Customer Reviews

Mindswap

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"MindSwap" is the first book I've read by legendary sci-fi master Robert Sheckley, and a what a great introduction it is. Somewhat forgotten now by all but the hardcore of sci-fi fans, Sheckley has spent the last five decades written gleefully insane social satires, including such classics as "Immortality, Inc.", "Journey Beyond Tommorrow", and his masterpeice, "Dimension of Miracles". "MindSwap", written in 1966, has Sheckley in fine form and is a great place to start if you have never been subjected to his dementia.

The plot starts off simply: In the future, interstellar travel between Earth and the many many known alien worlds is extremely expensive, so in order to see the galaxy some brave souls resort to "MindSwap", a service that switches your consciousness with that of a compatible alien lifeform. You enjoy a new body, new sourroundings and even new skills while still maintaing your own mind and memories, all at a low low cost. This is precisely what Marvin, our hero, sets out to do as the novel begins. He quickly runs into a snag, though, as his actual body (now inhabited by the consciousness of the alien whose body Marvin controls) is unexpectedly stolen. Then Marvin finds out HE is in a stolen body himself, and a judge gives him six hours to locate a spare body, and time is running out....

The plot then truly takes off as Marvin visits one crazy world after another, taking jobs that nobody else wants (often with very good reason) just to have a body to stay alive in. Jeweled Egg hunting (watch out for those Ganzers!), waiting out a ticking bomb (located up his nose), and other adventures quickly cure Marvin of his wanderlust and give Sheckley's sparkling wit a chance to shine. Master of the truly unexpected plot twist, Sheckley is also famous for dreaming up nutty concepts that he manages to explain in borderline convincing ways . The best example of this in "MindSwap" is his "Theory of Searches", which states that if you are searching for someone, they, whether they know it or not, are also searching for you. And if someone is looking for you, you might as well stay in one place and let them find you. And one waiting place, of course, is as good as another, and this is how Marvin finds himself hanging out in a Mexican Cantina, where he does indeed find many people he has lost (unfortunately mostly relatives).

I haven't even mentioned the love interest (the EXTREMELY elusive Cathy), the grueling journey across a frozen wasteland (to get to the Cantina, of course) and, for no apparent reason at all, a twenty page Medieval Battle (complete with full histories of the clans involved). All of this culminates in the most inspired creation of all, the dreaded, nightmare-filled "Twisted World". Darkly hinted at throughout the novel, when we finally get to see it, it is both not what we expected, and if you think about it, far worse than we could of imagined (actually, it kind of reminded me of the DMV). The book ends on a rather strange note, and I found that the only way to be at peace with the ending is either to completely think it through, or not think about it at all. Either way, it may put you off travel for a while.

Fun, funny, insightful and intensely creative, "MindSwap" is a terrific ride that should appeal to fans of absurdist humor, sharply written satire, or just plain great writing. Highly recommended.

Well, Codemaster Talon above says it all. Give this book to a teenager as his first mind-expander. Sheckley's irreverence, boldness and craziness appeal to kids and his perfectly structured satire and inventive characters appeals to adults.

Rudy Rucker told me this was his favorite Sheckley book, and was one of the books that inspired him to become a writer. In case you don't know, Rucker is a genius. (Although kinda mean.) And Harlan Ellison, also obviously a genius storyteller, is one of Sheckley's biggest fans.

And MINDSWAP is all at once Sheckley at his silliest and his most profound. The section on The Twisted World is evocative of nothing else you'll ever read anywhere. And all of the logical paradoxes and joke reversals and lyrical parodies of writing styles add up to one of the strangest, funniest, stupidest, most brilliant novels I have ever read. I should have put funniest first, because it is extremely witty.

Oh, and you might want to read his two other masterpieces of satire, DIMENSION OF MIRACLES and JOURNEY BEYOND TOMORROW (aka JOURNEY OF JOENES.)

Way back when -- er, okay, when I was in high school, which was more than two decades ago -- a friend's father used to say, "The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who have read Mindswap, and those who have not." He happened to be a minister in a protestant church, which is interesting to me, but doesn't really matter (I'm agnostic).

Funny that years later, Mindswap is one of the books I keep looking back to. I read it again, or -- more often -- read parts of it again. I remember thinking when I read it that it was the closest LITERARY thing to the Marx brothers I'd ever seen -- but that analogy is flawed, and if you really expect Groucho, Chico, and Harpo you may be disappointed.

But as an antic, irreverant, inanely comic sci-fi read, what a gem! It doesn't surprise me that Douglas Adams referenced Scheckley as one of his inspirations. Adams is more overtly Monty Python, but Sheckley has his own groundbreaking social satire. And... Mindswap is joyous!

With each increase in the price of travel, the underlying premise of "Mindswap" looks more attractive: In the future one will be able to travel "on the cheap" (even to other planets and solar systems) by temporarily swapping bodies with a willing trader on the other end. But, as our hero, Marvin Flynn, finds out, you'd better be careful whom you swap with! Having been gulled by a Martian poly-swapper, Marvin goes through adventures that tax both his and the reader's minds in trying to retrieve his body and resume his boring life as a college student. The fun in the book comes in a variety of forms. In addition to witnessing Marvin's implausible escapades with creatures of many shapes, sizes, and temperaments, the reader is exposed to Sheckley's virtuoso linguistic escapades. The characters may converse in the language of some distant planet for one of Marvin's adventures, then switch to faux-feudal patois for the next, even conversing at length using only the titles of (once-)popular songs for a third! Sheckley's writing overflows with cleverness in both form and plot. If you enjoy mind-bending prose, you'll enjoy "Mindswap!"

I think that the idea behind MindSwap is excellent even if told through characters that are quirksome and unlikeable. Marvin is a dolt. A hick from earth living in a small town somewhere in the future. He dreams of traveling to other planets. But its expensive. Out of his financial reach. However an alternate form of travel exists. He can swap his body with another person/being on another planet, sort of like apartment swapping in two cities.

What happens is that when Marvin gets to where he is going, it turns out that he has been swindled. He is forced to give up the body he has swapped into and the person he swapped with has gone off and stolen his body.

Once this plot device is set up, Marvin goes 'tripping' through several (what should be funny) altercations. I must be getting cynical because I was not laughing. It was more boring word play/thoughts than anything else. When I was a kid, I read Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The humor here is similar. If you liked that you probably will enjoy this.

This is an extremely fun flight of fancy. In my view, it is right on the line between hard sci-fi and fantasy: with the unexplained technology behind the whole thing, you get a panoramic view of a futuristic world. It is also a sci-fi mystery, in that the protagonist, thinking he is getting a new body for vacation, is accused of fraud and sets off an a high jinks adventure to find out what happened and keep one step in front of the law. The best thing about the book, as with all truly gifted sci-fi writers, are the details. Sheckley really gets them right, to create a coherent vision that is at once hilarious and believable. There is concern for ethics, squeamishness at the details of mindswapping, and a surprise ending that was genuinely shocking and unexpected. The 60s aspect is that the imagery is truly psychedelic, all in the service of a vision fully realized. It is absurd, a satire, yet also concerned, and never ridiculous.

Warmly recommended. This is great fun and while hard sci-fi, doesn't take itself at all that seriously, which is a very difficult balance to strike.

This review is not by Meera Censor, but by Alex Censor.
(Meera doesn't read science fiction).

Mindswap is ne of the most enjoyably memorable books I ever read.
I smile just thinking about it.

If you liked Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy you'll probably love this book.

The plot is that the somewhat hapless main character, Marvin, contracts, as
is fairly common in the fictional future in which the novel takes place, to
take a vacation via mindswap technology.
That is, through a broker you arrange to swap bodies and homes with an alien
on another planet.

When he arrives on the alien planet he discovers that the alien he has
contracted with has illegally swapped his the use of his body with not just
Marvin but another being.
Both cannot occupy the body at the same time, so the case is taken to the
local court as to who gets the body.

And it gets more interesting from there.

Alex

THREE-AND-A-HALF STARS

In a 2006 speech at Google's headquarters, fantasist Neil Gaiman recounted how his one-time editor Alisa Kwitney asked his opinion about Robert Sheckley. "I think that from the late fifties to the mid sixties he was probably the finest short-story writer actually writing in pretty much any field," he replied, "and that it's a terrible pity that he burned out his brain on recreational pharmaceuticals and sort of lost it. Why?" Kwitney's response: "I'm his daughter." Awkward social situation aside, Gaiman's evaluation of Sheckley's legacy was pretty fair. While Coleridge was the Romantic Period's poster boy for wasted potential, Sheckley could just as easily fill the position for the Golden Age of Science Fiction. And his 1966 novel Mindswap, ripe with fineness and foibles aplenty, exemplifies both parts of his career.

Marvin Flynn, native of sleepy Stanhope, New York, has always wanted to travel. Not to the Grand Canyon or the Egyptian pyramids or the North Pole or some such provincial, Earth-bound locale. Rather, Marvin wants to sail to the distant stars. But he has a problem: He's almost broke. So he opts for the next best thing, a mindswap with a Martian named Ze Kraggash. Marvin will get to experience Mars in a Martian body for a bit while Kraggash does the same on Earth. Only the situation turns sour as soon as Martin shuffles on his new corporeal frame. Turns out that Kraggash is a wanted criminal, a stealer of bodies, and the Martian authorities want to evict Marvin from his new form so that its proper owner can have it back. Marvin needs to find a new body -- fast.

Unfettered invention is both Mindswap's greatest asset and liability. Sheckley is a master of left-handed exposition, of dropping incidental details that gradually reveal the strange (and uniformly absurd) worlds where Marvin finds himself. For example, Marvin opens up about his desire to travel in Spanish/Afrikaans dialect to a friend while they sip LSD frappes at a soda fountain. A barker at the Free Market for host bodies offers a credit per month plus unlimited sacking rights for those willing to inhabit soldiers in the Naigwin Army, an army that has been losing the war for a decade, true, but you could be promoted to second-class Manatee Leader if you act now. During his adventures, Marvin also bumps into a verse-spouting hermit on a jungle world, an explorer whose Theory of Searches reads like advanced Calculus and a minor government official who may have a ticking bomb in his nose. But as delightful as Sheckley's imaginings are, he piles them on so thick that the narrative thread grows thin. In the end, it snaps altogether. Sheckley only manages a conclusion by employing the shaggiest of shaggy dog endings. A mortal sin for most writers, but here it accentuates the absurdity. Broken denouement aside, this one's worth swapping some of your time for.

In Stanhope, New York Marvin Flynn dreams of seeing the universe, but to go off planet costs money so either you are wealthy, you settle on MINDSWAP with a like minded person or you stay home. When he read the ad to swap bodies with a Martian, Marvin concludes this is his chance to go extraterrestrial seeing Mars through the body of a Martian, but retaining his own mind during the swap and the memories after the return.

The swap goes well and Marvin looks forward to seeing the universe. That is until he lands on Mars where an elderly Aigeler Thrus calls him names until the South Martian Desert Police take the two men into custody to have a Fulzsime telepath read their minds. Both are victims of fraud as Marvin learns his earthling body has been stolen and that the body hosting his mind belongs to Aigeler of planet Achelses V. Since Thrus' claim supersedes that of Marvin, he is given six hours to vacate the body. His misadventures in body (and planet) hopping begins.

This a reprint of a mid 1960s science fiction thriller filled that holds up gracefully even with advances in technology and the Quantum Leap TV show. The story line is loaded with wild odd suppositions leading to zany premises that in turn takes unbelievable but entertaining twists as the hero leaps into bodies whose owners "volunteer" to perform dangerous jobs with Marvin's mind at stake. The different worlds he visits in search of the thief who stole his body are fun to observe though the stays are short. Once the hero learns the universal truth that to find one person in light year space, one should stop off for a drink in the nearest cantina first.

Harriet Klausner

It would be quite unreasonable to give Robert Sheckley less than top marks for putting together a wild and woolly imaginative premise to build a sci-fi novel around. Consider a world in which interstellar travel is possible but, not surprisingly, it's a long, arduous and crushingly expensive process. For those that can't afford the time or the money for the real thing, science has also developed the technology for a "mindswap" - a way for two consenting people to simply switch consciousness, even over galactic distances, and effectively trade bodies instantaneously for an agreed upon period of time.

The possibilities for a novel built on such an idea are virtually limitless - anthropological and social comment, moral, social and cultural study, recreation and adventure travel in off-world settings, sexual adventure and comic misadventure, criminal skulduggery and much, much more. Sheckley chose to take his novel down the road of comic misadventure and criminal activity but I believe that somewhere along the way, he lost his mind and got waylaid on the sideroads of the 1960s hippie and drug sub-culture.

Marvin, a college student who wanted nothing more than to visit Mars, swapped minds and discovered that he had been scammed by a Martian criminal who has found a way to abscond with Marvins's body. Marvin now has no way home and it seems his only option is to indulge in a series of every more complex mindswaps and body trades to track down and recover his dearly beloved earth body.

I'm grateful that "Mindswap" was a blissfully short novel because the reading, quite frankly, was tedious to the point of pain. Give Sheckly his due. His efforts at humour occasionally rose to the status of laugh-out-loud hilarity but, for the most part, they fell flat and resembled nothing more than overblown, pretentious, philosophical doublespeak pouring from the mouth of a 1960s flower child in the grasp of a bad batch of LSD mindblowers!

It might have seemed appealing to a young adult reading crowd at the time of its publication but it certainly aged poorly and I'm afraid I can't recommend it to any potential reader even out of purely historical interest.

Paul Weiss