This is a bizarre novel about a past’s future. Namely the novel, which came out in 1963, poses a future in which there’s a large and quite dominant Polynesian/Oceanic culture, and we are getting a kind of oral history of a single member of that part of the world traveling to the United States (or what was the United States) and accidentally setting off an international incident and a war having been mistaken for being a Communist spy. This will happen in the year 2001.
So Robert Sheckley is a weird writer and a weirdly influential writer. In my mind he kind of splits the difference between Richard Matheson in his ability to imagine strange and interesting science fiction conceits, and more like a Philip K Dick in execution. There’s also plenty of Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison in there as well. His most “famous” book is not at all famous, Immortality Inc, but it did spawn the movie Freejack, an admittedly not good movie that I loved as a kid.
In addition to this, there’s a great collection of Robert Sheckley’s stories that New York Review of Books put out, and he’s so clearly influential in a lot of ways. There’s whole novels I recognize in the bare glimpses of some of those stories.
Anyway, this novel is interesting, but I am not sure that I liked it all that much. I am more invested in the idea of reading more of his work than I think I am in the specifics of this book itself.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Beyond-Tomorrow-Signet-D2223/dp/0451022238/ref=sr_1_1?crid=163ARERDS521I&keywords=journey+beyond+tomorrow&qid=1552393560&s=gateway&sprefix=journey+beyond+%2Caps%2C272&sr=8-1