Dramocles: An Intergalactic Soap Opera - Robert Sheckley - 1983 1st Holt, Rinehart & Winston Hardback

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Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
• Shelf wear or scuffing on the cover
• Creases, marks, or tears on pages or dust jacket
• Possible remainder marks or previous owner’s name/notes inside

Cover art: Wendell Minor

Blurb: “Robert Sheckley, a stellar name in the science fiction universe, is a writer whose sense of the bizarre overlaps with his sense of reality, resulting in a world of fantasy that falls just short of the incred-ible. In Dramocles, that world is a mix of twentieth-century soap opera, Greek trag-edy, and Shakespearian drama, pulled together in a marvelous comic-heroic display.

Dramocles has always been a rather ordinary king on a rather ordinary planet, but he finds his life utterly changed one day when he is informed he has a destiny to fulfill-one that is revealed not all at once, but in tantalizing bits and pieces. As he fumbles and struggles to carry out his mission, Dram-ocles's world falls apart around him—he inadvertently starts an interplanetary war, his family distintegrates, his closest friends and advisors betray him, and his realm is besieged by a series of barbarian invasions.

This misguided pursuit serves as a springboard for a series of plot reversals and impossibilities that unfold before the reader's— and the characters'-eyes. As each page brings a wilder turn to the story, we are reminded of Stanislaw Lem or Italo Calvino at their most absurd. With Dramocles, Robert Sheckley takes us on a magical tour de force with a comic mastery that is completely, and delightfully, his own.“