A Son of the Rock

Corgi, 1966, 157p.

This book was first published in 1962, and it shows. Structured as a series of tales noted down long after the events they describe by Pacific islanders who are among the few remnants of human civilisation – perhaps the only civilised remnants – following a devastating nuclear war which occurred in or around the year 2000 it relates the adventures of a man called Joenes in the run-up to, and the unfolding of, the apocalypse. Sheckley does not waste the opportunity to lampoon early 1960s attitudes, particularly slyly in the portrayal of a McCarthyite Senatorial inquisitor. At one point Joenes is sent to a military headquarters whose official map is false in order to confuse spies. Written when it was, it is not a surprise that the book has the USSR and the USA as adversaries and an unintended nuclear war brought on by automated systems as a plot point.

Other segments can turn our usual notions on their heads. Joenes is incarcerated for a time in a prison which people fight to get into.

The book is a series of incidents, though, not really a coherent whole and none of the characters rises above the mundane – nor to Sheckley’s need to have them explain things to his naïf main character. Names such as Arthur Pendragon, Bill Launcelot, Richard Galahad and Austin Mordred are something of a hostage to fortune, as is the plundering of the Theseus and the Minotaur story.

I suppose, though, that most fiction that is fifty years old would not stand much scrutiny.