Robert Sheckley, acclaimed by Kingsley Amis as "science fiction's premier gadfly," is certainly among the most insistently comic of science-fiction writers. His comic touch is most adroitly at work in his short stories, the best of which can be at once witty, bizarre, lightly satirical, and wryly frightening. However, the comedy does not wear so well in his novels, where his inventiveness often is unsustained and his humor belabored.

Sheckley was born in New York City and brought up in Maplewood, New Jersey. Less than affectionately remembered, New York City and metropolitan New Jersey play an interesting minor part in his fiction. His space captains envision furloughs and retirements in unlikely locales such as "New Newark" and "Perth Amboy-bas-mer." One of his wildest stories, "The People Trap" (collected in The People Trap and Other Pitfalls, 1968), describes a death-defying, government-sponsored race from claustrophobic Jersey City to outlaw-ridden Times Square...