The story starts with a familiar premise : Earth, having become an enlightened techno-utopia, no longer executes its criminals. Instead, such deviant elements are dumped on the surface of a vaguely livable planet called Omega. For good measure, the convicts' minds are wiped clean of all past memories. Our protagonist is one of these convicts.

He's been sent up for murder. Problem is, he doesn't want to believe it. Problem with that is that the memories leaking out from "beneath the surface" seem to indicate that he is.

At the beginning, at least, he's got a few more important things to worry about, like surviving. See, Omega doesn't have nice Earth values concerning the sanctity of life. Instead, a citizen's status is dependent upon how many people he can kill...but only according to the rules.

He narrowly escapes death, but only at the price of killing in self-defense. This touches off a round of self-doubt, but, at the same time, catapults him into Omegan society as the proprietor of a poisioners' shop. This gives him time to become acquainted with some of the more quaint Omegan customs, like mandatory substance addiction and the worship of Evil. Later, he finds himself the unhappy subject of a Hunt, and an unwilling participant in In the absence of patriachal authority, our happy band of convicts have developed a uniquely maladaptive society - one in which death is celebrated above all else. No wonder the average lifespan is only three years.

Eventually he uses his remaining morals to drag himself out of the muck and effect an escape. The Earth he finds is superfically a triumph of Utopian central planning : everyone has a job, everyone seems happy, crime and war are unknown, et. al. Robots cater to all humankind's needs. The worship of life and Good are central tenets of civilization. It is, oddly enough, a complete antithesis of Omega. The people are SO open-hearted that they don't even mind his presence, despite the fact that he sticks out like a sore thumb.

Something is wrong. Very wrong. Naturally, finding this wrong and curing it (and coincidentally coming to terms with the split images of himself as killer/saviour) ties off the novel.

I say "ties off" instead of "ends", because that's what it feels like : a stopping point for a novel that could have gone on longer. By the end of the book, I had become attached to the nutty, schizoid worlds of Omega and Earth, and curious as to the motives of the robots who are (implicitly) controlling them both.

Omegan life is downright entertaining; like a little boy poring through travel books crossed with the thrill of a police novel. Sheckley manages it all with a sort of deadpan/matter-of-fact narrative that manages to slip events past one so quickly that they're felt rather than seen.

The sheer weight of ideas reminds me of Phillip K. Dick novels. Perhaps this one, like so many of his, was written under a short contract. How else could one get delightful scenes of cowering outside the door to Hell's Congregation in a blizzard, or the twisted dual religions of Evil and Good that dominate Omega and Earth? Make no mistake...Sheckley can more than hold his own in astonishment.

I wanted more...but unless Hollywood picks up and films this one (not likely in the wake of Freejack's flop at the box office)it probably won't be forthcoming. If you can find this for a reasonable price (if you live in the UK, for instance, and have access to paperback reprints), give it a try. I'd be hesitant to pay great amounts for it used, unless I was more of a Sheckley fan...but it's books like this that keep me looking for more.

King Dramocles discovers on his fortieth birthday that he has a Destiny, but he doesn't yet know what it is; and thereafter the book is the story of one triggering mnemonic after another, each one bringing to light an earlier memory which, usually, gives Dramocles reason to disregard all the previous mnemonics. A contemporary reviewer said that Sheckley "pulls rabbit after rabbit out of his hat, trying to fool us into thinking that hat is really a Russian doll." Well, it seems I was fooled. The book doesn't consist of deus ex machina; it's ABOUT deus ex machina. (Sorry I don't know the plural of the Latin.) The plot twists seemed like true plot twists, because Sheckley never tries to pretend that the story is spontaneous ... the only constancy the reader can cling to is this: whatever is going on, it isn't spontaneous.

It's written in the latterday Sheckley style, where Sheckley shows evidence of boredom with his slick magazine writing of the 1950s ... sometimes resulting in slipshod work, but sometimes, as here, resulting in something more fresh and interesting. Not his best book, but one of his sweetest.

Pilgrimage to Earth is the title story and one of the best in this collection of short stories first published in 1957. Though the background of all the 15 stories is science fiction,Scheckley emphasizes seemingly normal characters in oddball and problem-filled situations. He keeps it interesting in these stories, which are fast paced. Some have twist endings. This collection is a good introduction to Scheckley's short stories, but does not represent him at his peak, in the now out of print collections Untouched by Human Hands and Citizen in Space. The author's novel, The Tenth Victim [expanded from his short story] was the basis for a tacky 1967 Italian movie. Scheckley was at his peak as short story writer in the 1950s', when these stories were written

The story begins in the twentieth century, with the hero's death. He wakes up in 2110 where the afterlife and every aspect of a person's mental life is a marketable commodity - or so it seems at first. The hero has to survive in a very confusing world. This is a Sheckley trademark - one he handles more entertainingly than anyone else - and this is one of the very best bewildering futures he has created.

(I was, I should note, dissatisfied with the ending - not the ending of the story proper, but the tacked-on epilogue. You can forget about these few paragraphs. I did.)

If, by some chance, the previous reviewer is right, and this volume contains some of Sheckley's short stories as well, then it's even more worth getting. Consider yourself lucky.

Sheckley brings nothing interesting into "A Call to Arms" that enhances the story and much of the inner dialogue doesn't even seem like the characters.

You might as well just watch the movie again if the basic story appeals to you.

It is a frivolous romp through a sad universe that seems populated with familiar faces by two of the great experts in the genre of humorous SF.

Read it or be forever the way you are. (Not that it will change anything permanent. Just a few yucks and a strange longing for a second right arm - even if the colours don't match.)

Filled with in-jokes that only a fan would get, it is a feast for the initiated.

I think that HARVEST would make the best "Post-Ripley" movie script.

I won't be reading this author in the future. And I'd suggest the publisher hire better editors.

Sheckley wrote many short stories in the 1950's and 60's, and some say those were his best work. It has probably always been a challenge for him to hold a long story together. But some of his novels have been great -- my favorites are "Mindswap" and "Journey of Joenes". Most of his work is out of print, but it's worth looking for if you've got a taste for the absurd.