And Now the News (2 page)

And:

I was also then a consulting editor for New American Library and as a result of the conversations surrounding that interview I bought a collection of three novellas from him (it was my idea, because I wanted to have his last great novella,
When You Care, When You Love
, reprinted in book form) that was published in paperback a year later. I knew him for the rest of his life, not as a close friend but as a fellow professional. Whenever we met he would launch into a sincere monologue on his current obsession for a few minutes, but
would also frequently tell a joke or two. He had a reedy, nasal voice, but told jokes well.

I also recall him telling me that it used to bother Harlan Ellison, when Sturgeon was living in his house in the late 1960s, that nudist Ted would answer the door without any clothes on. Ted liked to tell Ellison stories too.

He was known for singing and playing guitar at conventions in the 1950s. I only heard him do so once in the 1970s, when he was out of practice, but he was still good. I felt that way about his stories of the 1980s too, still good, but not at the top of his form—although I have not reread them in fifteen or more years now, and reserve the right to do so and perhaps change my mind.

For most of the 1970s and 1980s, Paul Williams, Chip Delany, and I became a Sturgeon admiration society. Each of us was always ready to write about Sturgeon, recommend Sturgeon, discuss Surgeon, bring his works to the attention of more readers. And he needed this, because for a really bright and talented man, he was just terrible at making money. I arranged to reprint some of his works in hardcover for the first time in the Gregg Press series in the late 1970s, and commissioned introductions from Chip and Paul. Paul helped put together new Sturgeon collections for Dell in the 1970s, and later Blue Jay in the 1980s. Chip Delany's enormous prestige as a critic maintained and enhanced Sturgeon's reputation in years when no
fiction was published and powerful younger writers entered the limelight. You are fortunate to hold in your hands a collection of Sturgeon stories from the 1950s, his greatest decade as a writer. As far as I am concerned, his major works of that decade were investigations and dramatizations of human psychology, driven by a syzygy of idea and character. The two stories that mean the most to me in this volume are “And Now the News …” and “Affair with a Green Monkey.”

The first is not by any useful definition science fiction (but see Paul Williams's story notes at the end of the book for Sturgeon's opinion), though it did appear in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
. It is simply one of the finest American stories of the twentieth century. It was written by a science fiction writer, and is a penetrating prophecy of what was going to happen too often in the next four decades, so often we now have a colloquial phrase involving the postal service for a certain kind of insanity. I read it when the issue was published, it worried me, and I tried to reject it for several years. I think back to it frequently when the real world recapitulates it another time.

And (again see the story note) it was based on a core idea and detailed plot given to Sturgeon by Robert A. Heinlein, also at the peak of his reputation, who had been asked by Sturgeon to suggest ideas for stories. Heinlein also said, “I must say that I am flattered at the request. To have the incomparable and always scintillating Sturgeon ask for ideas is like having the Pacific Ocean ask one to pee in it.” (The entire letter was published in
The New York Review of Science Fiction
, #84, August 1995.) I get the idea from everyone I have spoken to over the years that nearly every SF writer in those days considered Sturgeon in some way the best. “Affair with a Green Monkey” is both horrifying and funny, sort of like the joke I repeated above. It is also a clever and economical psychological portrait. And it really is science fiction.

There are other fine stories here (particularly “The Other Celia” and “The Skills of Xanadu”), and some only with fine moments, but all are worth reading, if only because they are the work of the SF writer of the 1940s to the 1980s who was at the same time writing
in genre and successfully and consciously aspiring to art in his writing. He is one of the primary models.

On later generations, after Bradbury (who was influenced by Sturgeon's stories in
Astounding
and
Unknown
between 1939 and 1944, not the work of later decades), Sturgeon's fiction of the 1950s is clearly influential at the start of the careers of Samuel R. Delany and Roger Zelazny in the 1960s. The intent was not only to entertain but also to create art in fantasy and SF: the use of telling and carefully observed detail to underpin characterization; a deep and complex understanding of, and portrayal of, human psychology; not only a fearless portrayal of sentiment, but—particularly in Delany—a fascination with love, sex, gender roles; and a constantly surprising but consistent evocation of cultures unlike our own—that then reflect back upon our own in pleasant or disturbing ways. This is the core of what I meant above when I referred to a syzygy, a complete blending, of idea and character as the driving force of his fiction.

If Sturgeon's influence had only extended this far, it would have been crucial to the evolution of contemporary SF, horror, and fantasy. But it extends much farther. There are more volumes in this series to come, including more of his very best.

J
OE
F
RITCH WALKED
under the moon, and behind the bridge of his nose something rose and stung him. When he was a little boy, which was better than thirty years ago, this exact sensation was the prelude to tears. There had been no tears for a long time, but the sting came to him, on its occasions, quite unchanged. There was another goad to plague him too, as demanding and insistent as the sting, but at the moment it was absent. They were mutually exclusive.

His mind was a jumble of half-curses, half-wishes, not weak or pale ones by any means, but just unfinished. He need not finish them, any of them; his curses and his wishes were his personal clichés, and required only a code, a syllable for each. “He who hesitates—” people say, and that's enough. “Too many cooks—” they say wisely. “What's sauce for the goose—.” Valid sagacities, every one, classic as the Parthenon and as widely known.

Such were the damnations and the prayers in the microcosm called Joe Fritch. “Oh, I wish—” he would say to himself, and “If only—” and “Some day, by God—”; and for each of these there was a wish, detailed and dramatic, so thought-out, touched-up, policed and maintained that it had everything but reality to make it real. And in the other area, the curses, the code words expressed wide meticulous matrices: “That Barnes—” dealt not only with his employer, a snide, selfish, sarcastic sadist with a presence like itching powder, but with every social circumstance which produced and permitted a way of life wherein a man like Joe Fritch could work for a man like Barnes. “Lutie—” was his wife's name, but as a code word it was dowdy breakfasts and “I-can't-afford” and the finger in her ear, the hand beginning to waggle rapidly when she was annoyed; “Lutie—” said as the overture to this massive curse was that which was wanted and lost
(“Joe?” “What, li'l Lutie?” “Nothing, Joe. Just … Joe—”)
and
that which was unwanted and owned, like the mortgage which would be paid off in only eighteen more years, and the single setting of expensive flowery sterling which they would never, never be able to add to.

Something had happened after dinner—he could almost not remember it now; what bursts the balloon, the last puff of air, or the air it already contains? Is the final drop the only factor in the spillingover of a brimming glass? Something about Marie Next Door (Lutie always spoke of her that way, a name like William Jennings Bryan) and a new TV console, and something about Lutie's chances, ten years ago, of marrying no end of TV consoles, with houses free-and-clear and a car and a coat, and all these chances forsworn for the likes of Joe Fritch. It had been an evening like other evenings, through 10:13
P.M.
At 10:14 something silent and scalding had burst in the back of Joe's throat; he had risen without haste and had left the house. Another man might have roared an epithet, hurled an ashtray. Some might have slammed the door, and some, more skilled in maliciousness, might have left it open so the angry wife, sooner or later, might get up and close it. Joe had simply shambled out, shrinking away from her in the mindless way an amoeba avoids a hot pin. There were things he might have said. There were things he could have said to Barnes, too, time and time again, and to the elevator starter who caught him by the elbow one morning and jammed him into a car, laughing at him through the gate before the doors slid shut. But he never said the things, not to anyone. Why not? Why not?

“They wouldn't listen,” he said aloud, and again the sting came back of his nose.

He stopped, and heeled water out of his left eye with the base of his thumb. This, and the sound of his own voice, brought him his lost sense of presence. He looked around like a child awakening in a strange bed.

It was a curved and sloping street, quite unlike the angled regimentation of his neighborhood. There was a huge elm arched over the streetlamp a block away, and to Joe's disoriented eye it looked like
a photographic negative, a shadow-tree lit by darkness looming over a shadow of light. A tailored hedge grew on a neat stone wall beside him; across the street was a white picket fence enclosing a rolling acre and the dark mass of just the house he could never own, belonging, no doubt, to someone people listened to. Bitterly he looked at it and its two gates, its rolled white driveway, and, inevitably, the low, long coupé which stood in it. The shape of that car, the compact, obedient, directional eagerness of it, came to him like the welcome answer to some deep question within him, something he had thought too complex to have any solution. For a moment a pure, bright vision overwhelmed and exalted him; his heart, his very bones cried
well, of course!
and he crossed to the driveway, along its quiet grassy margin to the car.

He laid a hand on its cool ivory flank, and had his vision again. At the wheel of this fleet-footed dream car, he would meet the morning somewhere far from here. There would be a high hill, and a white road winding up it, and over the brow of that hill, there would be the sea. Below, a beach, and rocks; and there would be people. Up the hill he would hurtle, through and over a stone wall at the top, and in the moment he was airborne, he would blow the horn. Louder,
bigger
than the horn would be his one bright burst of laughter. He had never laughed like that, but he would, he could, for all of him would be in it, rejoicing that they listened to him, they'd all be listening, up and down the beach and craning over the cliff. After that he'd fall, but that didn't matter. Nothing would matter, even the fact that his act was criminal and childish. All the “If only—” and “Some day, by God—” wishes, all the “That Barnes—” curses, for all their detail, lacked implementation. But this one, this one—

The window was open on the driver's side. Joe looked around; the street was deserted and the house was dark. He bent and slid his hand along the line of the dimly glowing phosphorescence that was a dashboard. Something tinkled, dangled—the keys, the keys!

He opened the door, got in. He could feel the shift in balance as the splendid machine accepted him like a lover, and they were one together. He pulled the door all but closed, checked it, then pressed it the rest of the way. It closed with a quiet, solid click. Joe grasped
the steering wheel in both hands, settled himself, and quelled just the great trumpeting of laughter he had envisioned.
Later, later
. He reached for the key, turned it.

There was a soft purring deep under the hood. The window at his left slid up, nudging his elbow out of the way, seating itself in the molding above. The purring stopped. Then silence.

Joe grunted in surprise and turned the key again. Nothing. He fumbled along the dashboard, over the cowling, under its edge. He moved his feet around. Accelerator, brake. No clutch. A headlight dimmer switch. With less and less caution he pushed, turned and pulled at the controls on the instrument panel. No lights came on. The radio did not work. Neither did the cigarette lighter, which startled him when it came out in his hand. There wasn't a starter anywhere.

Joe Fritch, who couldn't weep, very nearly did then. If a man had a car burglar-proofed with some sort of concealed switch, wasn't that enough? Why did he have to amuse himself by leaving the keys in it? Even Barnes never thought of anything quite that sadistic.