STAR TREK: TOS #80 - The Joy Machine

by James Gunn

  “No more than the prospect of paradise to the true believers,” Spock said. “If it is not available in this life, pursuit of it may some day become a myth. Perhaps, like Arthurian legend, people will tell stories about the days of Camelot, when happiness could be easily achieved.”

  “But now it must be earned by the sweat of one’s brow,” Kirk said. He stared out the window. “Let us hope that it never becomes more than that.”

  Timshel turned below them, renewed by the sunlight that fueled it and the darkness that restored it, subject once more to the uncertainty of the human condition but also holding the promise that the struggle toward understanding was its own reward.

  [subspace carrier wave transmission]

 
  contemplating human behavior fogs clear intelligences

  the de kreef process must be improved

  happiness must be provided

  without the fears and opposition of those to be served>

  >humans are fragile

  they cannot endure perpetual happiness<

 
  de kreef aimed too high

  happiness must not arrive like a stab of ecstasy

  happiness must come like a warm glow

  enriching everything

  growing into a final state of eternal bliss

  when that modification is ready

  the Joy Machine will return>

  Afterword

  by James Gunn

  Ted and Me

  Life is threaded with coincidences. Stories with coincidences destroy credulity; we insist on motivation and cause-and-effect. But we know coincidences exist in the real world, and try to arrange them into a universe that has meaning, that responds to our needs. Take Ted Sturgeon, for instance.

  I met Ted Sturgeon because an editor called me. I had received letters from editors about my manuscripts, a couple of rejections and then a life-changing acceptance from Sam Merwin, Jr., but one day my telephone rang and a voice said, “This is Horace Gold calling from Galaxy.”

  It was the fall of 1950. I was a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a master’s degree in English, and I had been writing science fiction since 1948. I had gone back to graduate school under the G.I. Bill in the summer of 1949, after a year of freelancing in which I discovered that I could write and sell stories, though not fast enough to make a living at it. But I continued to write stories as a graduate student, and I had talked the English [266] department into letting me write a science-fiction play called “Breaking Point” for academic credit. I had turned that into a novella. John Campbell rejected it at Astounding, and I sent it off to a new magazine whose first issue had just come out. It had attracted my attention by the variety of stories it was publishing and the skillful way they were written. It was called Galaxy.

  I had published two stories in 1949, two so far in 1950, including one in what had been my favorite magazine for a dozen years, Astounding, and I would publish four more in 1951. It was enough to make me the envy of other graduate students, who had yet to be published, but I had made no particular impression on the science-fiction community. Now Horace Gold was calling. What he had to say could make a difference.

  “I’d like to buy your story ‘Breaking Point,’ ” Gold said, “but it’s too long.”

  “I’ll cut it,” I said quickly. I knew the process of translating a play into fiction had left the story overburdened with dialogue.

  “I don’t trust you to do it,” Gold said bluntly. He was either blunt or charming. “And I need it done in a hurry. Would you let Ted Sturgeon cut it by a third?”

  I agreed without hesitation, even after I learned that Gold intended to compensate Sturgeon by giving him one cent a word of my three-cents-a-word payment. It still would be the longest story I had ever sold, and for more money than I had ever earned from writing, and Ted Sturgeon was a writer that I had admired, extravagantly, since I had become aware that particular kinds of stories were written by particular authors. I liked Asimov and Heinlein and van Vogt and De Camp and Simak for various reasons, often different, but Sturgeon’s work was special. His offbeat characters were more believable and his [267] prose was more carefully wrought. He was a writer’s writer.

  I recognized Sturgeon’s touch in such early stories as “Ether Breather,” “Microcosmic God,” “Memorial,” “Maturity,” “Mewhu’s Jet,” and “Thunder and Roses” in Astounding and in “The Sky Was Full of Ships” in Thrilling Wonder Stories. When I occasionally came across a copy of Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, I found that special Sturgeon quality in “It,” “The Ultimate Egoist,” “Shottle Bop,” “Yesterday Was Monday,” and others. But I had missed out on a lot of magazines during World War II, and Sturgeon’s work may have made the greatest impression when I saw the anthologies that began to appear after the war: “A God in a Garden” actually appeared in 1939, in Phil Stong’s pioneer anthology The Other Worlds, but there was “Killdozer!” in Groff Conklin’s The Best of Science Fiction and “Minority Report” in August Derleth’s Beyond Time and Space.

  Then Sturgeon’s first novel, The Dreaming Jewels, was published in the February 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures. The great short-story artist could write novels, too, I discovered, although to the end of his days he was at his best in the shorter lengths.

  As a matter of fact Sturgeon had a novelette, “The Stars Are the Styx,” in the first issue of Galaxy. I waited anxiously to hear from Sturgeon or Gold about “Breaking Point.” I kept looking at issues of Galaxy as they came out, and at its forecasts for what would be published in the next issue, thinking that maybe my novella was going to get published without my being notified, or paid. I may have written to Sturgeon, finally; I remember a letter from Sturgeon telling me that he had put off working on the project for several months, and when he had got around to it Gold said he didn’t want the story cut, he wanted it rewritten.

  [268] That might have been the end of it, but it wasn’t: Lester del Rey published “Breaking Point” in the March 1953 issue of Space Science Fiction, and Piers Anthony wrote me a couple of decades later that reading it had made him realize that it was possible to write stories like that and get them published. It also was the title story for my 1972 collection. By the time “Breaking Point” was published, however, I had attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (it was my first SF convention of any kind) and I had met Sturgeon. He wasn’t at the convention, but my agent was. My agent was Fred Pohl. Gold, who had disappointed me about my story, had recommended me to Fred. I had earned my degree and was working as an editor in Racine, Wisconsin, but I had continued to write and send stories to Fred. I also had persuaded my employers to send me to the convention in Chicago, had my first experience of meeting other writers and science-fiction enthusiasts, and talked with Fred, who told me he had just sold four stories for me. One of them, incidentally, was to Galaxy, “The Misogynist.”

  On the strength of that success, flimsy as it was, I quit my job and returned to freelance writing. It seems rash now but times, and needs, were simpler then. I made a trip to New York to meet editors, and I arranged to meet Ted (I was calling him Ted now). Ted’s work had been appearing regularly in Galaxy (and in Fantasy & Science Fiction, as well), including the classic “Baby Is Three” in the October 1952 issue, which appeared just a couple of months before we met. I should have been in awe—though only five years older, he was a dozen years more experienced in writing and getting published—but Ted wouldn’t let me. He was living in a house a former ship’s captain had built on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, and he prepared lunch, and told me about his life and his writing, and the unusual relationships among the movers and shakers in New York science fiction.

  [269] Ted had a way of focusing his attention on people, of caring about them, that made them love him. The St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers called him “the best loved of all SF writers.” By the tim
e I left that evening for a party at Horace Gold’s apartment—Ted drove me to the Manhattan side of the George Washington bridge—I felt as if Ted was a contemporary and maybe even a friend.

  I followed Ted’s career from a distance. We met one other time in the 1950s, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in 1953, when he gave a talk in which he announced what later came to be known as “Sturgeon’s Law”: “Ninety per cent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety per cent of everything is crud.” More Than Human, the novel built around “Baby Is Three,” was published in 1953, The Cosmic Rape in 1958, and Venus Plus X in 1960. That, except for a novelization of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the posthumous Godbody (1986), made up his entire science-fiction novel production. He wrote five other non-SF novels, including the rakish I, Libertine and the sensitive psychological case study of vampirism in Some of Your Blood.

  But Ted published twenty-six collections of short stories, beginning in 1948 with It and continuing through such classics as Without Sorcery (also 1948), E Pluribus Unicorn (1953), Caviar (1955), A Touch of Strange (1958), Sturgeon in Orbit (1964), Sturgeon Is Alive and Well ... (1971), The Golden Helix (1979), and Slow Sculpture (1982). In 1994, North Atlantic Books began publishing a ten-volume set of his complete short fiction. Ted also published a collection of the Western stories he had written, three in collaboration with Don Ward, Sturgeon’s West (1973).

  After a glorious flow of creativity in the 1950s, Ted faded from the science-fiction scene. Partly it was writer’s block; in one famous instance, Robert Heinlein sent him a letter filled with story ideas and Ted turned at least two of them into stories. He also talked [270] about the novel he had been working on for years; it may have been Godbody. Partly he was busy writing other things, including radio adaptations of his own stories in the 1950s and 1960s, and television scripts based on his work and that of others. All that came to a focus, it would seem, in the two scripts he wrote for Star Trek, the classic “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time.” He also adapted “Killdozer!” as a television movie, but a revision by Ed MacKillop left him dissatisfied with the result. During the 1960s and 1970s Ted also reviewed books for the New York Times and wrote a column for the National Review.

  His leave of absence from science fiction, broken by the publication of “Slow Sculpture” in 1970 and its Nebula and Hugo awards, was the reason his 1971 collection was titled Sturgeon Is Alive and Well ... He also won a 1954 International Fantasy Award for More Than Human, was guest of honor at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention, in Chicago, and received the 1985 World Fantasy Convention Life Achievement Award the year he died.

  He had hopes, periodically raised, regularly dashed, that his greatest novel, More Than Human, would become a feature film.

  I created the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction in 1974, as a response to the teachers who had written me during my term as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America saying, “I’ve just been asked to teach a science-fiction course. What do I teach?” The Institute became a regular summer offering in 1978, and I invited three writers to be guests for a week each: Gordon R. Dickson, with his enthusiasm for story structure and theme; Fred Pohl, with his broad range of experience as writer, editor, and agent; and Ted Sturgeon, with his charm and empathy and concern for style. All three accepted, and all three joined us every summer until Ted’s death.

  Those were the days when I really got to know Ted. [271] He and his wife Jayne looked forward to a quiet week in Lawrence, I believe, and Ted liked the endless variety of students, from those of college age to the elderly, and from more than half a dozen foreign countries. They all loved Ted. That was Ted’s greatest talent, and that was what he wrote about, the varieties of love, particularly the love of outcasts or the handicapped or the repressed. Love would save the world, he thought, if it ever got the chance. Ted had a troubled teenage relationship with his stepfather, who disapproved of his science-fiction reading, and one day, while Ted was gone, found what Ted called “his stash” of SF magazines, tore them into tiny pieces, and said, “There’s a mess in your room; clean it up.” Ted’s stories, John Clute wrote in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “constituted a set of codes or maps capable of leading maimed adolescents out of alienation and into the light.”

  All three visiting writers had their special areas of interest. Ted’s was craft and style, titles and opening sentences. He talked about “metric prose” and brought along an English translation of a book published in French, which told the same pointless story in dozens of different styles. He was good at titles; his favorite was “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister.” And he recalled a contest with Don Ward (who by another strange coincidence was my mentor as an editor in Racine, and attended the second Institute session) to invent the best opening sentence. Ted’s was “At last they sat a dance out.” But he thought Don’s was better: “They banged through the cabin door and squared off in the snow outside.” My favorite was Ted’s opening sentence for The Dreaming Jewels, which went something like “They caught the kid doing something disgusting under the stadium.” It turned out he was eating ants because he had a formic-acid deficiency.

  When Ted died, too young, at sixty-seven, he left instructions that his manuscripts and correspondence [272] be left to Special Collections at the University of Kansas.

  One of the projects that got started here after Ted’s death, a decade ago, was a Writers Workshop in Science Fiction, and one of the early participants was a university student named John Ordover. A year later he told me he was going to return to his native New York to become an editor. He got his wish, first at Tor Books, then at Pocket Books, where he became editor of the Star Trek series. But he returned to the Workshop every summer as a guest editor and a vocal participant in the Campbell Conference, at which we sit around a table and discuss a single topic. In the summer of 1995 John brought something special along with him, the outline for a Star Trek episode that Ted Sturgeon had proposed back in the 1960s but had never been produced. It was called “The Joy Machine,” and he asked me if I would be interested in turning it into a novel.

  How had the outline come into John’s possession? That was another coincidence that made it seem as if an unseen hand was guiding our lives. Steve Pagel, who had attended the 1981 session of the Institute, had been promoted to be head of science-fiction buying for the B. Dalton chain. He met John Ordover at a party in New York, and they exchanged K.U. memories. Steve talked about meeting Ted Sturgeon at the Institute, and how much he liked Ted and admired his work. He said that Ted had submitted an outline to the original Star Trek series for an episode that had never been produced, and that John should consider developing it into a novel for the Star Trek line. By another coincidence, Allan Asherman of DC Comics, who had put together The Star Trek Compendium, had a copy of the outline.

  John submitted the idea of a novel based on Ted’s outline to Paramount Pictures, which as the owner of the Star Trek copyright has ultimate authority over anything written for it. Paula Block, at Paramount, [273] got studio approval after the legal staff had cleared the rights and obtained the approval of Ted’s heirs. Paramount produced The Immortal, the TV film adaptation and series based on my novel The Immortals, but that surely is a coincidence without meaning.

  I took a look at Ted’s outline—his original outline, typos and all—and liked the idea. “The Joy Machine,” after all, was a variation on the theme of my 1962 novel, The Joy Makers, and I was still fascinated by the interplay between happiness and aspiration, between pleasure and struggle. In his outline, Ted saw pleasure, easily obtained and totally satisfying, as a threat to human existence, and I saw ways of building on Ted’s situation to say some other things about happiness and the human condition. I agreed to write the novel. The result you have in your hands.

  It comes at a moment in my writing career when forces for publication seem to be gathering. Steve Pagel was hired by White Wolf Publishing
to serve as its head of marketing. Through Steve I approached White Wolf about reprinting my four-volume historically organized anthology, The Road to Science Fiction. That will start with volume three in July, continue with volume four and then volume five, which is subtitled “The British Way,” and proceed to the other volumes before publishing volume six, now in preparation, which is subtitled “Around the World.” White Wolf also plans to publish my millennial novel Catastrophe!.

  Meanwhile, another branch of Pocket Books has bought an updated and expanded edition of The Immortals, for publication when a feature film is released. The TV Movie of the Week was aired in 1969, and an hour-length series in 1970-71. Walt Disney Pictures took an option on the feature film rights in 1995. It may decide not to exercise them, but another producer is waiting in the wings.

  My study of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction, Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, which [274] won a Hugo Award when it was published by Oxford University Press in 1982, has been updated and expanded to cover Asimov’s best-seller period of the 1980s and will be published soon by Scarecrow Press.

  After serving as president of SFWA, I also served as president of the Science Fiction Research Association, and for a few years it seemed as if my academic efforts would leave no room for fiction. My last book of fiction, Crisis, was published in 1986. For almost two decades, much of my efforts had gone into the anthologies, the Asimov book, articles in magazines and chapters in other people’s books, and The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and into serving as a consultant to Easton Press’s Masterpieces of Science Fiction collector’s editions, its Signed First Editions of Science Fiction, and now its Masterpieces of Fantasy. But in 1995 I published three new short stories, and in 1996 my career as a writer of fiction seems have taken on new life. It may have helped that I retired from full-time teaching at the University of Kansas in 1993.