Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high"
The Beatles - Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Spoilers for the book in question follow. Long story short: if you're into Role-Playing Games, you should suffer through this moderately entertaining abortion of a narrative.
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You've probably never heard of Robert Sheckley despite his half-century career and enviable doses of both talent and publication... at least from where I'm standing as a tongue-twisted blogger with five minus a half readers. He was quite adept in science fiction's prime modus operandi: quick, biting short stories centering on a particular effect, conserving more detail than they provide. Unfortunately for him, short stories rarely become famous enough to be remembered individually or lend their author name recognition by association. And, fortune aside, he also seems to have occasionally fallen into the habit of shitting where he ate.
The novel Mindswap came out in the mid-'60s when dropping acid was assumed to somehow unlock the secrets of the cosmos and deconstructionism was just ramping up from a moderately legitimate critique of communication's ability to twist concepts to the all-purpose anti-intellectual vandalism we know and love today. (In fact, Sheckley was both born and died within a couple of years of Jacques Derrida.) The book starts out intriguing enough. A small-town lad yearns for adventure, but as he can't afford to physically travel by spaceship he opts for swapping minds with a Martian, only to find himself defrauded of his human body and unable to return. From there, he swaps to another alien body hunting for talking eggs, and then to another alien too polite to refuse the gift of an exploding nose-ring. That takes us about halfway through the relatively short novel. Most of the second half is masterfully-wordsmithed crap.
"Marvin stared at this man transformed; then bowed low and exclaimed. 'Milord Inglenook bar na Idrisi-san, first lord of the Admiralty, Familiar to the Prime Minister, Adviser Extraordinary to the King, Bludgeon of the Church Rampant and Invocateur of the Grand Council!'
'I am that person,' Inglenook responded. 'And I play the hunchback for reasons most politic; for were my presence even suspected here by my rival, Lord Blackamoor de Mordevund, all of us would be dead men ere the frogs in the Pond Royal had chance to croak at first ray of Phoebus!'"
The hero Marvin's brain, overloaded with novelty, succumbs to "metaphoric deformation" and begins seeing all the aliens around him as humans engaged in stereotypical pulp adventures, from a risque pickup bar / brothel scene to a wild west romance, to an amusingly detailed pastiche of Alexandre Dumas and his many ghostwriters and imitators in later centuries' historical swashbuckling throwbacks. Or it would be amusing if that paragraph above weren't tortured and disarticulated into several dozen pages' worth of more of the same to pad out the book's length.
It bears mentioning that SciFi during the early and middle 20th century languished in the grip of pulp appeal, churning out piles upon piles of interchangeable swashbuckling pistoleer space pirate space rebel space commodore space-girl-getting space heroes like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, James T. Kirk or Luke Skywalker. If Sheckley wanted to highlight the shameful lack of creativity in copying such cliches century after century, he certainly succeeded. However:
1) That point could have been made in five pages just as easily as fifty.
2) Other authors of the time did it more elegantly (e.g. Robert Heinlein in Space Family Stone's asides about writing for a pulp SF TV series)
3) Sheckley himself was well on the way to demonstrating a better take on the hero's journey in Mindswap... before instead opting to merely posture as a literary rebel.
There is still one demographic for whom Mindswap should be considered required reading: roleplayers, whether you just play cRPGs like me or you actually get together around a table or you nerf each other in the park, or especially if you nurture ambitions of GMing or even writing material for such settings. Mindswap's ending takes escapist "immersion" to its logical self-defeating extreme. It provides apt examples of quick and illustrative world-building even while parodying formulaic adventure-worlds. Perhaps most importantly, this term should be remembered in any discussion of speculative fiction:
"'No,' Marvin said. 'Why is it called "Panzaism"?'
'The concept is self-explanatory,' Blanders said. 'Don Quijote thinks the windmill is a giant, whereas Panza thinks the giant is a windmill. Quijotism may be defined as the perception of everyday things as rare entities. The reverse of that is Panzaism, which is the perception of rare entities as everyday things.'
'Do you mean,' Marvin asked, 'that I might think I was looking at a cow, when actually it was an Altairian?'"
If your Altairians act like cows, then you should be writing cow fiction, not SF. We should all gain the cynicism necessary to spot the myriad hacks who fail to follow through the logical consequences of their futuristic or fantastic set pieces, who drag wonder into mundane muck.
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