I read a lot of science fiction, and I certainly read novels by Sheckley though I have no recollection of reading this one. The title that chimes with me is ‘Journey Beyond Tomorrow.’ Though the cover reproduced below is familiar.
I saw a copy of ‘The Status Civilization’ last month, in of all places, The Museum of Democracy in Canberra. In the once parliamentary library in the Museum there were a number of utopian and dystopian novels. (I thought them out of place in absence of any books on the subject of the Museum – democracy.)
The name Sheckley meant something to me so I put the Dogs of Amazon to work in tracking down a copy. A lot of 1950s science fiction is now being reprinted so we can re-visit them and I got a copy and read it in a day. It is slight book of little more than one hundred pages.
It posits a world consistent with Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature with some shadowy political institutions. The motif is familiar, Philip Dick, ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon;’ Mack Reynolds, ‘Equality;’ John Carpenter, ‘Escape from New York;’ and more.
The plot twist at the end was mildly amusing but quite inconsistent with all that had gone before, making the whole broken-backed. The point was how easy it is to misperceive a distant reality, and maybe that made more sense at the height of the Cold War than it does now.
Still it was a tonic compared to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses!’
Details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Status_Civilization