A review by jayshay
Mindswap, by Robert Sheckley
4.0
A comic tale of a bored earth man, a thirty-one year old adolescent, swapping bodies with a Martian to go on vacation. Things go wrong almost immediately.
Put me on the side of people who really enjoyed the humour in this book. Sheckley jumps from parody to parody, most pulled off with great verve and skill. It benefits from being written before 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and I would argue it is probably a more timeless book than Adams' work - which seems much more locked in the 80s than Sheckley's 60s work.
Under the humour is the serious intent to investigate how we know anything. At one point the main character Marvin Flynn remembers he is not supposed to judge people by their appearances, unfortunately no one ever told him what he is supposed to the judge them by instead. A comedy of a hapless man careening through the universe - or to put it another way a totally realistic novel about the human condition.
You could argue that instead of a failed novelist Sheckley suffers (in some reader's eyes) from being too ambitious, almost experimental. In the final half of the novel Marvin suffers from 'metaphoric deformation' and so does the novel. I enjoy how everything spins off madly - and that in the end Sheckley refuses to tamp everything back down into a safe cognitive box for the reader. No, he gives us his joker's smile and bids us adieu.
Put me on the side of people who really enjoyed the humour in this book. Sheckley jumps from parody to parody, most pulled off with great verve and skill. It benefits from being written before 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and I would argue it is probably a more timeless book than Adams' work - which seems much more locked in the 80s than Sheckley's 60s work.
Under the humour is the serious intent to investigate how we know anything. At one point the main character Marvin Flynn remembers he is not supposed to judge people by their appearances, unfortunately no one ever told him what he is supposed to the judge them by instead. A comedy of a hapless man careening through the universe - or to put it another way a totally realistic novel about the human condition.
You could argue that instead of a failed novelist Sheckley suffers (in some reader's eyes) from being too ambitious, almost experimental. In the final half of the novel Marvin suffers from 'metaphoric deformation' and so does the novel. I enjoy how everything spins off madly - and that in the end Sheckley refuses to tamp everything back down into a safe cognitive box for the reader. No, he gives us his joker's smile and bids us adieu.