Science & Tech Quote by Robert Sheckley

There is a sly shrug in Sheckley`s dismissal, the kind that reads like modesty until you notice the blade. He`s not attacking Star Wars or Star Trek; he`s quarantining them. They "go excellent" precisely because they are going somewhere specific: toward franchise myth-making, comfortingly legible worlds, and the reliable machinery of spectacle and episodic adventure. By praising them, he protects himself from the obvious charge of snobbery, then quietly pivots to what he actually cares about: the routes science fiction stopped taking once it learned how to sell itself.

Sheckley came up in the mid-century magazine era, where the genre`s muscle wasn`t continuity or lore but the short story`s trapdoor - a premise that snaps shut and reveals a social truth. His best work is satirical, compact, more interested in how humans rationalize cruelty, consumerism, and bureaucracy than in the engineering of starships. So when he says he`s "not so interested any more" in how much science fiction "goes", it lands as a lament for a medium that increasingly equated "future" with a branded aesthetic, not a cognitive provocation.

The subtext is craft as well as culture. Once a genre`s dominant pathways are paved by blockbuster properties, other modes look like side streets: the weird, the formally risky, the politically sharp, the stories that end in discomfort instead of catharsis. Sheckley isn`t nostalgic for some purer past; he`s marking a creative narrowing, and staking his allegiance to science fiction as a scalpel, not a theme park.