Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn on 16 July 1928 and died in Poughkeepsie, New York, on 9 December 2005. He wrote several hundred short stories, unpredictable, absurd and funny, that made comedy a serious instrument of science fiction. The Prize of Peril (1958) imagined a television show in which a contestant is hunted for a week for a cash prize — the first published work to foresee reality television — and was filmed twice in Europe. Nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.