Mindswap.

By Robert Sheckley.

Synopsis:
Marvin Flynn lives in a small town on Earth, and longs to travel. Because he can't afford to pay for an interstellar voyage, he answers an advertisement to swap his body with a Martian.

Review:
This book is wierd. Very surreal, at times almost disturbing. You won't get through this if you prefer stories which make sense all the way through. However, despite all this, it is very enjoyable. Occasional moments of satire are thrown in all the way through, and there are some very funny bits. There are also some references that probably made sense in the sixties, but the book overall is not in the least bit dated. The majority of the satirial comments are directed at human nature, rather than individual humans.

The book deals primarily with the idea of a mind existing independently of a body, which Sheckley also explored in Immortality Inc. Here it is used in a much more lighthearted way - people exchanging their bodies for exploration purposes and to cut down on the cost of travel, rather than disembodied spirits communicating from the afterlife. However there is a darker side to life in this version of the universe. Planets whose two intelligent species each refuse to acknowledge the other as sentient, people dispossessed from their bodies and left to die because of a bureaucratic error, and the galactic constabulary all add up to a fairly bleak picture. Much like reality, in fact.

In summation, wierd but fun.