If the biting, playful skewering of modern life in Sheckley hooked you, you'll love the engineer-duo antics of Trurl and Klapaucius in The Cyberiad. Lem turns fables about invention and power into comic parables—like the machine that can build anything beginning with the letter N, or the king who demands a poetical machine—delivering the same sly grin you felt when Sheckley took aim at consumerism and institutionalized violence.

Adams wields gallows wit the way Sheckley does when gadgets backfire on their owners. From Arthur Dent’s house (and planet) getting bulldozed by bureaucratic Vogons to Marvin’s soul-crushing sarcasm, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy keeps the laughs sharp and a little bleak—the same flavor you enjoyed when Sheckley turned helpful devices into existential traps.

If you liked the quick, head-spinning variety of tales in Untouched by Human Hands, Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers is a treasure chest of compact, mind-bending pieces. Stories like “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” and “Narrow Valley” deliver that same flash of audacious premise and swift, surprising payoff that Sheckley brought to “Specialist,” “Ritual,” and “Shape.”

Bradbury’s mosaic of tales framed by a tattooed drifter lands devastating ironies with Sheckley-like precision. Pieces such as “The Veldt” and “Kaleidoscope” pivot from wonder to gut-punch in their final beats, much like the perspective-flipping reversals you appreciated in “The Monsters” and “Shape.”

Chiang’s stories probe the philosophical heart of speculative ideas with the clarity Sheckley brought to alien perspectives and social thought experiments. “Exhalation” contemplates entropy and self-knowledge; “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” explores fate and causality; and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” dissects free will—echoing the curious, reflective spirit that animates Sheckley’s “Specialist” and beyond.