A review by eccles
Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley

3.75

A funny little 1960’s intellectual satire in a sort of Swifitan mode, in which our bemused but largely unflappable ordinary-man hero jolts through outlandish interglactic, intertemporal, inter-timeline-ian scenarios, each teaching him some new way of looking at things.  It’s less a social satire, although it goes that way in a couple of episodes towards the end, more an amused inspection of Ideas, in which Ethics and Science and Religion and History are all turned upside down or inside out, and we soon find ourselves in cosmologically absurdist narrative with nowhere else to go.   A little like all those Monty Python sketches that they couldn’t end, this madcap intellectual romp rather peters out 120 pages in.  It’s clear that many ideas in here were fodder for Douglas Adams, who managed to meld this zany content with some more workmanlike narrative structure, turning Carmody into Dent Arthur Dent, but there’s still much to enjoy in this original, energetic, mind-bending novella.