Holy smokes did Robert Sheckley stick every single crazy landing in his short story anthology The Store of the Worlds. If you have someone who likes Scifi or short stories, this is the book to buy them for Christmas. It is — bar none — the tightest short story collection I’ve ever read in my life. Yes, I’ve read O’Conner’s and Hemingway’s and Borges and several Best Of… and the O’Henry awards. And O’Henry himself. This is the tightest collection of short stories I’ve ever read, bar none.

Doesn’t mean they’re my favorite short stories of all time, not hardly. Each of the others I’ve listed wrote one of my favorite short stories. I don’t think a single one of these stories rises to the level of “favorite” or “greatest.” But what they do is stick the landing promised in the premise, every single time. They’re “twist endings” insofar as they’re surprising, but there’s absolutely nothing in retrospect that isn’t promised in the premise.

Rather than review them all, I’m going to say the premise and offer a couple of comments:

Table of Contents

• The Monsters
• Seventh Victim
• Shape
• Specialist
• Warm
• Watchbird
• The Accountant
• Paradise II
• All the Things You Are
• Protection
• The Native Problem
• Pilgrimage to Earth
• A Wind Is Rising
• Dawn Invader
• Double Indemnity
• Holdout
• The Language of Love
• Morning After
• If the Red Slayer
• The Store of the Worlds
• Shall We Have a Little Talk
• Cordle to Onion to Carrot
• The People Trap
• Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?
• Is That What People Do
• Beside Still Waters

The Monsters

Possibly the most provocative line ever uttered by a protagonist in a science fiction story:

“Wait! What day is this?”

Hum calculated silently, then said, “the fifth day of Luggat.”

“Damn,” Cordovan said. “I have to go home and kill my wife.”

You don’t expect to be taking both Cordovan’s and Cordovan’s wife’s side by the end. Brilliant commentary on our liberalism.

Seventh Victim

People are allowed, for pleasure, to murder one another. But on a man’s seventh victim, he suddenly loses the thirst for the hunt. Wonderful commentary on peace, love, and war.

Shape

Is it better to abide by the specific forms of your militarized, stratified society?

Or to try out new shapes?

What is formlessness?

Specialist

This was easily the weirdest of the bunch. Imagine an entire shape made out of the various bodies of different alien species. And the most central of them is the Pusher — human beings.

The Pusher dies.

So they need a new human. From Earth.

And their ship is basically a giant bulbous gooey body horror.

Warm

This could be a short film directed by Christopher Nolan, honestly. It’s so clean, so simple, and yet so disturbing. A man, laying on his bed, hears a cry for help. In his head.

He sees no one, what does he do?

Watchbird

This basically predicted the drone state we have in New York City and Yemen, both. But it deals predominately with finding technological solutions to ethical problems BEFORE we determine the ethics of said technology, which just creates more ethical problems.

This is obvious to the wise, but not to inventors.

The Accountant

A kid grows up a witch, but wants to be an Accountant.

Hilarious.

But also has a twist that, again, is baked into the premise.

Paradise II

Two men in a fringe risky real estate play bet on an Earth type that has been extinguished of billions of human souls. They see it as the perfect opportunity.

Of course, there’s sort of this lingering question:

What killed them?

All the Things You Are

God, I loved this story. Several of them made me weep, but I love the premise of this — it’s so basic on a chemical level and therefore so, so genius.

This story — more than all of the fringe, crazy out there tech — shows me that Sheckley had a fundamental knowledge of the sciences and how the physical world works.

Because the premise is simple: your breath is a biome of germs, your voice is vibrating sound just like a train or a trumpet, your sweat has acid in it. This is generally seen as a frailty in Scifi stories.

But what of a race that can’t stand the smell? The sound?

Whose very skin is burned by your touch?

What if All The Things You Are hurt another race? Just your physical being?

How does that affect diplomacy?

And can anything good come from you in that instance? Or are you just made to wound them and cause them intense suffering?

I love, love, love this story.

Protection

Gosh.

This story is about an alien species — or perhaps a paranoid delusion — trying to protect the main character from threats. The threats become more and more ludicrous that you think this character is just going through paranoid urban delusions.

Yet the ending of this is so innocuous, so terrifying.

The Native Problem

What if you settled a planet alone, by yourself, to get some peace and quiet and your own people with limited rocket-burn technology who left before your era, actually arrived after you did with quicker technology?

What if they saw you as a native with the capacity to communicate in their own tongue?

How would you prove to them that you’re the exact same?

Could you?

Pilgrimage to Earth

If you came back to Earth as a sort of pilgrimage after generations have been away and the whole Earth was advertising something — and someone advertised a real, honest, falling-in-love moment with a real, honest romance — and then took it away that night, how would you react?

A Wind Is Rising

What if a race evolved to handle hurricane force winds?

Trigger warning on this one.

I lived through the Joplin Tornado and there was stuff in here that set me a bit on edge. Still brilliant.

Dawn Invader

What if you could invade a planet using only your mind?

As a single, individual human?

If your body disintegrated, what would be left of you?

And would that YOU win?

Double Indemnity

Is there a way that a double indemnity clause in a time travel agency could become particularly problematic for people investigating ancestral genetic tendencies?

Holdout

Is there a way, in the long trend of anti-racism, for us to become racist against a people group no one would would ever have expected?

The Language of Love

Is it possible for a rather autistic lover generally incapable of romantic talk to learn the language of love — to learn it so fully — that it actually ruins love the other way?

Can you be too ignorant — and too wise — for love?

Morning After

A bad hangover.

Leads to survival in an alien jungle.

Or a hallucination.

Which is it?

If the Red Slayer

How many times do you have to die for the American government to earn the right to stay dead?

The Store of the Worlds

I wept and wept and wept at the ending of this one.

If you could buy any alternate life than the one you have, what would you spend your entire life savings on?

Even if it was only there for a little while?

Shall We Have a Little Talk

This story is a science fiction story for linguists. It’s on par with Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang and Out of the Silent Planet by Lewis. This one, however, is of a man trying to nail down a language that won’t let him nail it down.

Why?

So that he can conquer the planet in a totally legal real estate deal.

The story slowly devolves into hilarious nonsense.

Cordle to Onion to Carrot

If you had a hallucination with the god Mercury, would it make you more assertive, less assertive, both?

Would you drive away the people you love?

Would you change at all?

The People Trap

This one was absolutely wild.

It’s riffing on the land races of Oklahoma, but imagining if you had to fight through a super cyberpunk and gas punk, smog riddled Westchester on foot into the heart of Times Square. If you get there, you get of acre of land.

What would you do to get it for your family of ten?

Would you be happy when you had?

Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?

Easily the most erotic of the bunch, a vacuum cleaner with… other attachments… is delivered to a sexually unsatisfied wife.

When it comes to sex: whose fault is it if you’re unhappy?

Is That What People Do

This is like a weird, surrealist Rear Window for voyeurs. And it really turns the lens on who is watching whom.

Beside Still Waters

This one made the preacher in me weep.

Easily the most tender of them and, knowing Sheckley will write no more, it is very, very full of long term heartache.