Is That What People Do?: Stories

Robert Sheckley

May 2014 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

More than three dozen of the best and most popular stories by the acknowledged master of the short science fiction story. The thirty-nine works contained in this volume—twenty-six from the author’s ten other Open Road collections, plus thirteen additional pieces unique to this volume—include these vintage Sheckley stories: “The Eye of Reality,” “The Language of Love,” “The Accountant,” “A Wind Is Rising,” “The Robot Who Looked Like Me,” “The Mnemone,” “Warm,” “The Native Problem,” “Fishing Season,” “Shape,” “Beside Still Waters,” “Silversmith Wishes,” “Meanwhile, Back at the Bromide,” “Fool’s Mate,” “Pilgrimage to Earth,” “All the Things You Are,” “The Store of the Worlds,” “Seventh Victim,” “Cordle to Onion to Carrot,” “Is That What People Do?”, “The Prize of Peril,” “Fear in the Night,” “Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?”, “The Battle,” “The Monsters,” and “The Petrified World.”

This volume also includes the following uncollected Sheckley tales: “Five Minutes Early,” “Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension,” “The Skag Castle,” “The Helping Hand,” “The Last Days of (Parallel?) Earth,” “The Future Lost,” “Wild Talents, Inc.,” “The Swamp,” “The Future of Sex: Speculative Journalism,” “The Life of Anybody,” “Goodbye Forever to Mr. Pain,” “The Shaggy Average American Man Story,” “Shootout in the Toy Shop,” and “How Pro Writers Really Write—or Try To.”

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.”

About the author

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.