Robert Sheckley passed away at Vassar Brothers Medical Center Poughkeepsie New York on Friday, December 9, 2005. He was 77.

He was first hospitalized while in the Ukraine in April of this year. He returned to the US in late May, and recovered in the summer. On November 20, he had surgery for a brain aneurysm at Mount Saini Hospital.

Robert Sheckley wrote scores of novels and hundreds of short stories. When Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored Sheckley as Author Emeritus in 2001, then President of SFWA Paul Levinson said that Sheckley's "writing helped our genre grow up by giving it an irresistible sense of humor."

A funeral service will be conducted on Tuesday, December 13 at 12:00 PM at Simpson-Gaus Funeral Home, 411 Albany Avenue Kingston, New York. Online guestbook.

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Offical Obituary

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 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 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.

A funeral service will be conducted on Tuesday at a time to be announced at Simpson - Gaus Funeral Home, 411 Albany Ave. Interment will be in the Artist Cemetery, Woodstock in the spring.

Posted December 9, 2005