Reviewing The Status Civilization By Robert Sheckley
RIP Mr. Sheckley, You Would Have Loved GTA Online
I found a copy of The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley on my shelf. I don’t remember how it got there. Though I’d like to say my friend sent it to me, I cannot pretend to certainty in this matter. The book spoke to me this week. It said “You’d like to read a book that’s barely 100 pages long and utterly hilarious.” It was right.
The Status Civilization is the most video game-ass book I’ve read in a long time. Perhaps ever. It concerns the arrival of one Will Barrent, Generic Guy, on the prison planet Omega and his fraught adjustment to Omegan society. Every human on Omega was convicted of a crime back on Earth, though the severity of those crimes ranges from murder to beatnikism. Also, some people have been exiled to Omega for being psychic mutants. Everyone on Omega lives in the single city of Tetrahyde and ascends up the rigid social hierarchy by merking the people one step above.
What happens in this book is Will Barrent runs somewhere, receives some exposition, and then kills somebody. He searches their body, takes their stuff, and puts it on, becoming instantly cooler and more powerful by doing so. Everybody claps. He runs off to somewhere else. When he’s not running somewhere to kill someone, he runs a shop selling antidotes for poison and regularly stops by there to fiddle with its inventory and adjust his furniture. He has some bros with whom he plays the “pokra” minigame.
Will Barrent lives in an MMORPG. I interpret Sheckley’s actual intent as the satirization of mid-century conformity, as he shows people happily falling in line with Omega’s lawful evil ethos and then contrasts it with the people of Earth’s milquetoast mirror version of that same compulsion to conform. The jokes are funny enough and I did laugh several times. More often I laughed at how vividly Sheckley had conjured the MMORPG milieu without knowing. This book came out in 1960! He had no idea the veracity of what he conjured.
The chapters in The Status Civilization at times run no longer than a page, and detail some process like Barrent running up a hill, fighting a lizard, and then eating a snack to recharge. This is not a narrative. This is not a scene. This is an anecdote. This is me telling you what I did while gaming the other day.
Now to be fair, the book does possess an overarching narrative and a character arc for Barrent, but both are 1) silly and 2) unfurled in the most ludic fashion. Will Barrent has amnesia when he arrives on Omega. Everyone has amnesia when they arrive on Omega. Of course they fucking do! This is a video game!
Every time Will Barrent hauls ass to a new location and kills whoever’s around, he unearths another cryptic clue as to the nature of his true past and somebody tells him another location he should visit posthaste. There is one (1) entire woman in this book and she literally just shows up wherever Barrent is to tell him a helpful hint or offer him a useful object with the thinnest explanation. Call her Cortana, except I could probably, if pressed, attribute more personality traits to Cortana than to Moera, the character in The Status Civilization.
Oh wait, there is a second woman: she’s a psychic mermaid mutant who gives Barrent a quest. Obviously.
Moera eventually makes up a reason for Barrent to do slightly more motivated and important things. It requires him to conduct a lengthy stealth mission, because of course it does, and then resource management, and then an extended undercover exploration and interrogation sequence. The book culminates in--I shit you not--Barrent battling himself in a series of arenas. Literally arena battles against his double. Then the book just ends. No follow-up on the long term ramifications of what transpired. You had your fun, now get out! Fade to credits and a licensed pop rock song.
What a great slice of mid-century paperback. My copy is actively dissolving and it smells terrible. Throughout the tale Sheckley never capitulates to the norms of literary storytelling or the mere concerns of psychological and social realism. He tells you smoothly and amusingly of the actions of a guy, his actions, his actions, his actions, and a corny joke. He describes the incoherent and humorous dimensions of a made-up world rife with large and absurd contradictions. He deploys monologues on the nature of The Law which may be smart or may be stupid; it depends on the angle from which you read them. An eleven year old might think this story deep, but if they incorporate it too deeply into their personal philosophy, they will become the kind of asshole who’s radioactively annoying and harasses women online.
Robert Sheckley! Robert Sheckley! You were born too soon. If you’d arrived only 40 years later, you could have been an Activision-Blizzard billionaire, or a guy whose Steam game never quite takes off.
