StandingWater Creations

With that said, Mindswap follows the adventures of Marvin Flynn, a thirty-something young man, still living at home, recently graduated from college, who, like most of his counterparts in the future, is still considered too young to be out on his own, too young to date, and too young to be of any real use to society as a whole. In short, as in the past, times change, people perceptions alter, and reality becomes what people assume it should be, and in some cases, always has been.

Marvin is introduced, from the outset, as someone who has a severe case of wanderlust. Not the kind that would take him all over the world, though he has been all over the world, but rather the kind that takes him into places unknown, uncharted, and where very few have been before; or at least, very few have been and then report back. When world travel becomes common place, the common place then loses interest in the ordinary and the ordinary becomes everyday. In the case of Marvin,the Earth is far too ordinary and the Universe is far more interesting.

I came across this book on several websites. Granted, the majority of them had to do with science fiction, mainly short stories, and Robert Scheckley was noted as one of theauthors of science fiction who made considerable changes to the genre in that area period. Forty years ago science fiction and fantasy were not the same as it is today. It was a subgenre that wasnt considered high fiction; even though today it is a full genre of fiction, though still without the recognition of many literary achievements. The achievements are few and far between, but the greats in the field are pretty well known. Consider Tolkien, Heinlein, and Herbert. Card is someone who is still proliferate, though I find much of his work to be pedantic and without any creativity in short, he has a lot of good ideas that are expended in the first book in any series and then he milks the series for all theyre worth and sometimes more than they should be. However, there are many classic authors who have also contributed to the genre, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and C.S. Lewis have all contributed to the cause.

Because there are some well known authors as well as some partly known authors, I was somewhat taken aback to learn about Robert Sheckley through various websites dedicated to the genre. Ive worked in bookstores, as a young man and teenager, read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and still count Heinlein and Herbert as a couple of my favorite authors (though not Top Five favorite) they dont really encroach upon the literary greats that I find pushing most other authors out of the way. To my utter surprise, I come across Robert Scheckley (you can read more about him at www.sheckley.com) and had to find out why people were claiming that Mindswap was one of those books that had influenced and changed various aspects to science fiction. In short, if this book was what people claimed it to be, I had to read it.

Swapping bodies is not new to Robert Sheckley, nor did it stop when he published his book. People have dealt with the idea for generations and eons. He merely took it to another level. I cant say the level he took his story to was adequate. Truth told, I am still wondering why he was ever published, and given the era, why he was published in hard back. Most ten penny novels, back then, were published in paperback and were not expected to sell much more than the cost of publication. Inshort, not a lot was expected and, in many cases, not a lot was returned. With Sheckley, not a lot was delivered and nothing was really returned.

To begin the story we are introduced to Martin who wants to travel, sees and advertisement, flies to New York, and is transferred into another body. Upon arriving in Mars he is told that his real body was stolen and that the man who stole it had rented his body out to Marvin had done so to at least twelve other people. One of those people brought a suit against Marvin and within six hours he was about to lose his body to someone whod transferred to Mars hours earlier. The result was that Marvin had lost his real body and was now in need of finding a new one. So, he entered the free market and started hoping from one body to the next.

The book was really hard to read. Granted, I read it because it wasnt very long, but it proved to be a challenge because Sheckley kept jumping around with what he was doing. Hed tried to explain this away by indicating that swapping bodies with aliens often led to certain forms of dementia and that the mind would often begin seeing things as you wanted them to be rather than as they really were. Because of this Marvin went to Mars, then off to another planet, lost his marbles, started living in the Old West, as a fencing champion, off to France to live during one of their many internal struggles, beforeheading into the Twisted World where your preconceptions of reality were used against you. At this point Marvin becomes a god, chasesthe man who stole his body throughout the universe, finally takes his body back (which was stored in a dusty suitcase) and believes himself to be kicked out of the twisted world where, he believes, if you could figure out what was different betweenthe real world and the twisted world you can figure out if you are in the one or the other. He is in the one and not the other.

I believe that this book had a lot going for it. From the beginning I kept hoping that Marvin would be transferred into the body of the opposite sex or that we would, somehow, deal more with the ideas behind changing bodies. Instead, the book dealt a lot with Marvin and his dementias and how bad he felt because hed lost his body, lost love, and was going to die at every turn. If this book is the inspiration for a lot of other booksand stories, I feel really bad for those other books and stories because this is no starting point. Maybe a midpoint, but definitely not a starting point.