This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at 'The Book House' on Sa 12/4/93, but I never read. I must have bought this book when I used to take the Honda Shadow to St. Louis to visit that old house with all the books (and a ghost and a cat). I think that the original building was torn down and now they are at a different location.
Refinished 4/29/23 and I'm so glad that I finally got around to reading this very funny and thought provoking novel.
Tom Carmody has been picked as a winner in the intergalactic lottery. He's just a normal office worker and had no idea that there were other inhabited galaxies, let alone a lottery system over all of reality.
He defends his winning ticket against another 'Carmody' and he wins because even though it was technically a 'mistake', since nothing in the entire universe is perfect, the computer cannot be faulted.
He is taken to a city that has a lethal excess of 'motherly love'.
He meets the god of a planet that seems bored and looking for a new direction.
The book is full of delightful encounters that are funny and thought provoking.
The book's tone is very similar to the satire of 'THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY' by Douglas Adams'. And, somewhat like the writings of Philip K. Dick.
From a blog post 'Jeroen Admiraal':
"On the face of it, this is a silly story about a Mr. Carmody, a regular office clerk, who is informed one day by an alien that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstakes and he is whisked off to the Galactic Centre to receive his prize. What that Prize is, isn’t clear, but it talks. The rest of the book chronicles his efforts to return to planet Earth. On the way, he encounters parallel worlds, incompetent bureaucrats, a guy who designs planets and lots and lots of the absurd and the unexpected."
"What stood out to me was that Sheckley, although he stuffed the book full of the absurd, is very philosophical about it. He invents the wildest motivations for all the strange characters in the story. Mr Carmody may have to deal with a faulty computer, but the computer might have a religion for which it piously commits errors in celebration of life and free will. Mr Carmody might solicit the help of a local God, but has to argue with the sulking God that its natural Indwellingness makes it unhappy and should therefore applaud the arrival of Carmody as an external reality. In what is probably a homage to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1965), we meet inventors of basic laws of nature – including some laws that Sheckley comes up with himself.
The plot – for lack of a better word – is mostly just a series of set-pieces as Mr Carmody is sent from one place to the next. My impression is that Sheckley is foremost a short-story writer and this novel is a string of short stories stitched together. This approach can get stale fairly quickly but the book is quite short and a quick read. Its best qualities therefore do not lie in character or plot development, but in individual scenes and how they play out – in witty dialogues, wordplay, sudden unexpected circumstances and clever concepts."
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