Customer Reviews

The 10th victim (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

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To control violent tendencies in the future the state offers a game bases on those desires. If you chose to sign up, and possibly win a massive dollar award for abilities, you are assigned to kill, and agree to allow an unknown to try for your life as well. Should you succeed in killing your assignment, without dying first, you become a one. Continueing on, a two , a three, and so forth. If you make it to ten, you win all the prise money your little heart desires. The catch, if you accidently kill a civilian, not signed up for the game, it means your life. The main character of the book, Frelaine, is a nine. He has just spotted the person he needs to rid of in order to become a ten, but oops, he falls in love. So too does she. So do these two kill each other. They believe so until the real deal behind the game becomes known. To clean the world of the types of people that would play this game in the first place. OOT-O. My opinion.... fast paces, heart tuggin, adrenalin pumpin beats. The computer wizadry used in the future isn't too far from reality. The imaginable special effects are mind blowing. Its killing all right, but not a book of blood and guts, a book of out smarts, guarenteed to make anyone think, and then, think again. For any one like myself who finds passion in pure thoughts of the witt. If anything, one should read it simply to confirm their own talents, or not, of staying one step ahead of being on the ball.... a ball is hard to stand on, but amusing to kick. (computer nerds and art freaks find their competition. So do you brain-iacks........ I dare each of you to sign up for the game)

A really wonderful and interesting book: an essay, a novel, a screenplay, but it's enough to say "Sheckley in the best vintage". Maybe someone has seen Elio Petri's movie, with Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress: well, the novel is even better. Really a classic.

The Genesis of this novel was a short story by Robert Sheckley called "The Seventh Victim" (_Galaxy_, 1953). It was bought by producer Joseph E. Levine, the number of victims were increased, and the result was _The Tenth Victim_ (1965), a movie starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. It was not (as the publicists claimed) a "major motion picture". But it was a passable futuristic thriller. Sheckley obliged with a novelization of the movie (also published in 1965). Like the movie, it is minor but mildly entertaining.

It is the not-so-distant future. War has been replaced by the Hunt, a system in which computers select a Hunter and a Victim. One stalks the other until one or the other is killed. I have never been convinced that a society with organized violence within it (at one point we see a litterbug killed on the street) would also abolish war. But over and over, science fiction writers make this claim. We have the Hunt, the Mercenary Games, the Chase, the Organized Duel to Get Rid of War. Ah, well.

Our protagonists are Caroline Meredith (who has just finished her ninth kill) and Marcello Polletti. They are pitted against one another as Hunter and Victim respectively. In the past, Caroline has usually been the Victim and Marcello the Hunter. Both must train to adapt to their new roles. And then, of course, they begin to fall in love...

Sheckley adopts a tongue-in-cheek style that sometimes works and sometimes falls flat. Here is where it works, when Caroline kills a Hunter with a loaded brassiere:

The dummy whirled; it was Caroline, half-clad, the upper half of her body concealed only by a strangely shaped metal brassiere reminiscent of the one worn by Wilma, the legendary wife of Buck Rogers. (15)

And here it falls flat, in a scene in which Marcello has tricked his patchwork Hunting coach, Professor Sylvestre:

Despite his frivolous tricks, Marcello Poletti was headed for a graveyard. But then, he reminded himself, so were all men; whereas he, Professor Sylvestre, was probably headed for a junk heap. (65)

Most of the action takes place in and around Rome (the climax is in the Colosseum) and it adds a bit to the color of the setting and to the connection with past history. There is one funny scene in which some television executives argue over whether they can use St. Peter's Cathedral for the location of Catherine's last kill. One of them suggests that they might use a studio. The others look upon him with horror. They can't do _that_, they say. They are shooting a _documentary_.

Sheckley wrote two poor sequels to _The Tenth Victim_: _Victim Prime_ (1987) and _Hunter/Victim_ (1988). You would do well to pass them over.

A really wonderful and interesting book: an essay, a novel, a screenplay, but it's enough to say "Sheckley in the best vintage". Maybe someone has seen Elio Petri's movie, with Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress: well, the novel is even better. A bitter father of Douglas Adams, a sharp and concrete Vonnegut. Really a classic.