Customer Reviews

Dimension of Miracles

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Carmody is an ordinary, unremarkable Earthman. One day he discovers that there is a galaxy wide civilisation, unknown to humans and he has won a prize in the galactic lottery. He is taken away from the Earth and given his prize which turns out to be a taking but opinionated source of advice. Armed only with his prize, he sets out on a hilarious journey across the galaxy. On the way, he meets many strange people including the man responsible for building the planet Earth in the first place.

The prize's advice is not always much use. When Carmody is confronted by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the prize can only suggest turning into a plant or singing hymns!

The book races along at a frantic pace. Every couple of pages brings a new situation and a lot of humour. Sheckley certainly knows how to keep his readers interested.

If you think that this sounds a lot like "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, you are right but this book was written a decade earlier and it is funnier.

Sheckley has written many other novels and short stories and they are all very funny indeed so, if you enjoy this book, you will find a lot more to enjoy there.

This is a wonderful book. I first read it in 1968, and it presaged brand labels on the outside of clothing, a media culture, and a number of other things. And it's really funny. My copy is falling apart, I've loaned it out so many times. Thus far, each person who has read it has loved it. I'm happy to be able to obtain another copy.

Mr. Carmody is just your average working American who finds one afernoon that he's won the Galactic Sweepstakes by an Alien who escorts him to Galactic Central to collect his prize. Once there he is faced with the task of finding his own way back to Earth. Where earth is, isn't the only problem there is also "when" and "which" in a universe that contains an infinite variety. Enroute, Carmody must deal with beings ranging from the omnipotent to the incompetent with hilarious yet thought provoking results. Sheckley's subject matter is somewhere between "Alice in Wonderland" and "The HitchHicker's Guide to the Galaxy". His writing is not quite as good as Carol but better than Adams. Both Lewis Carol and Robert Sheckly try to say something important (even if it is obscure) while Douglas Adams is mostly irreverent comments on the absurdities of life. Both light and deep, and certainly funny, "Dimension of Miracles" is a very good read.

This is one of the wittiest, craziest, most profound books I have ever read. It's a cosmic mind-youknowwhat with a strange bittersweet ending. I have had hilarious times hearing friends discuss Sheckley's concepts in DIMENSION, in his other two brilliant books MINDSWAP and JOURNEY OF JONES, and in his lean-and-mean short stories. Rudy Rucker (before he wrote his weirdly mean-spirited Saucer book), told me Mindswap was one of the books that inspired him to write sf. Dimension was the one that inspired me. If you like James Branch Cabell, Vonnegut, Bradbury at his tightest, Ambrose Bierce at his loopiest, and Chesterton at his craziest and most profound, if any of this means anything to you, you will LOVE this brilliant satire about the creation of earth, the alternative world of dinosaurs, the most hellish city ever built, why God's incompetence is his greatest quality, and why, ultimately, You Can't Go Home Again. This, my friends, is one of the great satirical fantasies of science fiction.

There was always something about Robert Sheckly's writing style that appealed to me. His chapters were short and usually very to the point so he had already waded through the tendency for authors to ramble and over edit themselves and I was spared having to read all that to get to the good stuff. It isn't surprising that Sheckly was known as a master of the short story. 'Dimension of Miracles' is not a short story but it feels like a short story that got gratuitously extended to novella length. Nevertheless it's still classic Sheckly. He knew science in a superficial way but yet enough to keep his stories believable. He is a nihilist philosophically speaking so if you take your religion or your science very seriously he might offend you. He also can come across as smug because he sees humor in irony and those little ironies continually pop up in his writing. Concretely a paleontologist might be put off by a talking T-Rex who lived 100 million years ago because they were ruthless predators that evolved perhaps 2 million years before the dinosaur extinction. In an Ed Whitten parrallel brane Universe perhaps they talked and were civilized but .... prepared for the big Sheckly ironic ending which I won't give away. I'm still trying to figure out why Carmody's prize was so valuable which ofcourse is just another Sheckly irony !

In the 1960s, Robert Sheckley, the funniest writer ever to grace the field of science fiction, created a kind of humor that could only function as science fiction. DIMENSION OF MIRACLES is his absolute masterpiece, a book that has not been equalled in the 30+ years since its first appearance.

As can be expected from a silly science fiction book, there aren't laughs from cover to cover. More realistically, the first quarter is pretty good producing a good amount of laughs and head shaking. The half has some giggles but nothing more. At the end, it's an odd smile and an occasional shrug. Needless to say, the steam of hilarity is quickly dissipated in the steep chimney of story telling... but it was still easy enough and stomachable enough to finish off in one morning.

Like other silly science fiction books (Norstilia, Arrive at Easterwine, etc.), a major crutch the author uses is spontaneity, which sometimes manifests as just ridiculous randomness. Sheckley, however, keeps a close tab on his randomness and the silliness doesn't stray too far into juvenile absurdity. Puns are another unfortunate staple of what some authors consider to be funny novels. Again, Sheckley is self-disciplined only allowing one glaring pun on the words `cards' and `way'.

Aside from being a silly novel, it feels like Sheckley put lot of his personal credo in the pages. It's really quite an impressive list, however blatant some of it is: free will/human error, creation/death, conceptions/reality and touches on religious hypocrisy, law of diminishing returns and law of predation. Further, Sheckley has some interesting and thoughtful ideas about the differentiating between sanity and insanity, the boredom an omniscient being would experience and how waste could be a memorial to our needs.

Far from being one of the worst humorous science fiction stories out there (I think the short story `E van S' by Piers Anthony takes THAT prize), Dimension of Miracles is a thoughtful exposé of an intelligent man's personal philosophy, a comical feature of a witty man's humor and a keen unfolding done by the hand of one man's literary experience. Four stars is a little high for this but I'll round it up from 3.5.

Robert Sheckley was one of those classic science-fiction writers who could easily have been regarded as a superb mainstream writer in the adsurdist vein. While he uses all the familiar toys in the SF sandbox -- robots, aliens, time travel, etc. -- he's closer to Vonnegut, Voltaire, Kafka, and their brethren.

In this wonderful novel, which is essentially an expansion of shorter pieces, all his gifts are on full display. Thomas Carmody wins an especially talkative & sarcastic shape-changing Prize in an Intergalactic Sweepstakes he didn't even know existed, and is whisked away from Earth to one absurd situation after another ... and constantly pursued by a Predator specifically generated by the Universe to destroy him.

Douglas Adams is cited by some as having been influenced by Sheckley; but those who love Adams might have a little difficulty adjusting if & when they come to Sheckley. With all deserved respect to Adams' work, I think Sheckley's cuts a little more deeply. It's seldom laugh-out-loud satire, and more often the vision of a knowing eye that's equally bemused, appalled, resigned, and defiant.

Of course absurdity is a particularly potent aspect of much 1960s art. (And note that the original publication date for this novel is 1968.) It may not always translate as well to contemporary times, which takes a glib & dismissive approach to nearly everything. The absurdist is at his strongest when there's a streak of idealism somewhere within, when mockery of the absurd is driven by outrage, heartbreak, and a belief in something worthwhile, somewhere, somehow. Ultimately, you can't be detached & above it all for absurdity to work; sooner or later, you've got to care.

Now, is Carmody a cardboard figure, as some would claim? In one way, yes -- but that doesn't really matter, as he's simply an Everyman, which is what such a tale requires. As such, too much character study would probably diminish him, rather than enlarge him. That's not the purpose of this novel in any case. Take him as he is, and read yourself into him. After all, we're every single one of us in his shoes.

And as for the sublime ending -- some readers might find it obvious, or simplistic, or unsatisfactory. "So that's what he learns? Big deal! Who doesn't know that?" Maybe so ... but how many of us actually live it? I think that the older the reader, the more those final lines will resonate on a very meaningful level. For the thoughtful, this is most highly recommended!

This Sheckley novel is sort of a "God by Machine" exploration of
a " Where, When, Which" alternate universe.
With a predator chasing him Carmody has several near death experiences. In the Galactic Sweepstakes winning way Robert Sheckley has taken on logic, theology and science head on. The result is one of his once and future mind warps where the hero Carmody is forced to face the fundamentals of his own existence.When taken as a Descartes level of philosophical discourse( with tongue firmly planted in cheek),
we find that science meets magic as a category of introspection. On a trip home Carmody meets a Gia type planetary god as a life-form, the biblical God's construction contractor for Earth,and various Galactic super intelligent agencies.
He literally finds that he can't go home after being where he has been.
He has found an introspective hell of self-awareness.
Although not very much like his strange future worlds,
this may be one of Sheckley's best works. It reminds me very much of
an adult version of "Alice in Wonderland".

Sheckley seems like an intelligent guy with interesting ideas, but doesn't appear to know how to weave those ideas into a compelling plot, if this book is any indication. The idea of an Earthling being told he's won a prize in a galactic sweepstakes should be a good premise for a story; however, this is more like a string of brief episodes in which the main character, Carmody, is bounced from place to place and participates in some some absurd philosophical and theological discussions that are not that much fun to read. To top it all off, the story never goes anywhere; there's no resolution.

Apart from supposedly helping Carmody out in one instance, the prize itself seems particularly useless for all intents and purposes- we never learn what good it is or why anyone would want it. I discovered one review that speculated that this was part of the message, though I can't bring myself to think that this book is worth examining closer for hidden meanings. We never learn much about Carmody either, or why we should care about him. There's mention of a wife, but he must not love her very much since he seems content to impulsively forsake his existence on Earth.

While this book has its share of amusing moments, it's hardly hilarious. I believe I'll stick with Douglas Adams, thank you.