IMMORTALITY INC.

There must have been some pretty good novels written in 1958 for ‘Immortailty Delivered’ (AKA ‘Immortality Inc.’) to only be nominated for the Hugo Best Novel. It was after all the first novel to develop a scientific model for reincarnation. For my opinion of this, possibly Scheckley’s best known novel (and not because of the misguided film spin-off ‘Freejack’), and an explanation of what a whispering hebephrenic is please read on.

Originally ‘Immortality Delivered’ (1958) ‘Immortality Inc’ (1959) reached out to a new audience in the 1992 Legend Arrow edition in the UK as the ‘basis’ for the film ‘Freejack’ (more of which later)
‘Immortality Inc’ tells the story of Tom Blaine, a boatwright living in Greenwich village who ends up in someone else’s body in the year 2110 after a car crash that had occurred in 1958. He is tricked by a man named Orc (who reappears later in one of Sheckley’s neat plot twists) and ends up in a cell with a spaceman name of Ray Melhill, an unwitting victim of an unscrupulous trade in host bodies. As usual Sheckley’s eye for detail is meticulous, almost philosophical, as he builds a plot that is entirely believable, entertaining, flowing and thought provoking.
Blaine’s incarceration with Melhill allows the author the opportunity to devote six pages to explaining developments in the application of technology in the intervening 142 years and in particular the role of Hereafter Incorporated, the company whose illegal publicity stunt landed Blaine in his present predicament. Naturally the implications of immortality are comprehensively explored.

“A new religion popped up calling itself ‘Realization’. It started telling people that they owed it to themselves to experience everything. Gratify every desire, satisfy every lust, explore their blackest depths.”
Once again Sheckley plumbs the human psychi and the moral dilemmas facing the species.
Then it was discovered that there is life after death but the machines necessary for the electrochemical treatment necessary to ensure survival in the afterlife are owned by a handful of companies including ‘Hereafter Inc’. Those who are frightened of the thought of the hereafter (‘scared of the spirit stuff’) buy a body legally in the open market or illegally in the black market. “One of our bodies, pal,” Melhill explains to his newly found cell soulmate. This is not the end for our hero of course!
There is another opportunity for a philosophical/ theological discourse (a quasi religious ceremony no less) when Blaine is introduced to Father James of the Church of the Afterlife by Marie Thorne (the love interest) in the reincarnation room. Something goes wrong of course and part one of the book ends with Thorne fainting.
“It was the most feminine thing she had done so far.” (Ouch!)
Blaine is not impressed with the New York of 2110. Berserkers and zombies roam the streets (or in the latter case under the streets in a fashion resembling the fictional television series ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or the factual world of the ‘mole people’).
Another ingenuous scientific device is introduced as Blaine reacquaints himself with Melhill in the Spiritual Switchboard. Once more there is an opportunity for Sheckley to explore the themes that have always fascinated humans- life after death and ghosts.
“There are 3 possibilites when a man dies. First his mind can just explode, scatter, dissipate; and that’s the end of him. Second his mind can hold together through the death trauma, and he finds himself in the threshold, a spirit. Third, his mind breaks during the death trauma, but not enough to cause dissipation. He pulls through into the threshold. But the strain has been permanently disabling. He is insane. And that is how a ghost is born. They’re filled with twisted hatred, anger, pain.” (Melhill becomes the story’s narrator as he describes the limbo those in the third category find themselves trapped in).
Even statistics are invoked- “Only a few out of every million people managed to survive after death. (This was before Hereafter Inc. of course) and only a tiny % of those survivors went insane during the transition and became ghosts.”
(I don’t know what it’s like in other countries but UK TV seems obsessed at the moment with live ghost shows- all night vigils, trying to capture spirits on camera at reputedly haunted locations- shows with names like ‘Most Haunted’.)
Folklore carried everything before it of course and soon everyone started seeing or hearing ghostly presences (like the perceptual resolution of a cloud or a piece of foil shaped into human or alien form) In the world Blaine finds himself in scientists investigate and find a few genuinely inexplicable events (as they do on ‘ghost TV’)- ghosts are then classified:
Melancholics- ‘drifting disconsolately through the scenes of their great passion’
Whispering hebephrenics- ‘chattering gay and random nonsense’
Idiots and Imbeciles- ‘who returned in the guise of little children’
Schizophrenics- ‘who imagined themselves to be animals to be animals e.g. Vampire and Yeti prototypes
Destructive stone throwing and fire setting ghosts
Poltergeists and the grandiloquent paranoids who imagined themselves to be the Spirit of Christmas Past or the Grim Reaper.

Sheckley’s trick of using Melhill to legitimise the plot in a mixture of scientific fact and speculation is quite brilliant and his descriptions match exactly the kinds of apparitions and occurrences that the intrepid investigators of ‘Most Haunted’ and ghost hunters like the legendary Elliot O’Donnell (whose exploits used to both terrify and fascinate me as a child) continually search/ searched for. Indeed ‘Immortality Inc. is the first SF novel which develops a scientific model for reincarnation.
Blaine gets a job as a human hunter. It is obvious that Sheckley has researched the subject of ‘arms’ conscientiously using his own experience in the army as a 20-22 year old perhaps? The human hunt is a theme he has already explored in ‘The Seventh Victim’ short story (1953), ‘The Prize of Peril’ (1958), the novel ‘The Tenth Victim’ (1966) where Caroline Meredith has already notched up her ninth kill with her metal-plated firing brassiere(!) and presumably in ‘Victim Prime’ (1987) and ‘Hunter/Victim’ (1988) although don’t quote me as I haven’t read them yet!

In part three of ‘Immortality Inc.’ Blaine is rescued from a poltergeist by a zombie named Smith and taken to New York’s underground zombie colony. Blaine wonders why Smith keeps saying he needs him but all is revealed in a breathtaking and quite moving finale to the story. I will say no more about part 3 as I have already said more than enough to whet your appetite. As the entry in ‘The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’ (edited by Peter Nicholls) says:
“Scheckley is less popular than others less capable than he is; he has nevertheless built a considerable satiric reputation in a field where this is sometimes dismissed as a form of frivolity.”
Significantly Douglas Adams has the final word on the back cover of the Arrow edition:
“There is no better science fiction than the classic work of Robert Sheckley.”

THE TENTH VICTIM

First published in the US in 1965 on Ballantine Books- ‘A bullseye view of guns and lovers! Robert Sheckley’s chilling futurama of legalised manslaughter’.
It was also made into a film directed by Joseph E Levine and starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. The Halliwell’s Film Guide is pretty forthright in its views and pretty hard to please but I doubt if its one liner ‘SF satire which just about gets by’ is contradicted elsewhere. I cannot comment as I haven’t seen the film. As I’ve never seen it on a schedule perhaps someone out there can enlighten me? The only thing I have to go on are some stills from the film in the Ballantine edition.
It’s a pity if the film didn’t do it justice as this is one of Bob’s most accomplished novels. Bob had already began exploring the ‘hunter/ victim’ idea in 1953 with his short story ‘Seventh Victim’ (appearing in the collection ‘Untouched by Human Hands’)
The book has two main characters. The ‘heroine’ Caroline Meredith has just notched up here ninth kill, in true tragic-comic style firing her metal-plated brassiere, a classic piece of deception perpetrated in a wax museum.
In chapter two we are introduced to our ‘hero’, Marco Polletti and in chapter 3 to the ‘rules of the hunt’
‘The hunt was open to anyone, man or woman, regardless of race, creed or nationality, between the ages of 18 and 50. Anyone entering was in for all 10 Hunts, alternatively serving 5 as Victim and 5 as Hunter. Prize money was awarded in sums increasing with the number of kills. A 10s winner was awarded almost unlimited civil, financial, political and moral rights.’
There are some other substantial characters in the book such as hapless film producer Martin and a ‘junior’ who is always one step ahead of him.
‘Martin was thinking it was about time he got shot of Chet before Chet got rid of him.’
The childish self centred Polletti isn’t what you would call a ‘natural’ in the Hunter/ Victim business and his ability to deal with relationships is equally haphazard or so you’re led to believe! As usual there’s a neat twist in the tale.
There’s some memorable slapstick humour involving map reading. Another highlight is the Hunt Club where the ‘maestro’ waxes eloquent (too eloquent for some) about the Hartman Concentric Field Depth Sequence (Go to a village and pay everybody off), the Carr Static Defence (Seal yourself in an all steel room) and Invulnerability through Apparent Vulnerability (Pitch a tent in the middle of the desert).
As the story unfolds Caroline gets a bit too close to her victim. But I’ve already given enough away already!
Favourite one-liners:
‘You’re sort of clumsy aren’t you?
Only when I lose my balance.’
‘Stars are nice’.
‘It’s nice to have them every night’.
Also look out for the V Cepheil Beta Persei sketch!
My 1987 UK Methuen edition has a picture that mystifies me- of Caroline toting a gun in the Coliseum on the front cover. How come the blond changes to a brunette? Now, Ursula Andress would never have got that part if…..!

VICTIM PRIME

It’s back to the Coliseum again on the front cover of my 1987 Methuen hardback copy.
As in quite a few of his works, Sheckley takes a fatalistic view of the violent nature of man with a barely veiled contempt for the characters he describes.
Why fatalistic? Well, firstly there is no resistance movement to the horrors that occur in the name of ‘sport’ on the Caribbean island of Esmeralda.
Secondly, the climax of the book, a duel between the main protagonists Harold Erdman and arch rival Louvaine, is related in a matter of fact, almost deadpan way and produces an ending that might well disappoint the reader.
The story is written in meticulous detail as usual but there is little of the dry humour we’ve come to associate with Bob Sheckley and the love interest is a bit of a ‘throw away’ so there’s little in the way of romanticism either.
The world that Erdman has left isn’t too clever- well it would need to be pretty apocalyptic to persuade a young man his interests would be better served in a place (Huntworld) where ‘murder is done in an orderly and business like manner’. To make matters even worse a pointless fish war (involving nuclear weapons) has been raging and presumably acted as a catalyst for the corruption of an environment where the ‘excitement of the hunt’ is preferable to ‘a slow death and wasting away on a barren, opportuneless planet’.
To me ‘Victim Prime’ has few of the engaging qualities that made ‘The 10th Victim’ such a success. This time the book takes itself too seriously- there are no Chinese birds nest salesmen for Heaven’s sake!

HUNTER/VICTIM

Written in 1987 over 269 pages in the Signet edition, this was the third (and last?) in the series and is, for me, the best of the three.
“I had no idea the competition was so terrifyingly good!” enthused Douglas Adams on the cover.
Fast paced, reading like a secret agent/ spy novel *, dazzling in its detail, laced with humour, sarcasm and pathos and rich in social and political comment, the typical hallmarks of classic Sheckley.
William Gibson says much of the same in his sleeve notes remarking on the book’s ‘breakneck pace’ and ‘Sheckley’s amiably mordant sense of humour; fast, funny and furious’.
Michael Moorcock is also enlisted to add his kudos referring to the ‘action, humour and marvellous characters’. (Now there’s a name to conjure with for crossover sci-fi/ rock music fans!)
‘We don’t do things for ideological reasons anymore. The new administration is interested in pragmatism and cost accounting,’ says Dickersen, District Director for CIA Field Operations with barely a grimace in chapter 37 where duplicitous political machinations are depicted in ‘knockabout’ fashion, giving the impression of watching some staged satire.
Sheckley is, as always, thorough in detail and research enlisting the services of weapons experts and military personnel and using the experiences of himself and others to give his writing a contemporary edge- ‘The hallway smelled of Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup’.
On the whole the early plot of ‘Hunter/ Victim’ might be seen as a rather circuitous route to revealing ‘how the hunt really began’. You almost forget all about this in the first 182 pages but come chapter 40 there can be no more explicit reference to the central theme of the book than the passing remark made to a certain short story entitled ‘The 7th Victim’ and film of that story called ‘The Tenth Victim’. Of course we soon remind ourselves that the Hunt Corporation is already assisting our hero Blackwell in executing his revenge on a particularly unscrupulous gunrunner named Guzman as we accompany him on every step of his serpentine underworld journey.
As Moorcock pointed out the story is littered with memorable characters. Even the double dealing Famijian’s .long suffering girlfriend Rosalie, despite her bimbo like persona, is no mere ‘throwaway’ and turns out to be a character of no little substance and her incarceration with her ‘boyfriend’ is one of the most pathetically funny parts of the book. The startling characterisation is evident from the first poignant, fatalistic scene as we are drawn into the nightmare world of Frank Blackwell and the arousal of that most destructive of emotions- revenge.
Part 6 of the book is called ‘The Big Kill’ and the pace is unrelenting as the story reaches an intoxicating if somewhat convoluted (and far fetched of course!) climax.
Sheckley’s despair of and concern for humanity and the institutions that lead to an unquestioning acceptance of policy and, worse still, practice that is clearly morally repugnant is once again abundantly in evidence. Take these quotes from the story:
The Huntmaster: You will follow my orders
Dickersen: Yes, Sir. But why exactly are we doing this?
‘It is for the sake of the country’.
Hearing that, Dickersen relaxed.
And on the contradiction of governance:
‘Congress has just voted into law the Legalised Murder Act combined with the Clean Water, Earth and Air Act’ (Two of a triad of great popular causes, the third being a ‘not too outrageously disproportionate distribution of wealth’).
And finally on human nature:
“We of the Hunt are part of the solution. We offer voluntary murder as a substitute for war. You know that mankind will never be satisfied unless it is killing something’.
So there you have it- how the ‘Hunt’ all started and, for the reader’s convenience, the ‘rules of the Hunt’ are reproduced on the inner front flap.

*Interestingly in this context none other than John Le Carre, he of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy’ etc. fame has commented on Sheckley’s works