pro Writers Really Write--or Try To (1982)

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fourth volume of short stories I've read by Sheckley, and they still continue to delight and entertain. A wonderfully prolific writer.

[Adam Meek · Rating 3 out of 5]

the older stories from the 1950s hold up better than many of the later tales.

[John Held · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was good.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Is That What People Do?" (1978) is a clever, strange story.

[Ralph Palm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh

The quality of the stories is uneven. Some clever, some annoying, most are just meh; read but would not recommend

[Michael Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Sheckley excels with the short form and many of his best are included here, especially those featuring his dry satirical style. There are a number of examples of his insightful foresight into a future with extreme reality tv and acceptance of violence. There are some stories that have not aged well, but overall this is a great collection from one of my favorite authors.

[TrumanCoyote · Rating 3 out of 5]

Glib and kind of lightweight--somewhat disappointing. Still, "The Store Of the Worlds" a classic--reverberates more than the others. And there's "The Petrified World" (although I didn't like how he ended it). He does have a few prescient stories about reality-TV type things--and dangerous game shows. Sometimes he sounded sort of like Robert Bloch on amyl nitrate (I think I know what that meant). There's also an amusing essay at the end about what being a writer is really like...

[Cat. · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's pretty funny how quickly science fiction ages. These were written 30-40 years ago and they are just dated. On the other hand, I was amused by them, and the ideas underpinning a lot of them are right on the mark.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listened to "The Future Lost" and "Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension".