Diplomatic Immunity - Sheckley, Robert

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Résumé :
A brisk, gleaming doorway into a witty, watchful universe. Diplomatic Immunity brings Sheckley's best-loved satirical science fiction back into the light, where sharp ideas meet sharper humor. In this short stories collection, imagined encounters with alien bureaucracy reveal the frailties and ambitions of power, persuasion, and ethics. Through deft, human voices, the tales navigate mid twentieth century anxieties about the earth and space frontier, offering bite-sized meditations on diplomacy, manipulation, and the price of compromise. Readers of classic american science fiction will recognise a master craftsman at work, bending genre conventions to expose the fault lines of collaboration and control. This edition honours the book's literary and historical significance by presenting a restored, reverent edition that respects Sheckley's wit while making the stories accessible to today's audiences. It speaks to sci fi readers who relish precise irony, as well as collectors of satire who seek a complete collection buyers' treasure. The storytelling remains brisk and mischievous, with ideas that linger: ethical dilemmas, the subtle power of dialogue, and a humane curiosity about what makes societies function-and fail. Out of print for decades and now republished by Alpha Editions, this volume is more than a reprint. It is a collector's item and a cultural treasure, restored for today's readers and for future generations to treasure as part of the earth and space frontier's enduring dialogue....

Biographie:
Robert Sheckley (1928 - 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist and broadly comical. Sheckley was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. Sheckley was a prolific and versatile writer. His works include not only original short stories and novels, but also TV series episodes (Captain Video), novelizations of works by others, stories in shared universes such as Heroes in Hell and collaborations with other writers. He was best known for his several hundred short stories, which he published in book form as well as individually. In many stories Sheckley speculates about alternative (and usually sinister) social orders, of which a good example is the story A Ticket to Tranai (which tells of a sort of Utopia designed for human nature as it actually is, which turns out to have terrible drawbacks). Sheckley's early stories include the far future AAA Ace detective agency series. In these tales, the two partners face unusual problems often related to human incompetence or laziness. In the 1990s, Sheckley wrote a series of three mystery novels featuring detective Hob Draconian, as well as novels set in the worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Alien. Before his death Sheckley had been commissioned to write an original novel based on the TV series The Prisoner for Powys Media, but died before completing the manuscript....