Mindswap

I admit that i am very fond of this book, where a talented artist drops us into a group of disparate characters and dances with them, and our minds for a dizzying whirl. He lets us go far too soon, and we are left to discover what this exercise in rapid characterizations has done to us. Well done sir! Read it if you want to be shaken around a bit by a writer at the height of his powers. It was very sixties, and should have been. It is whar science FICTION should be. Fans of the Jack Williamson, very hard sci-fi need not apply!

An entertaining, inventive and absurdist romp that starts strong, is marred by a dated passage that many will find offensive, and ultimately disintegrates into a nonsensical Dumas pastiche on LSD.

A hilarious example of anti-intellectualism in science fiction. Mindswap is a satire on Voltaire's Candide, where the hero ends up in increasingly improbable situations. Like Candide, it parodies many other works and the writing might seem clunky if you're not familiar with Golden Age and 1950s science fiction.

A bit of a hoot of a science fiction novel in which Marvin Flynn, who cannot afford an interplanetary vacation by any other means, answers an ad to Mindswap (sort of like vacation time shares, except you swap bodies instead of houses) with a Martian. After the swap is complete he finds, to his dismay, that the other party has unscrupulously contracted his body to another vacationer, who is found to have prior claim, and absconded with Marvin's body for parts unknown. Marvin has six hours to find his own body, or be dispossessed of a physical body, which of course would mean death. What follows is a sardonic tour de farce as Marvin transfers from one alien body to another in a quest for his own. I think Douglas Adams must have been show more inspired by Sheckley's style for his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books, although Adams did it better. show less

Marvin Flynn is an Earthman who wishes to experience the wide universe. Being too poor to travel by spaceship to distant planets, Flynn takes the far cheaper (and, judging by the rest of the book, far more dangerous) option of mind-swapping. However, the person he mind-swaps with is actually less-than-scrupulous in his actions, resulting in Marvin being without a body, and having to take his chances in the wide universe for whatever spare bodies are on offer, while a brilliant, if unsuccessful detective, puts in all his efforts to recover Flynn's body.

The story is an interesting enough premise - Flynn planet-hopping into different bodies, experiencing a slice of life for each form (even if I would have preferred the premise to be show more explored further). It is also a geniunely funny book - I laughed aloud in many spots in the novel, Ganzer egg-hunting being a favourite. Well, it was both inventive and funny until it devolves into an English "medieval knights" story for much of the the latter third of the book, complete with cliched story and a lacking sense of humour. Yes, there is an explanation behind seeing an alien society in terms of Arthurian England, but the book loses much of its qualities (particularly its original premise and humour), whcih is quite unfortunate.

Sheckley's writing conveys the story that he wishes to tell clearly and simply enough, which, by my standards, is reasonable prose. However, there is one major exception to this. Sheckley seems to have a problem in that his writing contain information dumps every few chapters. Info dumps are bad writing even when they are discussing interesting science and technology, but the info dumps here are often badly-written metaphysics, complete with a plethora of made-up, unexplained words, and are often unnecessary for the plot of the novel. I would have much preffered such sections to have been omitted from the novel, and have the premise explored further.

There are many things to like here, certainly, but there's always something that prevents it from me giving this book more stars than what I have currently given it. The book is quite humorous, but the humour is not consistently present throughout the book. The writing is decent enough, except the author has a bad habit of including irrelevant and poorly-writen information dumps. The story had some inventive ideas, and an original premise, but this inventiveness fell away in the third part of the novel, too.

I've ranked the book three-and-a-half stars out of five, but by no means is each part of the book three-and-a-half stars. Some sections of the novel deserve four to five stars, some sections deserve less than two. Three-and-a-half is an attempt to comprimise between the dramatic variations in quality of the book. show less

I used to like this type of sci-fi, but my tastes have changed. I didn't appreciate the homophobia in chapter 13. I feel like if the author couldn't solve a plot problem, he just made things up, instead of trying to make it believable. I know sheckley meant it to be humorous; I found it unfunny.

Not my style. Reminds me of Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe - goofy story of boy who mindswaps and finds himself expelled from a stolen body… very wordy.