Options

More about the book

Options is a 1975 absurdist science fiction novel by Robert Sheckley. The story is ostensibly about a marooned space traveller's attempt to get a spare part for his starship, the Intrepid III. He has a robotic guard, programmed to guard him against all planetary dangers. But soon he discovers that the robot has not been programmed for the planet where they are, with comic results. However, the narrative later descends into a mass of diversions, non-sequiturs and meditations on the nature of authorship. Eventually the diversions take over the book to the extent that the author openly introduces an increasingly bizarre succession of deus ex machina in an attempt to get the novel back on track, but eventually admits defeat. Representative quote: Mishkin wondered what a spaceship looked like. What could you compare a spaceship to? Itself? "The spaceship looked utterly like itself." ... He decided to buy a toy spaceship and describe that.