One Man’s Poison
By Robert Sheckley
Something had gone wrong when they’d loaded the ship, and the rations hadn’t quite lasted long enough to make the outbound end of the uranium prospecting trip. Then they found an abandoned world and landed the ship on an old warehouse facility . . . and tried to find something to eat.
It was not an easy thing to do, going through an alien warehouse when they could barely read the manuals and had little clue about the nature of the local biology. They would have eaten a horse if there’d been one. But there wasn’t. And that was probably for the best — it might have eaten them first!
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Robert Sheckley
Sheckley was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City. In 1931, the family moved to Maplewood, New Jersey.
Biography
Sheckley attended Columbia High School, where he discovered science fiction. He graduated in 1946 and hitchhiked to California the same year, where he tried numerous jobs: landscape gardener, pretzel salesman, barman, milkman, warehouseman, and general labourer “board man” in a hand-painted necktie studio. Finally, in 1946, he joined the U.S. Army and was sent to Korea. During his time in the army, he served as a guard, an army newspaper editor, a payroll clerk, and a guitarist in the Army Band.
He left the service in 1948. Sheckley graduated with an arts degree from New York University in 1951. The same year, he married Barbara Scadron for the first time. The couple had one son, Jason. Sheckley worked in an aircraft factory and as an assistant metallurgist for a short time, but his breakthrough came quickly: in late 1951, he sold his first story, “Final Examination,” to Imagination magazine. He quickly gained prominence as a writer, publishing stories in Imagination, Galaxy, and other science fiction magazines.
The 1950s saw the publication of Sheckley’s first four books: short story collections Untouched by Human Hands (Ballantine, 1954), Citizen in Space (1955), and Pilgrimage to Earth (Bantam, 1957), and a novel, Immortality, Inc. (first published as a serial in Galaxy, 1958).
Robert Sheckley
