"Want to be immortal? It's not so hard, in 2110 A.D. Just go to the Hereafter Insurance Corporation, pay your fee, and hook yourself up to The Machine. There's nothing to fear. That is... if it happens ot be working right, and if nobody slips another mind into your body when you're not looking, and if you're not in a poltergeist hate-list... Immortality, Inc. is the trenchantly witty novel of a future where everything has improved except the bumbling human race, which just plain can't let itself enjoy a good thing when it finally gets it."--Provided by publisher.

Contains both the short story collection The People Trap and the novel Mindswap. Contents: 1 The People Trap (1968) 27 The Victim from Space (1957) 52 Shall We Have a Little Talk? (1965) 85 Restricted Area (1953) 107 The Odor of Thought (1953) 124 The Necessary Thing (1955) 140 Redfern's Labyrinth (1968) 147 Proof of the Pudding (1952) 158 The Laxian Key (1954) 172 The Last Weapon (1953) 184 Fishing Season (1953) 203 Dreamworld (1968) 216 Diplomatic Immunity (1953) 243 Ghost V (1954) 265 Mindswap (1966)

A classic science fiction novel from beloved author Robert Sheckley returns to print in Mindswap . In the future, interstellar travel to alien worlds will be too expensive for most ordinary people. It certainly is for Marvin, a college student who wants to take a really good vacation. And so he signs up for what he can afford, a mindswap, in which your consciousness is swapped into the body of an alien lifeform. But Marvin is unlucky, and finds himself in the body of an interstellar criminal, a body that he has to vacate fast. But that criminal consciousness has stolen Marvin's earthly body, and Marvin has to find a body on the black market. Travel from world to world with Marvin, each one crazier than the last, as he keeps finding far from ideal bodies in awful situations, just to stay alive.

A novel of upmanship espionage in which a jobless American is plunged into a spy mission in Venice.

The second Hob Draconian novel finds the smart but lazy detective in a race for his life. The laziest PI in the world takes a job that should be like shooting fish in a barrel--except he ends up being the fish! "Mr. Sheckley . . . has an engagingly madcap manner all his own".--"The Wall Street Journal".

THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A NEW ARRIVAL ON OMEGA AVERAGED THREE EARTH YEARS Barrent had been tried, convicted, and memory-washed on Earth - an Earth strangely altered and stratified by fear of the radical and non-conformist. Now he was serving his sentence on Omega - a prison planet walled by a ring of hovering guard-ships from which there was no escape. Omega was a world of horror, a savage, ruthless way of life. But it was only a momentary ordeal, a prelude to a return to Earth and the subtle terrors of its own status civilization. Robert Sheckley was a Hugo and Nebula-nominated American author. He was first published in science fiction magazines of the 1950's. His numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and comical. Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.

CONTENTS: ~ ~ SERIAL: Time Killer (Part 2 of 4) [Robert Sheckley]; NOVELETTES: Birds of a Feather [Robert Silverberg]; The Civilization Game [Clifford D. Simak]; SHORT STORIES: No Substitutions ]Jim Harmon]; People Soup [Alan Arkin]; ARTICLES: The First Spaceship [Willy Ley]; The Tin Age [H. L. Gold]

small format minibook paperback. 4.5" x3" 1990 number 1 on spine brand new hole punch in rear wrapper. science fiction novel by robert sheckley. rare collectible book.