Sturgeon’s introduction to this story in his 1979 collection The Golden Helix:
Wishful thinking … I yearn to live on Xanadu, and wear their garment, and join with them in their marvelous lifestyle.
Well, I can’t live there and I can’t live as they do, but I can do the next best thing: to infect locked-up minds with the idea of freedom in highly contagious ways.
Dr. Toni Morrison, novelist, essayist and educator, gave a commencement address at Bard College in 1979 in which she said (among many other powerful things) that your freedom is worthless unless you use it to free someone else, and that happiness is not happiness unless it makes others happy.
I never set down in a simple declarative sentence the theme of my Xanadu story, and now a truly great human being has done it for me.
A radio dramatization of this story aired on WBAI-FM in New York City sometime in he 1960s.
The title of the story, and the name of the planet and community where it takes place, are clearly taken from Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan,” which is so well known in the English-speaking world that Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “Xanadu” as “a place (as a town or village) of idyllic beauty.” This story and its companion piece “The Touch of your Hand” (1953), which presents the same very powerful and original-to-Sturgeon idea and ideal, are clearly conscious efforts at utopian writing by Sturgeon (as he confirms in the story-introduction quoted above).
“When I was a child,” science fiction novelist Somtow Sucharitkul wrote in Locus in July 1985, “I wanted to be exactly like Theodore Sturgeon when I grew up. This was because I discovered a short story called ‘The Skills of Xanadu’ in an anthology in a carton of abandoned books on the floor of the library at the Bangkok British School. It was a story set in a universe of astonishing beauty and brutality, a universe ultimately redeemed by compassion. This story changed my life. Later I parlayed the story’s theme into an entire tetralogy of my own, but you see, Ted said it all in only twenty pages.”
“The Claustrophile”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1956. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, ALONG COMES A STORY LIKE THIS THAT TURNS ‘COMMON SENSE’ AROUND—AND PLUMPS IT DOWN SQUARELY ON ITS FEET!
Sturgeon’s introduction to this story in his 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx:
We are a hero-hungry culture, and it has been a convention to visualize our heroes—especially in the early days of science fiction—to give our heroes bulging deltoids, perfect teeth, and a short temper. The transference of this hero to the controls of spacecraft is understandable but hardly rational. Why a man who is best qualified for bare-handed conflict with a Siberian tiger is the ideal spaceman defies logic.
“Show me a man who cannot be by himself,” said my dear old mother, “and I’ll show you a man who is not good company.” It was this cogitation that led me to wonder why, in so much science fiction, the spaceman had to be the intellectual heir of Conan the Conqueror.
Or, for that matter, why had he to be a man at all? Despite the proven preferences of NASA, women really are as smart as human beings, and by and large, are smaller and lighter.
This is the line of thought that produced “The Claustrophile.”
“Dead Dames Don’t Dial”: first published in The Saint Detective Magazine, August 1956. This story was adapted as a television drama and broadcast on a program called Schlitz Playhouse in 1959.
Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance:
ARRESTING A KILLER FOR A MINOR BREACH OF THE LAW MAY BACKFIRE DISASTROUSLY. BUT WITH LIEUTENANT HOWELL IT WAS A PATHWAY TO GLORY.
“Fear Is a Business”: first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1956. Editor’s introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance: “Earlier in this issue, I quoted Heinlein’s prophecy of the ‘mass psychoses’ of ‘the sixth decade’ of this century, and referred to the ‘saucer’ hysteria as an example. Much—far too much—science fiction has been writen about saucers, and far too little about saucerism, its causes and implications. Here the compassionate eye of Theodore Sturgeon contemplates a successful saucermonger and finds—well, as in all of the best Sturgeon stories, a little of the truth about all of us.”
“The Other Man”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1956. Written sometime in 1955 or early in 1956. This is one of two stories in this volume that can be considered a collaboration between two of the acknowledged grand masters of science fiction writing, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert A. Heinlein.
I went into a terrible dry spell one time, Sturgeon said in his Guest of Honor speech at the 20th World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1962. It was a desperate dry spell and an awful lot depended on me getting writing again. Finally, I wrote to Bob Heinlein. I told him my troubles; that I couldn’t write—perhaps it was that I had no ideas in my head that would strike a story. By return airmail—I don’t know how he did it—I got back twenty-six story ideas. Some of them ran for a page and a half; one or two of them were a line or two. I mean, there were story ideas that some writers would give their left ear for, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Some of them were merely suggestions; just little hints, things that will spark a writer like, “Ghost of a little cat patting around eternity looking for a familiar lap to sit in.”
This mechanical, chrome-plated Heinlein has a great deal of heart. I had told him my writing troubles, but I hadn’t told him of any other troubles, but clipped to the stack of story ideas was a check for a hundred dollars with a little scribbled note, “I have a suspicion your credit is bent.”
It is very difficult for words like “thank you” to handle a man that can do a thing like that.
I have used, incidentally, two of his ideas since, with due credit built in. Heinlein has some pen names, you know … and when I use one of his ideas I use the names throughout the manuscript in some way. One of the stories, “Fear Is a Business,” has pure Heinlein as the basic idea. I think the other one was “The Other Man.” I am not sure about that, but I do know “Fear Is a Business” was one of them.
The latter statement is incorrect; Sturgeon while preparing his talk seems to have confused “Fear Is a Business” with another story of his that he sold to the same magazine the same year, “And Now the News …”, which does indeed have “pure Heinlein” (from Robert Heinlein’s Feb. 11, 1955 letter to Sturgeon full of what he refers to as “Sturgeonish ideas”) as its basic idea and indeed the source of its plot in detail. “Fear Is a Business,” however, does not seem to derive from any of the story ideas or suggestions in Heinlein’s letter, which I found among Sturgeon’s papers after his death.
“The Other Man” definitely uses one of Heinlein’s letter’s ideas as a springboard, and Sturgeon acknowledged this by naming Richard Newell’s alternate personality in the story “Anson” (Robert A. Heinlein’s middle name and the first part of Heinlein’s 1941 pseudonym Anson MacDonald). On the second page of his typewritten, single-spaced, five-page letter, Heinlein wrote:
“We know very little about multiple personality, despite the many case records. Suppose a hypnoanalyst makes a deep investigation into a schizoid … and comes up with the fact that it is a separate and non-crazy personality in the body, distinct from the nominal one, and that this new personality is a refugee from (say) 2100 A.D., when conditions are so intolerable that escape into another body and another time (even this period) is to be preferred, even at the expense of living more or less helplessly in another man’s body.”
The next paragraph of Heinlein’s letter follows this train of thought to provide the basis for what would be one of Sturgeon’s finer stories, “The Other Man”:
“Or do it this way: hypnoanalyst hypnotizes patient; second personality emerges and refuses to go away. Original-owner personality is a nogood, a bastard, a public enemy, a wifebeater, etc.; new personality is a real hero-type, good, smart, hardworking, etc.
What is the ethical situation? Should the analyst try his damnedest to suppress and wipe out the false personality and give the body back to its owner? Or should he accept that the world is improved by the change? This could be made quite critical.”
In his introduction to “The Other Man” in the 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx, Sturgeon wrote: A great many scientists and technologists are involved in science fiction. During the Big War, the largest block of subscriptions to Astounding Science Fiction was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the next largest in Hanford, Washington—facts, John Campbell told me, that the German military intelligence never discovered or noticed. Whenever I appear on radio or television, the interviewer may or may not know anything about the field, but you can bet the guys behind the glass wall do. Many famous scientists, like astronomer Fred Hoyle, anthropologist Chad Oliver, rocket designer G. Harry Stine, and the late Willy Ley, have written it, and some, like Carl Sagan and M.I.T.’s brilliant Marvin Minsky, have come to science through an early love for it. And I had the heady experience of being told by a Nobel caliber scientist that he became a microbiologist because of a single story I wrote.
Such being the case, why doesn’t some psychiatrist or psychotherapist pick up on the technique suggested by this story? Intuitively I know that it, or something like it, just has to work. Intuition, of course, is no substitute for expertise. In other words, if I knew enough I’d be doing it instead of writing about it. But it’s a valid notion just the same.
Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: IT WAS WHOLLY, SHOCKINGLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO TAKE THIS CASE—ONE REASON EVERYBODY KNEW; THE OTHER HE KEPT TO HIMSELF—ONLY THERE WAS NOT ONE SINGLE WAY FOR HIM TO GET OUT OF IT!
Sturgeon, after submitting “And Now the News …” to F&SF, told F&SF editor Anthony Boucher the story of his collaboration with Heinlein, in a letter dated May 21, 1956: I forgot to tell you one most important thing about ANTN: a year ago last Feb I was in the blackest reaches of Avichi and wrote a desperate yell to Bob Heinlein, saying I could write but had nothing to say; by airmail special I got a thick missive containing 26 valid story ideas, ranging from a single line (“… the shade of a little cat padding through eternity looking for that one familiar lap”) to 2-300 wd explications of epic ideas. Thru getting this I made the discovery that I still couldn’t write, which made things worse for me instead of better, but it was a most valuable thing to know and saved me a lot of searching in wrong directions. Then came the beginning of the upturn; the first of these RH ideas was what you just bought. The next was THE OTHER MAN, upcoming later this year in GALAXY, and so far that’s all. But there will be more of them, and my current ambition is to keep them out of all other collections and run them as a book dedicated to Bob. Hey, how about RH POSITIVE as a title?!
Three-fourths of the way through this story, Sturgeon mentions the inscription above the door of doctor Fred’s clinic—“Only man can fathom man”—and says, “It was from Robert Lindner.” Possibly the quote is from Lindner’s 1954 best-seller The Fifty-Minute Hour: A Collection of True Psychoanalytic Tales.
“The Waiting Thing Inside” by Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward; first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1956.
In his Feb. 4, 1956 letter to Anthony Boucher, TS wrote: In addition I have found (and I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t) a collaborator—Don Ward, a really wonderful guy, a good editor, and above all a patient man. Don dreams ’em up and I write ’em my way and submit them without his seeing them; that last seems to be the thing which makes it possible at all. We sold a Western that got a Special Mention in the EQMM contest, another that has the lead in Howard Browne’s new magazine, and have on the pan another EQMM murder mystery and a Western aimed at the SEP [Saturday Evening Post]. This suggests that both “The Waiting Thing Inside” and “The Deadly Innocent” were written, and sold to the magazines they eventually appeared in, before February 1956, probably in the autumn of 1955. Don Ward, in his introduction to the 1973 Sturgeon/Ward collection Sturgeon’s West, confirms that “The Waiting Thing Inside” is the story that “won an honorable mention in one of EQMM’s annual prize story competitions.”
Editor’s introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance:
“We are happy to welcome the first appearance in EQMM of Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward.… Mr. Sturgeon—one of the ‘big names’ in the field of science fiction—tells us little of his awards and accomplishments, but those of you who are science fiction fans know all about Ted. However, here is a little background that you will find revealing. His primary education, he says, was simply ‘academic parents.’ For his secondary education, he simply ran away to sea. For his higher education, he drove a truck, served as a short-order cook, did a stint of farm labor, and worked in hotels and in advertising. As a post-graduate course, he got married, and now he and his wife have a son Robin and a daughter Tandy. His hobbies? Maybe you will be surprised, and then again maybe you won’t: they include a hot guitar and a hot-rod truck.
“Don Ward got his Ph.D. more formally—in 1941 in political science at Syracuse University. He taught history and political science for five years, then switched to the publishing business where, for the past ten years, he has been deeply involved in Westerns and in science fiction, and for seven of those ten years has been editor of Zane Grey’s Western Magazine for Dell. He is married to a beautiful blonde, has three sons and one daughter, and his natural habitat is Exurbia.
“Mr. Sturgeon’s and Mr. Ward’s collaborative story is a tale of Western crime with emphasis on characterization. You will meet a strange triangle in Delia, Vic, and Roy—with the pent-up passions of long, shabby years, of calculating, hating, fearing, repressing, and, most dangerous of all, of waiting …”
“The Deadly Innocent” by Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward; first published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, November 1956. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: THIS LOVELY MANTRAP WOULDN’T HURT A FLY—LANCE WAS NO LITERARY MAN, BUT WHEN HE MET GLAMOROUS ELOISE, AUTHOR OF BEST-SELLING ROMANCES, HE WAS A GONE GANDER. JUST HOW FAR GONE, LANCE HAD NO IDEA UNTIL LATER.
“And Now the News …”: first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1956. Editor’s introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance: “Mr. Sturgeon says that this is a science fiction story and he can by God prove it. You may decide that it’s a fantasy … or possibly a mystery … or conceivably a surrealist view of straight reality. In other words, it’s a story outside of any ordinary commercial category, a story that creates its own genre—and one of the most distinguished stories that F&SF has ever had the pleasure of publishing.” This is strong praise, and I’d like to add that I’ve long considered this one of the finest short stories ever written by an American writer. I have also noted, in my book The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits, that with this story “Theodore Sturgeon became the first modern storyteller to call attention to the enormous impact on Everyman, on the individual human being, of the rapid evolution of our communications media during the twentieth century.”
Sturgeon’s introduction to “And Now the News …” in his 1979 collection The Golden Helix:
It was 1956, and the beginning of a conscious realization that to limit science fiction to outer space was just that—a limitation, and that science fiction has and should have as limitless a character as poetry; further, that it has a real function in inner space. This in turn led me to a redefinition of science itself, and to an increasing preoccupation with humanity not only as the subject of science, but as its source. It has become my joy to find out what makes it tick, especially when it ticks unevenly.
One more thing about this story: I had written to a friend with the complaint that I hadn’t an idea in my head, and needed one urgently. On a cold November morning my wife and I opened his response. Twenty-six story ideas—a paragraph, a sentence, a suggestion, a situation. Clipped to th
e pages was a check with a note: “I have the feeling your credit is bent.’ As my wife and I stared at it and each other—the furnace stopped. That furnace would stop for only two reasons: the house was warm enough, or we had just run out of fuel, and it certainly wasn’t warm enough. Right on cue. We both wept.
This story springs from one of the springboards in that package, and the springboarder’s name is Robert A. Heinlein, and I’m pleased at this opportunity to acknowledge this single favor among the many he has done me by his writings and by his—well, his being.
While I said above that “The Other Man” uses a Heinlein-letter idea as it springboard, I would describe the genesis of “And Now the News …” differently. In this case, a good argument could be made for considering this story as something written “by Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein,” because Heinlein in his letter provided the full plot of the story in great detail—and even its remarkable punch-line. Here is the “idea” from the letter:
“Once there was a man who could not stand it. First he lost the power to read and then the headlines did not bother him any longer. Then he lost the power to understand speech and then the radio could not bother him. He became quite happy and the wrinkles smoothed out of his face and he quit being tense and he painted and modelled in clay and danced and listened to music and enjoyed life.
“Then a clever psychiatrist penetrated his fugue and made him sane again. Now he could read and listen to the radio and he became aware again of the Cold War and juvenile delinquency and rapes and rapacity and et cetera ad nauseam.
“He still couldn’t stand it. He killed quite a number of people before they got him.”
One reason it is surprising that the plot of this story originates with Heinlein and not Sturgeon is that Sturgeon himself had for years been an obsessive listener to the hourly news on the radio. The opening scene of his 1946 story “Mewhu’s Jet” describes such a man in humorous and painful detail.
And Now the News Page 41