Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley was a prolific and critically acclaimed science fiction writer, author of twenty-six novels and hundreds of short stories.

In, Sheckley pitched two stories for , "Rites of Fertility" and "Sister In Space", however both went unproduced. Almost thirty years later, he was the author of the DS9 novel The Laertian Gamble.

Sheckley commented: "“I didn't realize I was a Star Trek fan until I started writing The Laertian Gamble. Before that, I had been critical of Star Trek." (Voyages of Imagination)

Biography
Sheckley was born in Brooklyn, New York to a family of Eastern European Jewish origin. When he was a child, the family moved to nearby New Jersey. After serving in the US Army in the Korean War, he went to New York University. After then, he lived in various places including Greenwich Village, and the island of Ibiza in Spain.

Sheckley's writing got widespread praise, including from the English writer Kingsley Amis. His work was published in a number of different magazines, including Playboy; it is often Absurdist and satirical. His daughter Alisa has gone on to become a successful writer in her own right.

He also wrote tie-ins to Babylon 5 and Alien. His work The 10th Victim has been cited as an influence on the Japanese film Battle Royale as well as The Hunger Games.

He fell ill with a brain aneurysm while attending a convention in the Ukraine and had to be flown back to the US, where he died in a hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York.