Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Plaza & Janes Editores, S.A. (1999), 223 pages
Description
In the future, interstellar travel to alien worlds will be too expensive for most ordinary people. It certainly is for Marvin, a college student who wants to take a really good vacation. And so he signs up for what he can afford, a mindswap, in which your consciousness is swapped into the body of an alien lifeform. But Marvin is unlucky, and finds himself in the body of an interstellar criminal, a body that he has to vacate fast. But that criminal consciousness has stolen Marvin's earthly body, and Marvin has to find a body on the black market. Travel from world to world with Marvin, each one crazier than the last, as he keeps finding far from ideal bodies in awful situations, just to stay alive.
User reviews
LibraryThing member burnit99
A bit of a hoot of a science fiction novel in which Marvin Flynn, who cannot afford an interplanetary vacation by any other means, answers an ad to Mindswap (sort of like vacation time shares, except you swap bodies instead of houses) with a Martian. After the swap is complete he finds, to his
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dismay, that the other party has unscrupulously contracted his body to another vacationer, who is found to have prior claim, and absconded with Marvin's body for parts unknown. Marvin has six hours to find his own body, or be dispossessed of a physical body, which of course would mean death. What follows is a sardonic tour de farce as Marvin transfers from one alien body to another in a quest for his own. I think Douglas Adams must have been inspired by Sheckley's style for his "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books, although Adams did it better. Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
I admit that i am very fond of this book, where a talented artist drops us into a group of disparate characters and dances with them, and our minds for a dizzying whirl. He lets us go far too soon, and we are left to discover what this exercise in rapid characterizations has done to us. Well done
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sir! Read it if you want to be shaken around a bit by a writer at the height of his powers. It was very sixties, and should have been. It is whar science FICTION should be. Fans of the Jack Williamson, very hard sci-fi need not apply! Show Less
LibraryThing member paulsikora
Pure fun from start to end and with a happy grinning contented ending.
LibraryThing member bohemiangirl35
pretty over-the-top. I can't finish it because it was just too much. If it was toned down some, I think I would have liked it more.
LibraryThing member OliviainNJ
A hilarious example of anti-intellectualism in science fiction. Mindswap is a satire on Voltaire's Candide, where the hero ends up in increasingly improbable situations. Like Candide, it parodies many other works and the writing might seem clunky if you're not familiar with Golden Age and 1950s
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science fiction. Show Less
LibraryThing member burritapal
I used to like this type of sci-fi, but my tastes have changed. I didn't appreciate the homophobia in chapter 13. I feel like if the author couldn't solve a plot problem, he just made things up, instead of trying to make it believable. I know sheckley meant it to be humorous; I found it unfunny.
Language
Original language
Spanish
Original publication date
1966
ISBN
8401540976 / 9788401540974