Microcosmic God (57 page)

This opus, sheer “spaced-opera,”
[
sic;
changed in the paperback version to “space-opera,” a familiar sf term for clichéd or old-fashioned science fiction melodramas]
is included here primarily because with it I can modestly take my place among the prognosticators. Based on the problem of isotope separation, it was written three years before the organization of the Manhattan Project. Major Groves’ brain trust tried five methods to accomplish the trick of separating U-235 from U-238, in a mass of metal which was all chemically pure uranium. Here’s one they never thought of …

This year, incidentally, the layman is beginning to hear of the Probability Wave in connection with nuclear physics …

Sometime in the mid-1950s (after reading a statement by Philip Van Doren Stern that said, “Never set pen to paper until you can state your theme in one single, simple declarative sentence”), Sturgeon began making a list entitled:
IN ONE SENTENCE—What Sturgeon stories said
. He only typed five entries, including one for this story, which says,
“Artnan Process”: Any dictatorship is bad, even if beneficent
.

TS to Paul Williams, interview, December 6, 1975:
The only really important story I wrote in that so-called entertainment period was “Microcosmic God.” It’s a story I have never liked … But that was a blockbuster. The other stories I wrote, they were fun, “The God in the Garden” and “Helix the Cat,” all these funny kind of humorous things, “Biddiver” and all that, were lightweight amusing stories and they hadn’t anything too heavy to say. What’s that one about the Martian, and these two guys are so—they fed the Martians Coca-Cola until they got drunk?

Magazine blurb (contents page): THE ARTNANS HAD A MONOPOLY ON THE U-235 BECAUSE OF A REFINING PROCESS. BUT THEY WERE PERFECTLY WILLING TO LET ANYONE FIGURE IT OUT—IF HE COULD!

“Biddiver”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, August 1941. Sturgeon’s “in one sentence—what Sturgeon stories said” for this one (circa 1954) was:
In the weakest of us lives a friendly giant
.

The insurance fraud at the start of the story harkens back to TS’s first published story, “Heavy Insurance.”

Sturgeon did own an automobile at the time he wrote “Biddiver”—
a deep maroon Buick coupé with chromium wheels and my initials on the
doors
(letter to his mother, circa August 1940).

Another element of what Sturgeon later called his “optimum man” theme (he told David Hartwell in 1972 that his stories since 1945
have all had this preoccupation with the optimum man
) begins to emerge here: the superman looking for a purpose (“Maturity,”
More Than Human
).

Magazine blurb (title page): BIDDIVER WAS A LITTLE MAN WHO GOT RICH, GOT DRUNK, GOT INTO THE WRONG “AUTOMOBILE” AND—BECAUSE IT WASN’T AN AUTOMOBILE BUT SOMETHING ELSE—GOT CHANGED!

“The Golden Egg”:
first published in
Unknown
, August 1941. It would be interesting to know why John Campbell chose to run this story in his fantasy magazine rather than in his science fiction magazine.

The “phenomenal young man” aspect of this story makes it an early appearance of a recurring Sturgeon character, the superman/aesthete (Robin English in “Maturity,” Horty Bluett in
The Dreaming Jewels
). The attractive adult male who knows nothing of the world (because he’s a created human, or an alien, or an amnesiac) and has to be educated is another recurring character: for example, Nemo in “The Clinic,” Anson in “The Other Man,” the reborn Guy Gibbon in “When You Care, When You Love.”

Sturgeon’s unfinished manuscript “Cory Drew,” dating perhaps from January 1940, also concerns a “very handsome” adult male newly created (in a laboratory by a couple of mad scientists), his childlike nature, and what happens when he meets a woman who falls in love with him. Ariadne Drew in “The Golden Egg” has the same last name as the hero of that unfinished effort. Sturgeon had evidently forgotten that he’d already used the name in “It” (which, although a very different sort of story, shares with “Egg” the driven, detached curiosity of its nonhuman entity).

One common thread in these “education” stories, illustrated by the comic sequence in “The Golden Egg” when Elron talks first like a hobo and then like a debutante, is Sturgeon’s interest in how ordinary human behavior would appear to the proverbial “man from Mars,” the outsider who knows nothing of our built-in cultural contexts and assumptions.

Why Sturgeon chose the name “Elron” is not known. He was certainly aware of and a reader of fellow sf writer L. Ron Hubbard.

Magazine blurb (title page): THE GOLDEN EGG WAS ANCIENT BEYOND MAN’S UNDERSTANDING—AND WANTED A MEASURE OF AMUSEMENT IN MAN’S SMALL WORLD—

“Two Percent Inspiration”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, October 1941. In a 1953 essay, “Why So Much Syzygy?” (reprinted in
Turning Points
, Damon Knight, ed., Harper & Row 1977), Sturgeon describes his fiction as a series of investigations of “this matter of love,” and lists the “love motivations” driving some of his stories:
In “Two Percent Inspiration” it was hero worship, a kid and a great scientist
.

1948 introduction (
Without Sorcery
):
The title, of course, is from the old saw about genius—“ninety-eight percent perspiration.” I have since revised my conception of genius and now define it as an infinite capacity for taking beer. This story is the only one I ever wrote which has three (count ’em) plot twists at the end. I am proud of one thing in it: Satan Strong, Scourge of the Spaceways, Supporter of the Serialized Short Story, and Specialist in Science on the Spot
.

1984 introduction
(Alien Cargo): More early don’t-give-a-damn fun; actually a lampoon on some of the more dreadful contemporary (1940) examples of science fiction. So come on and meet, Satan Strong
[etc.].

Although this seems to me a quite minor Sturgeon story, and granted the existence of many common sources (E. E. Smith’s
The Skylark of Space
, for one), it is intriguing how much it anticipates, in tone as well as content, the excellent series of young adult science fiction novels Robert Heinlein wrote between 1947 and 1958. Heinlein’s
The Rolling Stones
even features a space-going engineer who makes a living writing trashy sci-fi, possibly an acknowledgement of the influence of “Two Percent Inspiration.”

The pre-story fragment surviving in Sturgeon’s papers, in this one instance a kind of plot summary of “Two Percent” rather than a false start/early draft, seems worthy of inclusion here in its entirety. Read in conjunction with the story, it provides us a good glimpse of how Sturgeon transformed plot (note that the plot outline in this case also establishes the mood of the story) into narrative, circa 1941:

Professor Thaddeus MacIlhainy Nudnick, followed by ninety-three sections of the alphabet, was a genius. He found himself aboard the good ship
Stoutfella,
named after a mythological character from the literature of the ancients who was always popping up in In-lish writings. Also aboard is a man-child by the name of Hughie, who was addicted to trashy literature in general and science-fiction in particular. Hughie was always pining away for an emergency, and dramatizing the possibility, particularly this trip; for he knew Professor Nudnick and some of his feats. He knew in his heart that come the emergency, the prof would take down the ultraradio, swiftly twist two wires, weld a connection, wind a coil, and—zooie! Everyone
would be safe in the Betelgeuse system via space-warp. Or something
.

Comes the Emergency. The Earth-Mars Navigation Board, which is composed of an equal number of both races and decides by majority vote, is under the thumb of one Arthur Horn, who, oiled by Mars, has frightened the rest of the Earthmen on the Board to vote the way he wants. It seems that the
Stoutfella
has discovered a huge deposit of prosydium, a rare-earth metal invaluable as an “atomic catalyst” in the molecular-collapse process for hardening copper. Nudnick is aboard to guide them to it; he spotted it by improvising a detector when he was travelling on a Martian pasenger liner. He has kept his mouth shut because if the existence of this unclaimed treasure were ever made known, it would precipitate a deadly war between the planets. Independently, Nudnick is trying to claim it for Earth; he can’t acquaint the Earth Government of it for fear of their sending an armed fleet to seize it, which in space law is an act of war. He considers the headstrong government stupid fools for such characteristics. The prosydium asteroid is much nearer Earth than Mars anyway; once he has claimed it Earth can protect it. Anyhoo, this feller Horn has got some suspicions that Nudnick is up to something, and so has the
Stoutfella
stopped and completely disarmed on suspicion of piracy, knowing that when he later sends a private ship to squeeze the secret out of Nudnick, the old boy won’t blast them, as he has every right to do. Nudnick annoyedly gives up his weapons, even to sidearms
.

The
Stoutfella
proceeds; since Nudnick is wise to the fact that Horn is up to some monkey business, he leads Horn’s little Martian-crewed ship a gay chase. He can’t, however, keep this up forever; he is an old man and his ship will have to be fueled one of these days. The kid, meanwhile, is completely disgusted with the scientist. Keeps on quoting science-fiction to him, saying, “Why don’t you blast ’em? Why don’t you go into hyperspace? Why don’t you make a light-deflector so the ship will be invisible? Why don’t you do something really scientific?” The old guy just laughed at him and slapped him on the back. The kid tried a couple of things himself word for word out of the science-fiction rags, with little or no effect. Finally, with fuel almost gone, the
Stoutfella
is forced down on Mercury, on the twilight strip a bit toward the day side. It is hot and damn windy; the two of them sit the ship down and jump out, hightailing it for the mountings
[sic].
The Martians come right away after them, land beside their ship and come ashore. A futile chase, and the Earthmen are caught. Halfway back to the Martian ship for torturing, the Martians drop dead. The only gadget Nudnick
has
whipped
together is a beamed spy-ray, and he has forced the dying Martians to confess “all” about Horn, out there in the heat. Once back in the ship, explanation and delight
.

The opening scene of the completed story seems to draw partly on Sturgeon’s childhood punishments at the hands of his professor stepfather, as described in his 1965 essay “Argyll,” and perhaps also on the “bloody unfair” brutalization he and other cadets suffered at the hands of upperclassmen and officers at the Penn State Nautical School in 1936. However, the idealized brilliant professor Nudnick also probably derives to some degree from Sturgeon’s childhood admiration of his Scottish stepfather Argyll.

Magazine blurb (contents page): A MARTIAN MIGHT BE AS GOOD AS ANY EARTHMAN IN MOST THINGS—BUT WHEN IT CAME TO A SHORT HIKE ON MERCURY—

“The Jumper”:
first published in
Unknown Worlds
, August 1942. Written before July 1941.

This is an early example of Sturgeon examining the psychopathic personality, who seems compelled to manipulate and irritate the people around him just because he can (see “When You’re Smiling,” “The Other Man”). The “jumper” is another fascinating, though unrelated, psychological or parapsychological conceit (Sturgeon may have learned of this when visiting his uncle in Canada). But unlike later Sturgeon stories, the psychological ideas are merely presented, not explored in a rigorous or imaginative fashion.

Magazine blurb (title page): THE NAZI PRISON GUARD WAS PLAIN NASTY—AND SOMETHING MORE. THE CANADIAN RECOGNIZED THE SYMPTOMS—AND MADE THE VICIOUS GUARD SIGNAL THE R.A.F. FOR HIM!

Corrections and addenda:

I have not had the opportunity to compare the texts of all the stories that were collected in
Without Sorcery
with their original magazine texts (manuscripts are unavailable for most of these stories). The reader is advised that there may be textual variants in such stories as “Microcosmic God,” and “It” and “Ether Breather” from the first volume. We have used the
Without Sorcery
text as the source in this series for all stories included in that book.

A comparison has been made of the texts of the story “The Ultimate
Egoist” since the first volume was published. Sturgeon evidently went over the story carefully, removing (or adding) a word or a phrase from a sentence to improve the flow of the writing, and rewriting awkward sentences. The most significant changes are the dropping of a passage of reminiscence from the start of the paragraph that begins “Looking at Drip, putting sugar in his coffee” (
Vol. 1
, p. 295), and the conversion of the last two paragraphs of the story from past tense to present tense, which considerably heightens the dramatic effect.

The passage dropped from the magazine version reads:
I poured him a cup of coffee, thinking about the ships, thinking of the live surge of a steel deck, and the whip of a wind, and of a double rainbow by moonlight in the Caribbean. The pulsing rustle of valves and pistons. Aces backed up in a marathon stud game in the messroom. Heat in the fireroom, making your lungs too big for your chest. Breakdown in a hurricane off a rocky coast, and you smell death in the wind—death and kerosene. A load of high-test aviation gas, so your ship is a five-hundred-foot stick of dynamite. A Louisiana Cajun using his knife and a Boston Irishman using his feet. Breath of life, the very warmth in a man’s blood, these things, once he’s been to sea
.

With rare exceptions, Sturgeon did not revise his texts for book publication for his collections after the first one (he did revise his novels that were based on magazine material,
The Dreaming Jewels
and
More Than Human
). It is possible that he may have revised a story before it was anthologized by another editor, in the early years of his writing career, and that we may have missed such changes by working from the magazine text rather than the anthology text.