Microcosmic God (2 page)

Our acquaintanceship—and I know Ted would have let me call it a friendship—was limited to the last decade of his life, during which I met him perhaps five times. Once he showed me the silver Q he wore on a chain around his neck—with the arrow through it. His personal emblem, it stood for, “Ask the next question”—his motto. I have two brief, warm letters from him, in answer to two of mine. Once I spent an afternoon with him while he recorded some of his stories at a midtown recording studio. Twice we made plans to get together, sit down and really talk—even going so far, the last time I saw him in Vancouver in June of ’84, as to fix a summer date.

But somehow summer came and went. So did winter.

Then Ted was dead.

If I may strain a metaphor: Language is a sky we all live under. It’s a total surround, both to thought and to action. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden wrote of Yeats. But once in a while, by luck or by skill, in poetry or in prose, a writer puts words together so that, if they
don’t
make things happen, they make us
see
and
sense
things happening. The range of Sturgeon’s work is an immense and astonishing galaxy of such dazzling and precise lights shining out against the twilight of ordinary rhetoric.

Theodore Sturgeon was the single most important science fiction writer during the years of his major output—the forties, fifties, and sixties. He was by no means the best known. He was popular—from
time to time, greatly so—but he never had the crossover appeal of a Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, or Isaac Asimov. But the “crossover” machinery that took up the first two of these was film: Heinlein in 1950, with
Destination Moon
, and Clarke in 1968 with
2001: A Space Odyssey
. And Asimov’s popular science books and official textbooks had far more to do with establishing him as a household name than did his science fiction—which, not counting reprints, comprises only some thirty-five titles out of his more than 300 volumes. But though on occasion
More Than Human
came close to reaching the sound stages, no film based on a Sturgeon story ever got done.

In no way am I suggesting that he displaces the other indubitable artists of our field … Stanley Weinbaum, Alfred Bester, Philip Dick, or Cordwainer Smith. But if we can read Sturgeon, read him deeply, carefully, and with the nuance and insight his texts invite, then we can read any of these others; and our readings will be enriched by what we learn of science fictional language possibilities
from
Sturgeon.

This is not, however, a commutative proposition. For if we do
not
read Sturgeon, our readings of all these others will be deeply, and possibly irrevocably, impoverished: What our greatest SF artist—Sturgeon—does for the broader range of our art is takes what in other writers becomes dead convention or trope and, within a shared historical context, infuses it with life and demonstrates its vital use.

Sturgeon’s theme was love. At least one of his methods was to physicalize the emotions and move them through the body, describing their weight and resistance, their frictions and trajectories. He articulated the ripplings in the tapestry of day that enwraps us all—articulated it with an economy and accuracy that again and again impinges on his reader with electric insistence. He loved the physical world of weather and scents, and, especially, machines—glittering in the sun, glimpsed through a laboratory window, rising blackly to block the stars, or rusting behind an old garage. He loved the commonsensical demands of the body—and, as well, had vast patience with the intricate excuses the mind raises against them.

More than half a dozen years ago, I first wrote:

The book you hold now, the second volume in a projected ten volume set of Sturgeon’s complete short fiction, reflects on all four of those exhortations.

Spearheaded by Paul Williams and Noël Sturgeon (the fifth of Sturgeon’s children and the Trustee of his literary estate), The Sturgeon Project is an incipient Sturgeon Society. No regular newsletter exists yet. But I know that will be coming. And anyone who has looked at the first volume of these tales (
The Ultimate Egoist
[1994]) will be aware of how much the story notes for this series already depend on the letters: the whole set will certainly have to be at the center of any future biographical study.

Sturgeon was a superb artist: we’ve seen that from his writing from the forties and fifties. But with the first volume of his earliest work now available, we can see, with the rediscovered stories and letters from his late adolescence, an artist who, in his commitment to his work and in his perseverance, has much about him of the hero.

Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absorbed into the particular practice of science fiction writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically. (I use the terms in the same sense that allowed the
young Ludwig Wittgenstein to jot in his notebook, on the 24th of July, 1916, almost two years before Sturgeon was born, “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same”—the very sense, I presume, that allowed the young Georg Lukacs to write, only a year before that, in his
Theory of the Novel
, that fiction is “the only art form in which the artist’s ethical position
is
the aesthetic problem.”) And if Alfred Bester’s
The Stars My Destination
(1956) is regarded by many as the single greatest SF novel and therefore minimally outshines Sturgeon’s
More Than Human
(1953), it is because Bester’s book
is
a novel, whereas Sturgeon’s is three connected novellas, two of which are superb and the third of which is merely fascinating.

To talk about science fiction with any sophistication, however, especially to talk about that science fiction which flowered in the forties and fifties, we must locate coequal forms. One, near-future science fiction, posits a familiar landscape, familiar social patterns, and familiar social surfaces. Into it the author intrudes one or a limited number of marvels. The game is to explore the resultant alterations in behavior. The other form, far-future science fiction, begins the game with a landscape where behavior patterns, social texture, and societal workings are already highly altered. Here, as the text proceeds, the game is to recognize which patterns of behavior—or, in the more sophisticated versions of this form, which abstracts of these behavior patterns—remain constant despite material reorganization. In this form of science fiction the question is: What is the human aspect of the structure of behavior—no matter how much the behavioral content or the context alters?

The newcomer to science fiction (often a young newcomer to science as well) is usually more at home with the near-future sort. The long-time reader, especially one at home with the technical underpinnings that support the multiple distortions of landscape in the far-future variety, often finds the second type the greater intellectual challenge.

When near-future science fictions fails, we usually dismiss the failure as “a gimmick story.” When far-future science fiction fails, we usually call its degenerate form “space opera.” But if we accept the division and acknowledge the fine and faulty examples on both
sides, then we can go on to say that Sturgeon is
the
master of near-future science fiction (whereas
The Stars My Destination
is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the far-future variety).

Sturgeon was born February 26th, 1918, and grew up first on Staten Island, then in Philadelphia with his mother, his stepfather, and his older brother Peter. An adolescent career as a gymnast was ended by a bout of rheumatic fever. By and large to get away from a fraught relationship with his stepfather, Sturgeon, while still a teenager, entered the merchant marine. But his burning desire was to be a writer. His first fiction sale that we know about (for five dollars—on publication) was a short-short story called “Heavy Insurance” that appeared in the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, in
The Milwaukee Journal
, July 16th, 1938, when he was twenty. His story “A God in a Garden,” written the following spring, marks Sturgeon’s first sale to John W. Campbell, the great science fiction (and fantasy) editor, for whom Sturgeon was to become one of the prime members in his stable of writers during the later thirties and all through the forties. A contemporary fantasy, “A God in a Garden” appeared in the October
Unknown
—that extraordinary journal which, over the five years of its life, all but created the genre of contemporary urban fantasy. Sturgeon’s first science fiction story, also sold to Campbell, was “Ether Breather.” It appeared in
Astounding Science Fiction
, September 1939.

The Sturgeon
oeuvre
is magnanimous and expansive. If its verbal texture almost everywhere approaches the exquisite, its edges positively sprawl. The core of that work has been, to date, his four science fiction novels:
The Dreaming Jewels, More Than Human, Venus Plus X
, and
The Cosmic Rape
. And clearly on the SF border territory is his 1960 novella (published as a separate volume),
Some of Your Blood
. He also wrote an historical spoof,
I, Libertine
(1956) under the pseudonym of Frederick R. Ewing, a novel the tale of whose creation, at the inspiration of WOR-AM disc jockey Jean Shepherd, is a small fifties period comedy in itself. There is an Ellery Queen mystery that he ghosted, as well as some other film and TV novelizations to his credit. (
The King and Four Queens
[1956];
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
[1961]). His final novel,
Godbody
, originally written at the end of the sixties for a publisher of erotica who
eventually went out of business, only appeared posthumously in 1986 and is somewhere between fantasy, science fiction and erotic mysticism. At various times and in various circles,
More Than Human
—really a concatenation of three interconnected long stories—has been considered the greatest science fiction novel (certainly of the near-future variety) ever written, in spite of the weakness of its ending. But Sturgeon at his strongest is finally revealed—again and again—in the torrent of wonderful stories, which Paul Williams, in this series, has organized and annotated so brilliantly.

With the current project, the number both of the ordinary
and
the extraordinary tales has only risen. As far back as the special 1962 special issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
devoted to Sturgeon’s work, Judith Merril wrote: “[a] quality of voice makes the most unevenly composed Sturgeon story compellingly readable.” But it is astonishing to find that voice clear and recognizable in the very first handful of short-short stories he sold McClure as a twenty-year-old, who (after his first sale) had just broken away from the merchant marine.

One of the great paradoxes to me has always been that the general flaws one finds in commercial fiction are invariably in the line of plot and structure: The progression of incident in the vast majority of paraliterary fictions is simply and wholly unbelievable. Having done or felt A, it is simply unbelievable that character X would proceed to do B or C. What makes this paradoxical is simply that the explicitly stated esthetic of the writers of these stories is one that holds up craft over art, that says that surface is of a wholly secondary importance as to craft—which, by this esthetic is wholly a matter of a well-structured, well-motivated plot. If craft—specifically the structuring of believable fictions—can be learned, why can so few commercial writers learn it? Equally paradoxical is the fact that without exception, every truly memorable commercial writer, from Chandler and Hammett to Bradbury and Vance, Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester and—yes—Sturgeon is memorable because of a specific writerly surface that is so easily called “style.”

These paradoxes have produced their share of critical embarrassments.

In the 1970s, for example, in the pages of
Science Fiction Studies
, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem attacked Sturgeon’s story “Maturity,” one of the most respected stories in the greater Anglo-American science fiction community. During the late forties, this story greatly excited the SF community of both readers and writers. It was much talked about and several times anthologized, quickly gaining a reputation as a “science fiction classic.” Lem proceeded to point out the story’s very real structural weaknesses. On the strength of those weaknesses, Lem proceeded to dismiss the story, Sturgeon, and the critical community that had held the story to be of value. Though Lem purposely skirted the story’s good points, the flaws he picked out were—again—certainly there. But what Lem seemed wholly unaware of was the underlying cause of the excitement around the story in the first place. And that is: Sturgeon rewrote it.

SF stories had of course been rewritten before. Editors had often asked for changes, and even the sort of rewriting Sturgeon did is suggested in the memoirs of Isaac Asimov and others from the fine old days. All the same, in 1947 a draft of “Maturity” was published in
Astounding
. Sturgeon was not satisfied with it. (Presumably it wasn’t mature enough … ?) The story was reworked, and a new draft (mainly the ending differs) was published in an anthology. News of the whole process became generally known throughout that small and volatile group of writers, editors and fannish readers that composed the SF community (a tenth the size, in the late forties, of what it is today.) And the interest suddenly sparked. People wanted to see what an SF story rewritten by someone among them already acknowledged as a master wordsmith
looked
like.