Microcosmic God (55 page)

“Yesterday Was Monday” was adapted as an episode of the television program “The New Twilight Zone.”

Original magazine blurb (from the contents page): THE ACTOR SLIPPED BEHIND THE SCENES—TO FIND THE SCENE-SHIFTERS AT WORK BUILDING YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW!

“Brat”:
first published in
Unknown Worlds
(same magazine as
Unknown;
the title changed with the 10/41 issue), December 1941. It would be interesting to know whether this was written before or after the birth of the Sturgeons’ first child (Patricia, born Dec. 21, 1940), but I have seen no hard evidence either way. I’m guessing it was written in anticipation rather than from first-hand experience—placing it as, perhaps, a summer 1940 story. In any case it’s intriguing that in Theodore and Dorothe’s divorce decree, the name of their second child is not Cynthia, as she has always been known, but Michaele.

Story introduction from
Without Sorcery:

When this was written, I had the bad habit of running out all my copy in one draft, without a carbon. As a result, there were actually a half-dozen stories which I forgot entirely. Some appeared during the war when I was out of the country and could not get copies. When I returned I spent many a narcissistic night in reading my own stuff. It was with great joy that I ran across this one; I had absolutely no recollection whatever of having written it. I wandered around for days murmuring, “Did I write ‘Brat’? Did I really?”

The above is a proper tribute to an underrrated story that in some ways is a breakthrough work: a true story of transformation (and thus one of the first truly characteristic Sturgeon stories), a transformation arising not through the author’s preconceived plot but from something that happens to him and his characters as the tale tells itself.

There are times, however, when a literary caretaker wants to kick the author (who in turn, we can be sure, often feels the same way about the caretaker). In 1984, for
Alien Cargo
, Sturgeon wrote:

Not fun. A horrid little fantasy, derived from true-life observations by a man who loved children, but not children like this one. Those ones
.

If you are reading these notes after reading the story in question—and if not, shoo, scram, go away, you’re doing it wrong—you will immediately realize that this latter introduction was written by an author who
had not recently read the story he was commenting on; who had, as it were, absolutely no recollection of what it was about emotionally. (Emotional content is primary in most Sturgeon stories—for example, the real power of “It,” and that story’s influence on later horror writers, lies not in the concept of the creature but in the emotional impact of the characterization and the setting.) Sturgeon couldn’t have written this 1984 comment after actually rereading “Brat” and re-meeting its four characters.

Sturgeon’s descriptions of his interactions with his paternal aunt Alice Waldo, in letters to his mother in 1938, suggest she may have been a model for the prissy Aunt Jonquil as she is portrayed at the start of “Brat.”

Magazine blurb, from the contents page: ‘BUTCH’ LOOKED LIKE A NINE-MONTH-OLD BABY. BUT HE LIKED HIS STEAKS RARE, AND HIS COFFEE BLACK—AND TROUBLE IN MASSIVE DOSES!

“The Anonymous”:
unpublished. From the trunk left behind by Sturgeon on Staten Island in 1941 and returned to him in 1972. The typeface of the manuscript and the inscription on it saying “please note change of address” both identify it as having been written or completed circa August 1940.

The date is significant because the story (in my opinion) is so flat and energyless, yet seems to have been written during a period of time when the author was also producing excellent and exciting work. While many authors appear to grow in self-confidence (for better or worse) as their careers progress, Sturgeon from the beginning of his writing career found himself moving almost cyclically between real extremes of self-assurance and self-doubt. Highs and lows. Some of these cycles, in terms of his writing, were in periods of years (of writing a lot and writing nothing at all). But there is also considerable evidence in Sturgeon’s correspondence of brief, intense fluctuations between energy and paralysis tormenting him even during relatively productive or prolific periods.

I’ve applied for a job with the British Purchasing Commission
, he wrote his mother in December 1940, shortly before his daughter was born.
The idea is to establish some sort of regularity to my income, which, although ample, isn’t steady enough to live comfortably on. My checks are large and fairly frequent, but just one reject can throw me out completely for weeks. The more work I do the worse I feel, the worse I feel the less money I make. Bounce two stories in a row—and science fiction is very hard to write—and I start having bad dreams when I’m wide awake. And I mean
bad
dreams—horror is my specialty. Can’t sell stories
while that goes on. But when I sell a couple a week or two apart, I go on a spurt, and months go by in the life of Riley …

Sturgeon did submit his 1940-era rejects to other markets—the magazine
Weird Tales
for one, and no doubt other science fiction or fantasy magazines—but not very persistently and certainly not successfully (he sold no sf or fantasy to any magazine editor other than John Campbell until 1946).

A comment in a letter from TS to his mother and stepfather March 20, 1938, after thanking them for sending his birth certificate and adoption papers as requested, shows Sturgeon already chewing on the notion of identity alteration:
For quite a while now I have had an idea buzzing around in my sconce to the effect that someday, sometime, I would like to change my identity—notice, I said identity, not just name, and disappear most melodramatically from the sight and mind of man. Sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde affair, you know; I’ve always thought that it would be amusing to start a verbal war on some subject with myself through the public press. Well, it’s all conjecture and daydreaming; but like a good scout I must be semper paratus. And don’t worry about it; I’ll most certainly keep you informed
.

“Two Sidecars”:
unpublished. Also from the trunk left on Staten Island.

The only specific mention in the surviving correspondence from 1940 and 1941 of Sturgeon attempting to write for markets other than
Astounding
and
Unknown
(and the Street & Smith comic books he wrote scripts for) is in a letter to his mother dated April 22, 1941:
Another thing we are hopeful about is the
Writer’s Digest
contest, in which I entered two stories. First prize of two hundred prizes is $250; all winning entries go to
Liberty
magazine, and those that are printed there knock down an additional hundred. It would make me very happy to win, I think!
This story could have been for that contest, or could have been written much earlier (anytime between August 1940 and spring 1941) for submission to a non-fantasy market.

A sidecar, according to my dictionary, contains “brandy, an orange-flavored liqueur, and lemon juice.” This story and “Nightmare Island” might raise the question of Sturgeon’s own relationship with alcohol. He did drink, of course, in his years as a merchant seaman, and afterward (February 1940:
New Year’s wasn’t bad. I went to Philly, did the rounds with Wally, got pleasantly tight four times in three days
), but there is no suggestion in his correspondence that it was ever a problem for him. Nor
is there much specific evidence that he used alcohol to help him write, though he no doubt tried it. But his drugs-of-choice for writing seem to have always been coffee and sleep-deprivation (but in a 1952 letter included in the chapbook
Argyll
he also speaks of writing under the influence of dexedrine and “soggy with beer”).

However, although alcohol wasn’t the problem, the utter paralysis of the husband in this story in the face of his imminent loss of his wife is an eerie foreshadowing of the circumstances of Ted and Dorothe’s divorce in 1945 (as described by Sturgeon himself in correspondence and later fiction).

“Microcosmic God”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, April 1941. I date it as having been written after August 1940, based on a comment in a letter apparently written that month:
I’m only selling to one market
—Unknown,
I have five stories coming up in that, and one in
Astounding—
a sequel to “Ether Breather.”
This suggests that “Microcosmic God,” “Completely Automatic,” and “Poker Face,” all published in
Astounding
near the start of 1941, were written in the fall of 1940. “Microcosmic God” is further dated by the existence of five pages of an early draft, typed on the script (or italic) typewriter and with the return address that was used starting in mid-August 1940.

Sturgeon’s 1948 comments on the story, from
Without Sorcery: This was written just at the beginning of the shooting phase of World War II, and is the result of mulling over a possible end product—in miniature—of dictatorship and isolationism. I have been asked repeatedly to do a sequel to this. I know better!

And his 1984 comments, from
Alien Cargo:

I have always disliked this story—not for its basic idea, which has been called unique, but for its writing. Just out of my ‘teens, I had not yet learned that nobody is ever and altogether good, and nobody is all bad. Ignorant of that, one can produce 100% purified vintage dyed-in-the-wool cardboard characters. The story’s basic idea, however, is indeed unique, and many years later, at the Artificial Intelligence offices in M.I.T., a truly great scientist introduced himself to me, to tell me (as many scientists have) that he had gotten into science in the first place because of reading science fiction as a youngster, and further, that he had gotten into microbiology because of this one story. And this is a guy who might win a Nobel Prize! So … what price literary judgments?

Science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz offers a different perspective in his book
Seekers of Tomorrow
(1967):

“ ‘Microcosmic God’ … had all the reaction of a bomb with a fast fuse. It was not that the idea was new; the concept of intelligent creatures in a microscopic world producing inventions at an accelerated rate relative to their own time span had been used in ‘Out of the Sub Universe’ by R. F. Starzl (
Amazing Stories Quarterly
, summer 1928), had been defined in complete detail by Edmond Hamilton in ‘Fessenden’s World’ (
Weird Tales
, April 1937), and had been recognized as a poignant classic in Calvin Peregoy’s ‘Short-Wave Castle’ (
Astounding Stories
, February 1934)—but Sturgeon did it best.” [James Gunn in
Alternate Worlds
(1975) credits Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1858 story “The Diamond Lens” as the first in the general category of “world in a microcosm” stories.]

Moskowitz goes on, drawing partly on his 1961 interview with Sturgeon: “The modest fame as master of fantasy which Sturgeon had attained with ‘It’ was far transcended by the acclaim brought to him by ‘Microcosmic God.’ Far from being pleased, Sturgeon was first annoyed and then infuriated. The kindest thing he could say for ‘Microcosmic God’ was that it was ‘fast paced.’ He deplored the fact that it did not have the ‘literary cadence’ of many of his other less complimented works and he deeply resented the fact that readers didn’t even seem to get the point: that a superman need not be a powerful, commanding person.

“He failed to understand that he had struck the universal chord. Stories like ‘Shottle Bop,’ where you got what you wanted by ‘wishing,’ were good fun but nobody in this modern technological age believed them. On the contrary, a story like ‘Microcosmic God,’ where a man could get anything he wanted by logical scientific means, made possible the complete suspension of disbelief and utter absorption of the reader by the story. That was the story’s appeal.”

In any case, the extent and durability of the story’s appeal were demonstrated in 1969, when members of the Science Fiction Writers of America were asked to vote on “the greatest science fiction stories of all time” (for inclusion in a book entitled
Science Fiction Hall of Fame
). “Microcosmic God” tied for #4 in total votes—one of the five best or most popular sf stories ever written (through 1965), according to a poll of “virtually everyone now living who has ever had science fiction published in the United States” (quote and voting results from Robert Silverberg’s introduction to
SF Hall of Fame
).

“Microcosmic God” was included in the first paperback science fiction anthology published in the United States,
The Pocket Book of Science Fiction
(edited by Donald A. Wollheim) in 1943. As a result many
readers associate it with their discovery of science fiction. (“The first [sf] story I read was ‘Microcosmic God’ by Theodore Sturgeon. It has sometimes occurred to me that it has all been downhill from there.”—Gene Wolfe, in his introduction to
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. I
)

John W. Campbell, Jr., summarized the story well in the March 1941
Astounding
(in a section where the editor talks about next month’s issue): “Theodore Sturgeon has a novellette coming up, too. The tale of a man who played god to a homemade microcosm and forgot that he still had to live and get along in his greater world himself.” His blurb for the story when it appeared (title page) was: KIDDER HAD A SYSTEM FOR INVENTING THINGS IN A HURRY—AND HE THOUGHT HE HAD A SYSTEM FOR HANDLING THE RESULTS. HIS METHOD WAS INHUMAN—BUT HIS AGENT WAS HUMAN—AND DANGEROUS!

The unfinished early draft of “Microcosmic God,” the text of which is included at the end of these story notes, reveals that the Neoterics evolved in the author’s mind from ants … and thereby makes a small link between this story and Sturgeon’s 1953 classic “Mr. Costello, Hero”—which in turn suggests that in Sturgeon’s universe Senator Joe McCarthy and Adolf Hitler may be perceived as examples of the archetype called Mad Scientist.