The collection begins with “The Mountain Without a Name”. Something akin to Dubai in space, it tells of an Earth construction company terraforming a planet for human use, which includes converting their version of Mt. Everest into a sea. But bad luck seems to tail them, wrecking the crew's best made plans. Things eventually come to a head, and the men are left with the most dire (as intended) of choices. In “The Accountant”, Sheckley must have been having a bad day with bureaucracy. A throwaway story, it tells of parents pressuring their child to become a magician when all he wants is to be an accountant. Though structured like a bar joke, the punchline is more dark humor than knee-slapping.
Reversing the classic pulp magazine cover of a green, slavering alien holding a damsel in distress while an intrepid man with a blaster looks to attack, “Hunting Problem” sets an alien on the tail of humans—then reverses it again. Another one off—fun, but still a one off. “A Thief in Time” plays off Heinlein's time travel larff. Sheckley's hero, the future inventor of a time travel machine, finds himself confronted by the consequences of his invention. “The Luckiest Man in the World” is an odd duckling in the collection in that it is more akin to the Sheckley that Sheckley is famous for being: witty, but with layers. In it, a stranded meteorologist uses the power of science to do everything—appendectomy, house construction, plumbing, etc. Thomas Kuhn would have loved it.
Featuring a showdown between a Kantian alien and three humans up to no good, “Hands Off “ is clever, but not by a mile. Lacking guide rails, Sheckley seems to just be wandering ideologically without any deeper purpose as their cat and mouse game plays out. “Something for Nothing” is a sci-fi twist on genie-in-a-bottle stories. It tells of a man who discovers a humming box beside his bed one day that has a button that grants wishes. While unpredictable, the story treads familiar moral water upon its conclusion. In “A Ticket to Tranai” a man named Goodman goes to the planet of his dreams. While there, he learns the semantics of utopia are largely perception-based, making for one of the most based stories in the collection. A brief piece, “The Battle” sees humanity assemble a host of robot armies to fight the legions of hell, including Satan himself. The battle ends in death and destruction, but its the aftermath of fighting when morality strikes that Sheckley makes his humorous point.
An
upside-down Western, “Skulking Permit” sees
a lonely, frontier planet prepare for a visit by their imperial
masters. A utopia, the locals need to implement crime to appease
them; every good civilization has crime, after all. Tom is an
average guy, and he's given the role of the town criminal, something
he has extreme difficulty doing. But once he gets the hang of the
crime thing, well, all bets are off. “Citizen in
Space”, the title story, is a peculiar
one, and the best of the lot. It tells of a man who wants to escape
to the freedom of space. But he is dogged by "spies",
ordinary people like plumbers and children, who make freedom
particularly difficult to find. Closing the collection is a bit of
Sheckley daydreaming, “Foolish Question”, which is better left
alone.
In the end, Citizen in Space is
decidedly Sheckley-lite. A parade of clever one-offs, it surprises
and engages the first time through but lacks underyling substance for
a second read. It does not
showcase the writer's full power. It's witty enough fun; satire and
humor rarely have such self-awareness in science fiction, and that's
ok.
The following are the 12 stories contained in Citizen in Space:
The Mountain Without a Name
The Accountant
Hunting Problem
A Thief in Time
The Luckiest Man in the World
Hands Off
Something for Nothing
A Ticket to Tranai
The Battle
Skulking Permit
Citizen in Space
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