Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley, of Red Hook died December 9, 2005 at Vassar Hospital. He was 77. He was born in Brooklyn on July 16, 1928. Mr. Sheckley was raised in Maplewood, New Jersey and entered the U.S. Army after high school. He served in Korea during the Korea Conflict. After discharge he attended NYU, graduating with an arts degree. He began to sell stories to all the science-fiction magazines soon after his graduatino, producing several hundred stories over the next several years. During this perior Mr. Sheckley also wrote fifteen episodes for the television series Captain Video and sixty short-short stories that were read aloud by Basil Rathbone on Monitor Radio. He also wrote 'The People Trap', which became the basis for television special. He was a major force in the development of modern science fiction. He is the author of a number of episodes of 'The Twilight Zone.' He was fiction editor of 'Omni' magazine from March 1980 through the summer of 1982 and a Visitiing Scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in Boston in 1983. In 1991 Mr. Sheckley received the Raymond Z. Gallun award for contributions to the genre of science-fiction. His book 'Immortality Inc.' was adapted for a film called 'Freejack,' starring Anthony Hopkins, Renee Russo and Mick Jagger. 'The 10th Victim' became an Italian movie starring Marcello Mastroianni and Ursula Andress. He also wrote for graphic novels, multimedia games, television and other mediums. Mr. Sheckley's fiction has been translated into German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish and Lithuanian. His work is especially popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. Mr. Sheckley's marriages to his first four wives, Barbara Scadron, Ms. Kwitney, Abby Schulman and Jay Rothbell, ended in divorce. At the time of his death he was separated from his fifth wife, Gail Dana of Portland, Oregon. Other survivors include a son, Jason of Falls Village, CT, from his first marriage, a daughter, Alisa Kwitney of Stanfordville, NY, from his second marriage; a daughter, Anya of Pine Plains, and a son, Jed of Providence, RI, from his third marriage; his sister Joan Klein of New York; and three grandchildren. A funeral service will be conducted on Tuesday at 12:00 PM at Simpson - Gaus Funeral Home, 411 Albany Ave. Interment will be in the Artist Cemetery, Woodstock in the spring.