Title: Victim Prime

By - Robert Sheckley

Publishing Info: --A Signet Book, 1987

Genre: -Novel

Sub-genre: -SF

Nationality: -American

Time Period: -20th Century

First and Last Read by Dr. Rearick -Read in January 18-20, 1994

Rated: -

Location: -Located in Bruce Paul's Library

Comments:

This is the sequel to Sheckley's The Tenth Victim. However, it is not a continuation of the plot but instead a continued examination of a situation. There are not reappearing characters. In fact, the novel takes place before the action of the first work. (In a strange bit of twisting humor, Sheckley has the protagonist refer to "that old movie they made before the Hunt became legal--Tenth Victim, that's the one" (71), which was really made in the 60s or 70s and was, of course, based on Sheckley's original work.) The tone of the novel is darker and therefore in some ways more believable. However, because of this, Victim Prime does not maintain the air of black satire so strong in the first work.

The whole planet is deteriorating, and since war has become impractical there has arisen a strange escape valve for Humanity's violent tendencies--a club called "The Hunt." In The Tenth Victim, the hunt is worldwide. However, in the setting of this novel, it is legal only in Esmeralda, the small Caribbean island set up by investors specifically for the Hunt. (Esmeralda is listed in Comton's 1968 edition as "a beautiful street dancer of Paris (supposedly a Gipsy) who is accused of witchcraft, is hidden from her accusers in the belfry of Notre Dame Cathedral by the hunchback bell ringer Quasimodo, but is finally executed." I am left wondering if there is a connection with the bewitching dark beauty who is herself doomed and the beautiful island upon which dark events occur and which is also clearly doomed. Certainly Sheckley, an old school science fiction writer, knows the contents of Victor Hugo's famous story.)

Esmeralda (wasn't that also the name of Samatha's mother in Bewitched?) is the only spot on the globe which maintains a high standard of living. Tourists come from all over the planet to watch The Hunt. As for the Hunt, it is an quick way to make money since the state pays anyone who qualifies (after facing a mechanized death test) two thousand dollars right away and then continues to support him or her with bonuses and rewards as the hunter / victim survives round after round.

As mentioned earlier, Victim Prime struck me as more plausible than the first novel since Sheckley's vision of the rest of the planet is so desperate. I could believe that an individual might opt to escape death by radiation poisoning, pollution, robbery, and or famine by taking part in what turns out to be a far more predicable and controllable danger of a prearranged hunt. The Tenth Victim gave no indication of such a collapsed planet. And without such a terrible environment one must suppose that Western humanity has either completely altered its perspective of what is acceptable so much so that it has become an alien culture (In fact, Sheckley set his first novel in Rome not only because of the obvious gladiatorial echoes but, I believe, since he suspected that American readers were more likely to accept that such decadent activities as possible in the "old world"), or that the author's vision of the human heart is so dark that he really believes that we are all, beneath our film of civilization, just aching for a chance to kill another human being. This is where believability breaks down in The Tenth Victim which is why Sheckley never develops the characters, but instead has them ride along with his dark humor.

And even then he has them, once they have come to know one another, opt for marriage at the end (albeit at gun point) instead of death.

There is the distinction. I do not doubt that there are plenty of people even today who would enjoy watching another killed. The infamous "snuff" films are but one manifestation of that dark quality which exists in our society. However, as I mentioned before in the last review, the difficulty in staging a continuing Hunt is in finding willing players. It is one thing to view death; its a very different thing to be the actual executioner. It would take a world in which humanity was eating its own entrails for the Hunt to exist among feeling humans. This is a dark and unfunny situation. But, in fact, Sheckley seems to suggest this when he has Herald Erdman grieving over his victim at the novel's end even as he is carried off by the blood maddened crowd.

Entry Written Jan. 20, 1994