Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Sheckley

There is a sly double move in Sheckley calling his own work "the absurdist stuff". It sounds shruggy, even self-deprecating, but it also smuggles in a critique of the marketplace that decides what counts as "terribly popular". Absurdism, especially in mid-century science fiction, was a way to say the quiet part loudly: the universe is not obligated to make moral sense, bureaucracies can be cosmic in scale, and technology often amplifies human foolishness rather than curing it. Labeling it "stuff" drains the term of prestige and returns it to craft, to the working writer's reality of trying strange angles while editors and readers want cleaner thrills and clearer morals.

The line also hints at timing. Sheckley was writing in an era when American SF was still negotiating respectability and often leaned on earnest problem-solving, plausibility, and heroic competence. Absurdist satire threatened that contract. It made the genre look less like prediction and more like diagnosis. If you turn the rocketship into a punchline, you're also turning the future into an argument about the present.

Underneath is a professional realism: popularity is a weather system, not a verdict. By framing the reception as "at the time", he implies the long game - that cultural tastes swing, that yesterday's niche becomes today's canon, and that the writer who keeps pushing the odd, sharp form may end up read precisely because it once didn't fit.