Skulking Permit (The Galaxy Project)

Like William Tenn’s TIME IN ADVANCE, Sheckley’s SKULKING PERMIT (December 1954) is a meditation on penology and the entirety of the criminal justice system, framed as lighthearted satirical science fiction. The furthest human colony of the far-flung Terran Empire is subject--as are all the colonies--to periodic inspection by Headquarters, and Sheckley’s settlers are prepared to show that they, no less than their Terran ancestors and overlords, have established a satisfactorily advanced civilization. Every culture, they reason, needs a series of roles satisfactorily enacted, and that means not only pillars of society but criminals too...every human society has a lawbreaker. Sheckley’s protagonist, reluctantly employed to fill that role and given a skulking permit for those purposes, does the best he can granted the pressure of circumstance and his own low capacity for criminality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) was one of the four writers (Cyril Kornbluth, William Tenn, Frederik Pohl) adapted and shaped by Horace Gold, the editor of GALAXY magazine, to enact the most characteristic voice of GALAXY. Accomplished and penetrating satirists, these four dominated the contents page throughout the decade and if Kornbluth was the most bitter, Sheckley was the comic talent, the Court Fool who like the Fool in KING LEAR would dance through unspeakable and dangerous truths as japes. Sheckley’s first story appeared in IMAGINATION in May 1952, and then he published his first two contributions to GALAXY in late 1952 and swiftly came to dominate the magazine. Perhaps his most famous GALAXY story was THE TENTH VICTIM in 1953, adapted a decade later for the Ursula Andress film of the same name. A graduate of NYU and a Korean War veteran, Sheckley had no occupation other than writing fiction until, at the age of 51, he became for a year the fiction editor for OMNI magazine, returning then to fulltime freelancing. Always well regarded in the USA and among the most frequently anthologized of its short story writers, Sheckley found a passionate and ever-growing audience in the Eastern Bloc where during the Cold War he was, with Phillip K. Dick, the most highly regarded of all science fiction writers. He spent much time during his last half decade in those Eastern countries where he was much honored.

ABOUT THE SERIES

Horace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction’s most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.

The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today’s best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Scheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.