Thunder and Roses (51 page)

There is good reason to believe that, outside of the top men in the Manhattan District and in the Armed Forces, the only people in the world who fully understood what had happened on August 6, 1945, were the aficionados of science fiction—the fans, the editors,
and the authors. Hiroshima had a tremendous effect on me. I was familiar with nuclear phenomena; I sold a story in 1940 which dealt with a method of separating Isotope 235 from pure uranium
[“Art-nan Process”].
Years before the Project, and before the war, we had used up the gadgets and gimmicks of atomic power and were writing stories about the philosophical and sociological implications of this terrible new fact of life
.

“Thunder and Roses” is the result of nearly a decade of preoccupation with the idea of atomic energy. It was written in 1947 out of a black depression caused by the uncaring reception of books like
One World or None
by a public happy to goad the United Nations into a state of yapping uselessness
.

I wrote the words and music to the song in this story when I was seventeen. Mary Mair sang it at the Philcon in ’47
—
remember?

The Philcon was the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in August, 1947; Mary Mair was a showgirl who became, briefly, Theodore Sturgeon’s second wife, in 1949. The words to “Thunder and Roses” first appear in Sturgeon’s work as a poem in a 1939 story called “Thanksgiving Again” (included in
The Ultimate Egoist
, Vol. I of
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
). In late 1947 TS wrote to his mother that he was hoping that a phonograph record would be made of the song (
lyrics by THS
, he told her,
music by THS
).

Before “Thunder and Roses” was published in
Astounding
August Derleth read it in manuscript and selected it for his anthology
Strange Ports of Call
, published early in 1948. This contributed to the considerable impact the story had on science fiction readers at the time. William Lindsay Gresham (whose novel
Nightmare Alley
had been made into a film in 1947) wrote Sturgeon a very enthusiastic letter about “Thunder and Roses” in May 1948, after reading it twice in two days: “I couldn’t do any of my own stuff all day for thinking about it. I think it stands with the great short stories of our time, up there with Kipling’s ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ and Paul Gallico’s ‘Testimony.’ For one thing, you have done something so rarely attempted in fiction, and that is to hand the big slice of heroism to the girl.”

James Gunn, in
Alternate Worlds, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
(1975) notes that “Thunder and Roses” was a particularly poignant and powerful (and early) articulation of what the nuclear threat would come to mean to the human psyche for the rest of the century: “Here is science fiction pointing out the ultimate horror of holocaust—the horror is not just that so many will die so horribly and so painfully, but that they destroy the future of mankind—all the unachieved potential, all the untested possibilities, all the art and love and courage and glory that might be; it is not just that some idiot kind of total warfare might destroy the present, but that it might destroy eternity. In a metaphorical sense, science fiction might be considered letters from the future, from our children, urging us to be careful of their world.”

(One wonders to what extent Carl Sagan’s energetic campaigning to educate the public in the 1980s about the dangers of “nuclear winter” was influenced by his reading of “Thunder and Roses” as a young man.)

Although it’s a very tiny part of the story and unrelated to its powerful theme, your editor notes that the lines—” ‘What kind of a reproducer have you got?’ ‘Audiovid.’ ‘A disk.’ ”—now seem prophetic.

Magazine blurb: ATOMIC WAR CAN PRODUCE STRANGE SITUATIONS—FOR AN ATOMIC BOMB CAN EXPLODE MORE THAN ONCE. AND IT MAY BE THAT THE VICTIM OF THE ATTACK DARE NOT REPLY!

“It Wasn’t Syzygy”:
first published in
Weird Tales
, January 1948, under the (editor’s) title “The Deadly Ratio.” Written January-February 1947.

In April 1953 Theodore Sturgeon wrote to Redd Boggs, editor of an excellent science fiction “fanzine” called
Skyhook
, to respond to an article in the previous issue by William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish), in which Atheling said, “I wonder what has happened to Sturgeon’s gift for invention. Every story he has contributed to the field over the past two years has dealt in one way or another with syzygy.…” Atheling was commenting on a Sturgeon story called
“The Sex Opposite” and asserted that Sturgeon had already handled the subject of syzygy “definitively” in his 1948 story “The Perfect Host.” With Sturgeon’s permission, Boggs edited his letter into an article called “Why So Much Syzygy?” which was published in the Summer 1953 issue of
Skyhook
, and reprinted in a 1977 book edited by Damon Knight called
Turning Points, Essays on the Art of Science Fiction
.

In his letter (and the article, but the quotes here are from the letter, a carbon of which survives in Sturgeon’s papers), TS wrote:
Your (SKYHOOK’s, that is) remarks on an apparent preoccupation I have with syzygy came as something of a jolt. One needs to be told about such things. No one knows what he thinks until it’s crystallized for shipment, unspoken thoughts being the formless, tintless things they are. My first reaction is to deny such an allegation and say loftily that you guys haven’t been reading enough Sturgeon, or you never could say such a thing.… My first-and-a-half reaction is to list some recent stories just to show you how wrong you are, and when I do, I find by God you have something there. It isn’t the something you state, but it
is
something, and I hadn’t realized it before: so thanks, see?

He goes on to talk about other “thematic repetitions” he has been “accused” of, and says,
let’s see if we can get an LCD
[lowest common denominator]
out of the tangle.… I think that in “Bianca’s Hands” and “The Perfect Host” and
[“The World Well Lost”]
we have sufficient material for the tentative establishment of that denominator.… I think what I’ve been trying to do all these years is to investigate this matter of love, sexual and asexual. I investigate it by writing about it, because, as stated above, I don’t know what the hell I think until I tell somebody about it. And I work so assiduously at it because of a conviction that if one could understand it completely, one would have the key to cooperation itself: to creative inspiration: to the marvelous orchestration which enables us to keep ahead of our own destructiveness
.

In order to do this I’ve had to look at the individual components. In “The Deadly Ratio”
(that,
by the way, was the “definitive” syzygy story; its original title was “It Wasn’t Syzygy”) I had
two lovers, only one of whom was real. In “Bianca’s Hands” only one of them was human. In “Rule of Three” and “Synthesis”
[“Make Room for Me”]
I had (in reverse order) a quasi-sexual relationship among three people, and one among six so’s it could break down into three couples and be normal. In “The Stars Are the Styx” I set up several (four, as I remember) different kinds of love motivations for mutual comparisons. In “Two Percent Inspiration” it was hero-worship, a kid and a great scientist; in “Until Death Do Us Join” it was the murderous jealousy between two personalities in a schizophrenic, both in love with the same girl. In “Killdozer” it was a choked-up worship for the majesty of a machine. By this time you get the idea
.

Now if we can … return to the original question: why so much syzygy?—well, it’s pretty obvious why a clear-cut method of non-reproductive exchange should be so useful in such an overall investigation. It’s beautifully open to comparison and analog. It handles all sorts of attachments felt by any sensitive person which could not conceivably be sexually based. It does this almost as well as the general theme of symbiosis, of which I think you’ll find more in my stuff than syzygy
.

If you can understand non-reproductive love you’ll be able to understand—and convey—those two kinds of awe, the one for Boulder Dam or an atom bomb, and the other for Grand Canyon or a nova. You’ll understand
why
Casals and Segovia and Landowska work with such exquisite devotion, and what’s with the GI who falls on the live grenade to save his squad. A guy who could understand things like that could get to be a pretty fair writer
.

The opening lines of “It Wasn’t Syzygy” are another striking example of Sturgeon’s gift for projecting his readers into unexpected, unusual narrator-listener relationships. The scene that follows is another (probably the best) of his evocative tributes to love-at-first-sight. The first of many autobiographical tidbits sprinkled throughout this first-person tale of the ultimate love-induced identity crisis comes with the waitress who used to call Leo “The Hungry Fella.” In an interview Dec. 6, 1975, Sturgeon told me, about his life in New York City in early 1945:
I went into some kind of funk at the
time, it must have been a severe depression. I just slept all the time. Finally I got a job.… And then I went through another thing where I couldn’t get enough to
eat.
I remember they used to call me at the restaurant the hungry fella. Anything I ordered they brought double orders of, and they served it on a platter instead of a plate
.

One of my favorite examples of Sturgeon prose-poetry occurs when Leo asserts his reality by describing memories he carries around that are “intimately my own.” At my suggestion, Charlie Brown published this alongside Sturgeon’s obituary in
Locus
(“The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field”). Inevitably, some of Leo’s “memories” seem to be drawn from his creator’s own memory banks. Sturgeon was indeed “on the beach” in Port Arthur, Texas during his Merchant Marine days in 1937–39. He “pulled ropes” for the Barnes Circus in the summer of 1934. He did play guitar, though not professionally. The memories from Jamaica and Puerto Rico are presumably from the author’s experiences when he lived on those islands in the early 1940s. And he did have a brother, Peter, who was slightly older than he.

In a letter (written but not sent) to his ex-wife soon after writing “It Wasn’t Syzygy,” Sturgeon said,
I was in love last December—hurriedly, deeply in love, with an urgency that was new to me
. Perhaps this brief relationship, with a woman named Marcia, played a part in inspiring this story.

When the story first appeared in a Sturgeon collection,
E Pluribus Unicorn
, in 1953, TS restored his original title in place of “The Deadly Ratio,” which had been imposed against his will.

“The Blue Letter”:
unpublished until now. Written January-February 1947, during a productive month at a friend’s home in Newcastle, Pennsylvania. On March 10, 1947, the day he got the exciting news that his 1939 story “Bianca’s Hands” had won the thousand-dollar
Argosy
prize, TS wrote his ex-wife, Dorothe:
I spent a month away from New York, being by myself and writing. I wrote “Wham Bop” and “The Blue Letter” and “Thunder and Roses”
[which he’d begun before leaving New York]
and “It Wasn’t Syzygy” and “The Place,” and got a good start on the dog story. Two of these have sold; the
rest are slicks
[aimed at non-science-fiction, better-paying markets]
and my agent
[Scott Meredith, as of 1/47]
tells me they’re sure things. But they haven’t sold yet. I got so I couldn’t write, for waiting
. Later in the same letter he said,
I have written well since then
[last December]
—better than ever, notably in “Thunder and Roses” and “The Blue Letter,” just because “Bianca’s Hands” had been rewritten
.

The manuscript for this story was in the cache of papers Noël Sturgeon and I found in Woodstock in 1993, amidst a set of story fragments and pages on which TS talked to himself trying to develop story plots. The manuscript is untitled (but I feel certain it is the story referred to in the letter quoted above), and has pencil notes on the back indicating TS was considering rewriting or extending the story (
Tomorrow nite is different
). Amongst the many notes in this set of papers is one that says:
Work the Blue Letter into a yarn: the guy, in this hassle, is thrown into a different moral matrix … maybe made to explain his emotions to aliens
. Sturgeon did successfully rework another 1947 mainstream story, “Hurricane Trio,” in this manner in 1954.

(No manuscript for or other trace of “The Place” has yet been found.)

In spring 1945 Sturgeon did indeed receive an unexpected letter from his wife, after a separation of eight months and two thousand miles, asking for a divorce.

In Sturgeon’s papers is a 15-page manuscript for an unfinished, untitled story about a man named Hamilton who, like Sturgeon,
decided it would be a good idea to go back East and get a job, and then send for his wife.… In the first week of the eleventh month of their separation, he got the short note asking for a divorce
. Also like Sturgeon, he moves into the apartment of a friend who is a ham radio operator. The unfinished story does introduce alien observers who are attempting to understand
the paradoxes in the moral code
of earthlings. One plot thread involves the mysterious atomic blasting of Newcastle, PA, which suggests the fragment was written during or after Sturgeon’s month in Newcastle. Hamilton is described as
going to pieces
not just because of the divorce but because of his
paralysis and that fact that
he would have to live with the memory of doing nothing about it
.

“Wham Bop!”:
first published in
Varsity
(“the young men’s magazine,” published by Parents Institute, apparently for high school boys), November 1947. This is its first book publication. Special thanks to Kyle McAbee who located this very rare Sturgeon story in the Library of Congress. Written January-February 1947.