โ Scribed by Robert Sheckley
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Like William Tenn's TIME IN ADVANCE, Sheckley's SKULKING PERMIT (December 1954) is a meditation on penology and the entirety of the criminal justice system, framed as lighthearted satirical science fiction. The furthest human colony of the far-flung Terran Empire is subject--as are all the colonies--to periodic inspection by Headquarters, and Sheckley's settlers are prepared to show that they, no less than their Terran ancestors and overlords, have established a satisfactorily advanced civilization. Every culture, they reason, needs a series of roles satisfactorily enacted, and that means not only pillars of society but criminals too...every human society has a lawbreaker. Sheckley's protagonist, reluctantly employed to fill that role and given a skulking permit for those purposes, does the best he can granted the pressure of circumstance and his own low capacity for criminality.
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