The editor’s introduction to Robin’s half-page piece reveals that he is ten years old and that “this article [“Martian Mouse”] was originally written as a school composition.”
Blish’s article describes Sturgeon, in a much-quoted line, as “the finest conscious artist science fiction has ever had. Davidson’s introduction in F&SF read:
“Among the paradoxes of the kingdom of nature is this: that the golden-throated nightingale is drab, while the splendid peacock has a harsh scream for a voice. ‘Paradox,’ in the sense of ‘a seeming contradiction’—but of course really no contradiction at all. The splendor of song is sufficient for the nightingale. The peacock’s plumage is glory enough for him. Nature, there, is neither niggardly nor lavish past measure. We have writers who sing sweetly as nightingales, writers who are gorgeous as peacocks. It is a flat fact that Theodore Sturgeon is both. As someone put it to us recently, he ‘has an aura.’ His flashing eyes, his floating hair, Pan-like beard, continually sparkling wit, his alchemist’s fingers, and his ardent pen.… It is around us that the circle is thrice-woven; it is we who feed on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise. Much have we traveled in the realms of gold, who have read much (or even little) of his work. It seems only right, somehow, that, with all this, Theodore Sturgeon should have a beautiful wife and beautiful children as well. It seems, anyhow, not right that we can find (after long searching) nothing fresher to say at this point than this: We are proud to publish this newest story by Theodore Sturgeon. It will form (though complete in itself) part of a book, and he has promised us the privilege of publishing the other parts as they are written. The tale has its beginnings with the long, deep thoughts of Captain Gamaliel Wyke, crouching by the winter fire in his four great grey shawls, near the tolling breakers and the creaking gulls. Thus it begins. There is time enough before we consider its ending.”
“Hold-up à la Carte”: first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February, 1964. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: “Once upon a time (in September, 1962, to be exact), Theodore Sturgeon had occasion to look through his old files for the carbon copy of an early short story—when lo and behold, out popped another short story, one that had never been published and which Mr. Sturgeon had completely forgotten. This original manuscript was resting in peace under (to quote Mr. Sturgeon) some layers of peat moss in the bottom of an old box.… Now, Mr. Sturgeon could not remember how long ago he had written this newly discovered story—he judged he had done it for some demanding editor back in the 16th or 17th Century.…
Well, the interesting thing about this previously unpublished Sturgeon is simply this: it is a genuine ‘period piece’—a story that will remind you of ‘the good old days’ of Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine—the ‘dear, dead days’ of Herman Landon’s The Gray Phantom, and of Johnston (The Mark of Zorro) McCulley’s Thubway Tham; ah, remember? This new-old Sturgeon is the kind of story that was sedately popular in the 1920s, the accepted detective fare of its time (when the hard-boiled experiment was just beginning). It is the kind of story that, we judge, could have been written early in the same decade that saw the birth of Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, Earl Derr Bigger’s Charlie Chan, S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance, and E.Q.’s Ellery Queen.
“How to Forget Baseball”: first published in Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1964. In the introduction to the tenth anniversary issue of Sports Illustrated, the editors described the special feature on “The Future of Sport” as “a practical look at what to expect in the next decade,” “the sporting miracles of tomorrow, in color today,” and “a chilling glimpse of a game of the far future” (the Sturgeon story). In introducing the special issue, the publisher, Sidney L. James, writes, among other things: “Beyond the practical side of the future is the fanciful. Ours is a science fiction sports story by Theodore Sturgeon, one of the two or three writers who emerged as giants in the field when science fiction moved out of pulp country after the atom bomb made impossibilities valid subjects for serious speculation. Sturgeon’s grim, sardonic and somewhat Orwellian view of how sport and society may evolve is one that we are far from sharing, but we do feel that his story—which effectively demonstrates the high level of writing skill in this genre—is a contribution to thinking about sport. And sport is to be thought about as well as enjoyed.”
On the title page of the story: OUT OF A FANTASTIC SOMEDAY WORLD WHIRLS A DEMONIAC FLACK IN A FORMLESS CAR TO SHOW A POOR PRIMITIVE FROM AN ALL-BUT-VANISHED SOCIETY THE NEW NATIONAL GAME, QUOIT. ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S MOST DISTINGUISHED SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS TELLS HOW THE PRIMITIVE IS AT FIRST CONFUSED, THEN HORRIFIED, FASCINATED AND—IN THE END—ENTRAPPED BY A THING HE ABHORS.
“The Nail and the Oracle”: first published in Playboy, Oct. 1965.
“If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”: first published in Harlan Ellison, ed., Dangerous Visions, in 1967. In Dangerous Visions, each story was bookended by an introduction by the book’s editor and an afterword or epilogue by the story’s author. Sturgeon, consistent with his use of the auctorial voice (in the style of British novelist Henry Fielding) as part of his stories from the beginning of his writing career, made the afterword part of his story. He used a shortened, rewritten version of the afterword (when he first published the story outside of Harlan’s anthology—in Case and the Dreamer, a Sturgeon collection of three short novels published in 1974) to conclude themes raised in auctorial asides earlier in the story. So the afterword appears in that shortened form as part of the story, as in Case and the Dreamer. It’s a letter to the story’s reader, parallel to the letter from TS to Harlan quoted in Ellison’s introduction.
Finally, for the reader’s enjoyment, this is a letter Sturgeon wrote to his wife Marion and their children in Woodstock, New York, dated July 15, 1966, and thus during the period he was staying with Harlan and writing some of the stories in this volume:
Dear Dear Everybody:
This is just a short note to let you know I love you all, each and every single one, and love you well; and that I miss you and will appreciate any tiny word from any of you about what you are doing and what you are thinking about, no matter how trivial you might think it is; it’s important to me. Also I want you to know that I am working very hard on my two television shows, The Invaders and Star Trek, and although it is very hard, and coming too slowly, it is going well, and if I work very hard I will be able to be back in Woodstock before the second week in August.
I will tell you about one adventure and one wonderful surprise. The other night Harlan had the wild and sudden impulse to go to a huge discount store called Akron—kind of a Big Scot. Harlan’s little bronze Austin-Healey only has two seats, and Norman Spinrad, the writer, is here, and Harlan’s girlfriend Sherri, so we took my car, which is a little brown Volkswagen I rented, and off we went. As soon as we got there Harlan dived into the clothing section and I disappeared into Hardware and Tools and Sherri began to look at hats and sweaters and Norman sort of got lost.
After quite a long time, Harlan found me looking at some lumber thoughtfully, and zeroed in on something stacked next to the lumber. “Just what we need,” he said, in that superpositive Harlan Ellison way, pointing at a twelve-foot stepladder. “What on earth for?” says I. Says he: “To clean the inside of the skylight.” “But Harlan!” “Come on,” says he. “Let’s take it over to the checkout.” “But Harlan,” I said gently, knocking him down and putting my knee to his chest, “don’t you think it’s too big?” “Oh no. It’ll just reach,” says he. Says I, patiently, “I don’t mean for the skylight, Harlan, I mean for the Volkswagen, Harlan: that stepladder is TWELVE FEET LONG.” Says he, a great light dawning: “Oh.” So we went to the check-out to pick up the other things he had bought.
He had bought the way nobody else in the world buys: hot plate trivets, some Italian knit dickies, some stationery, kitchen stuff, some electrical fixtures, an ebony and wicker settle about the size of our
piano bench, and FOUR THIRTY-QUART GARBAGE CANS. We loaded everything into the garbage cans and carried them out to the Volks. We put them down on the sidewalk. We looked at each other and at the car, which somehow looked very much smaller than it had before we went in. Spinrad, who at the best of times is an Eeyore, immediately sent up a wail of total despair and impossibility. Sherri, who is usually a very self-contained girl, began to laugh uncontrollably. Harlan took out his glasses and put them on, and uttering small sounds of purpose and reassurance, began attacking the problem of loading the car. “See? No sweat! Told you. Now the other garbage can? Just give it a good shove there. Right. What do you mean you can’t get the door shut?” and so on. Norman began to get really persuasive with his Eeyorisms.
The store was now closed and we wouldn’t be able to return the merchandise. If the police saw the car loaded like that they’d make us take half of it out, probably miles out on a freeway. And besides it looked as if it were going to rain. About this time Harlan got the last of our purchases into the car and got both doors and the trunk lid closed. ‘I told you!’ he said triumphantly. The trunk was full and the back seat was full and the seat-backs were tipped forward, the right one against the windshield and the left one smack against the steering wheel. ‘Harlan,’ I said. ‘Where are we going to put the people?’ ‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged, wrenched the door open and started to pull everything out again. The self-contained Sherri staggered backwards across the sidewalk and clung to the building front to keep from collapsing; I don’t think I have ever seen anyone laugh so hard. Norman, on the other hand, seemed about to dissolve in tears. Harlan got everything back out on the sidewalk, took off his glasses, polished them, put them back on again and began loading things in a different way. (Do you know how big a thirty-quart garbage can is? Big enough for one of me, or two of Harlan, to hide in with the cover on.…) Well—he did it.
And all four of us got into the front seat. We went to a place which serves nothing but pancakes—Swedish and German and French and flaming and with sausages and sour cream and six kinds of syrup and lots more. We ate so many pancakes that we came this close to being too fat to get back in the car. And all the while I was chewing on the knobby thought that Harlan had already bought the garbage cans and that settle when he came back to where I was and started lusting after a twelve-foot stepladder.
“Runesmith”: by Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison; first published in F&SF, May 1970. Harlan Ellison’s introduction to this story, in his 1983 book Partners in Wonder:
“Sturgeon and I go back many years. No words by me are needed to add to the luster and familiarity of his reputation and his writings. Of his personal warmth and understanding of people I’ve written at length in Dangerous Visions and elsewhere, as I have written of his many kindnesses to me.
Ted came out to the Coast about five years ago and stayed with me for a while, and we got to know each other almost better than we wanted to. (Picture this, if you will: Ted has a penchant for running around in the buff; that’s cool; I do it myself a lot of the time. But I make these tiny concessions to propriety when I know nice people with easily blown minds are coming to the house; I wear a towel. After the first few incidents—a cookie-peddling Brownie ran screaming, an Avon lady had an orgasm on my front stoop, a gentleman of undetermined sexual orientation started frothing—I suggested to Ted that while he had one of the truly imposing physiques of the Western World, and while we all loved him sufficiently to overlook the vice squad pigs who came to the door at the request of the Brownie’s den momma, that he would make me much happier if he would for Christ’s sake put something on. So he wandered around wearing these outrageous little red bikini underpants.) For his part, Ted had to put up with my quixotic morality, which flails wildly between degenerate and Puritan. I would catch him, from time to time, when I’d done something either terribly one or the other with a look on his face usually reserved for Salvation Army musicians who find their street corner is occupied by a nasty drunk lying in the gutter.
But we managed to be roommates without too much travail, and during that period I suggested to Ted that we do a story that we could dedicate to the memory of Dr. Paul Linebarger, who wrote speculative fiction of the highest order under the name Cordwainer Smith. Ted thought that was a pretty fair idea, so I typed out the title “Runesmith” and sat down—I type titles standing—and did the first section, up to the sentence, Smith, alone. Then!
Then, the dumb motherfucker pulled one of those wretched tricks only a basically evil person can conceive. He decided in between paragraphs that he didn’t care for the way the story was going and he wrote the section beginning with ‘Alone’ and ending—without hope of linking or continuing—at the sentence that begins, ‘The final sound of the fall was soft …’
‘Now what the hell is that supposed to be?’ I demanded, really pissed off. Sturgeon just smiled. ‘How do you expect me to proceed from there, you clown? Everybody knows the plot has to start emerging in the first 1500 words, and you’ve tied me off like a gangrenous leg!’ Sturgeon just smiled. I suppose you think that’s funny, dump the hero into a pit, he can’t get out, the lions are gnawing at his head. You think that’s really funny. Dumb is what it is, Ted, it is dumb!” Sturgeon just smiled.
I threw my hands in the air, dumped the six pages of the story in a file for a week, and didn’t get back to it till I’d calmed down. Then I went on and wrote—struggling to smooth the break between my first and second sections and that gibberish of his—the section running from Smith backed to the wall of the landing to the section where he returns to his former lodgings, where the mistake was first made. (But much of what you now find in that longish section came in rewrite. It was only three pages of typescript originally.)
Then I gave it to Ted. Twenty-six months passed. Finally, I called him—he was long since gone from my house, where it was possible to get an armlock on him—and told him if he wasn’t going to get off his ass and finish the story, to return it to me, so I could lift out that demented section he’d written, and complete it myself. Nine months passed.
So I called him and told him I’d trash his damned house, rape his old lady, murder his kids, loot his exchequer, pillage his pantry, burn his silo, slaughter his oxen, pour salt on his fields and in general carry on cranky. Four months passed.
So I had a lady friend call him and tell him I was dying of the Dutch Elm Blight, lying on my death bed and asking, as a last request, for the story. He went to the mountains with his wife and kids for a holiday.
‘What is all this nonsense about Sturgeon understanding love?’ I screamed, stamping my foot.
Two weeks later Dr. Jekyll waltzed into the house and handed me the completed first draft, smiled, went away. I didn’t waste any time. I rewrote it from stem to stern, cackling fiendishly all the while, sent it off, and kept the money!
Now how about that, Sturgeon!”
“Jorry’s Gap”: first published in Adam, October 1968. This was one of the first of the “Wina stories” (a name given by Sturgeon to a burst of new stories that flowed forth from his pen and typewriter shortly after the arrival in his southern California life of a woman named Wina who would become his fourth long-term committed life partner and the mother of his seventh child, Andros). He recounts Wina’s positive effect on his life and writing in the introduction to his 1971 collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well, which consists almost entirely of “Wina stories.”
These stories were also the product of a special relationship Sturgeon developed with two young editors of “men’s magazines,” Merrill Miller and Jared Rutter, who agreed to purchase and publish any stories Sturgeon sent them, whether science fiction or not. One can approach the typewriter with a wonderful sense of wingspread with a market like that, Sturgeon said in his introduction to Sturgeon Is Alive and Well. He went on to say: Nothing will ever stop me from writing science fiction, but there sure is a plot afoot to keep me from writing anything else, and I won’t have it. Perhaps now you can
understand why I am so pleased with this collection In 1968, when this story was written, Ted’s son Robin was 16, and was living in the small town of Woodstock with his mother, two younger teenage sisters, and his little brother.
“Brownshoes”: first published in Adam, May 1969. This story was then reprinted in F&SF, October 1969, under the title “The Man Who Learned Loving.” It went on to win the Nebula Award (voted on by members of the Science Fiction Writers of America) for best science fiction short story of the year. It is also an early “Wina story.” The ongoing argument between the hippie chick and her hip guy on whether it is possible to save the world while wearing unhip brown shoes or whether in fact that was necessary as protective coloration is classic, evidence that Sturgeon was writing from his own experience.
“It Was Nothing—Really!” first published in Knight, November 1969, and another early “Wina story.” This is another of a series of Sturgeon stories (including “Brownshoes”) on “how to save the world,” very much an expression of what was on the minds of intelligent, caring people when the story was written.
“Take Care of Joey”: first published in Knight, January 1971. The line near the end, “or the one boy with curly hair” is a reference to himself, Ted Sturgeon, a recollection of what he went through as a young man with curly hair.
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