Mindswap (Robert Sheckley)

Mindswap
Robert Sheckley
Dell
Fiction, Humor/Sci-Fi
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: College student Marvin grows bored with his life in a quaint town in upstate New York, a place so backwards in the intergalactic age that the people still travel by jet plane. He wants to see the wider worlds, but the only affordable way for someone of his limited means is a mindswap: transferring his consciousness instantaneously into another body on another planet, while the inhabitant of that body enters his own. What better way to experience another planet than in a body adapted to live there? Despite the warnings of his conservative family and friends, Marvin answers an ad from a Martian who wants an Earth vacation... but his plans go awry almost from the moment he arrives on the red planet. Ze Craggash was a crook who simultaneously sold his body to multiple travelers and has absconded with Marvin's Earth body in the confusion. Ordered to vacate his new host - a death sentence if he can't find another body to swap into - he turns to a down-on-his-luck Martian detective. Thus begins a series of increasingly desperate swaps, each taking him further and further from his home across the vastness of space.

REVIEW: As one might expect from a story originally published in 1966, Mindswap shows its age, even as it plays with some fun ideas and presents some moments of timeless satire and absurdity in the vein of Gulliver's Travels.
From the start, Marvin lets his enthusiasm and desperation to do something bold and adventurous before he gets too old and settled (and too much like the people around him in his backwards town) blind him to the potential drawbacks of mindswaps. To the rest of the world and the galaxies, mindswapping is as casual a means of travel as taking a plane or riding the subway; the odds of something going on are supposed to be infinitesimally small. So, of course, everything that can go wrong eventually does. Losing his human body and place on Earth is the least of his troubles before long, as he finds himself faced with numerous ridiculous situations that have potentially dire consequences for his survival. At some point, the absurdity starts overtaking the (admittedly thin) plotline, especially when his mind starts to crack from numerous swaps and he begins seeing his increasingly alien environs as caricatured, surreal locales from Earth... displaying at the same time some rather cringeworthy class, gender, and racial stereotypes that can't really be swept under the lumpy "author of his time" rug. (The audiobook narrator did not help with this, leaning hard into overdone accents to emphasize just what culture and ethnic group Sheckley was caricaturing.) It also starts to feel like Sheckley gave up all pretense of story and even satire to show off just how utterly bizarre he could get, to the point of completely derailing the final leg of Marvin's adventure and making this reader wonder what the point of it all was, as it ended up feeling like a waste of time.
While I could appreciate Sheckley's deadpan delivery of a strange far future and stranger situations, I just plain didn't enjoy it or care by the end, by which point even the laughs had dried up.

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