And Now the News

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Another way it’s surprising that this story was plotted by the dean of modern science fiction, the man who practically invented the medium, is that Sturgeon had a lot of worries about whether the story would be bought and published, once he’d finished it, because it’s not exactly a “science fiction” story and therefore not necessarily appropriate to a science fiction magazine (or, for other reasons, to any other genre fiction magazine). TS wrote to Anthony Boucher in May 1956 about “And Now the News …”: Here’s its history. I wrote it for EQMM’s last contest; Joe and Bob did me the kindness of holding the final decision on First Prize until they’d seen it. Bob Mills, having read it now not once but twice, is gratifyingly enthused, but of course can’t buy by himself. I don’t know what Fred’s feeling is, but from Lee I got the most exorbitantly praiseful rejection note I have seen in eighteen years of professional writing. He too has read it twice now, and (Bob tells me) feels the same way. Reason for exclusion from EQMM: crime angle not strong enough for the EQ reader. Reason for second reading: Bob’s suggestion that it might be slightly recast to increase this: i.e., an opening “In the matter of the deaths of (four names) …” and a framing of a private eye (or crime-school student, or M.A. looking for doctorate) who is hunting the reasons for these reasonless killings. Reason for ultimate rejection: its length, which Fred felt was too great for EQ; he’d willingly buy it at 4M if I can do it. I probably can but dammit I won’t.

  After its first showing to EQMM I sent it to Horace [Gold, of Galaxy] and then to John [Campbell, of Astounding] to see if it could wind up those goddam advances and leave me clear for you. Horace was afraid of it because he has been flooded with psychiatric stories and doesn’t know how the readers would like it; he has regarded all my recent sales to him as dangerously borderline (in terms of the field and/or previous in the literary evolution of the form. He asks specifically for it in 9 (now 4) months for re-evaluation; he personally loves it. John rejected it out of hand with the extraordinarily astute comment: “This is a splendid and splendidly written story, Ted, but you’re going to have a hell of time selling it. It isn’t a crime story, it isn’t a romance, western, fantasy, s-f; it’s something unto itself. The modern reader wants to know before he reads something what it is he’s going to read, for all his demands for originality.” I boggle at his dictum about its not being s-f. I think it’s definitive s-f, the famous Sturgeon definition being “a human story investigating a humanly soluble problem, cast in a narrative which could not be told without the science aspect.” If psychiatry isn’t a science, chemotherapy is, and I’d like to see you try this story without chemotherapy.

  Thence, on Don Ward’s insistence, (Don is partner to a (regrettable) new literary agency these days, but I go along with it on a trial basis and because only Don handles my stuff) it went the rounds of some higherpaying markets. Reaction was consistently favorable, and consistently no. The essence of most of it (where opinion was expressed at all) bears out my opinion that there is an interesting parallel to be drawn between the bawdy stories re monks and nuns circa Bocaccio, and the rash of psychiatrist jokes now current. These are, I opine, all expressions of awe and worship, couched in terms of little-boy defiance. The ironic cast of AND NOW THE NEWS speaks too pointedly of the psychiatrist who does everything right and destroys the patient; editors seem timid about this, never for themselves, always on behalf of their readers. One of the most entrancing examples of this is the editor who rejected the story without explanation, and then worriedly looked me up later to buy beer and explain that it was (for once, he asserted) a personal thing; that the story disturbed him because someone very close to him had been in and out of institutions for years and he was full up to here with psychotherapists and their cant, their superiority and “infallibility.” Especially Freudians. “I would publish a story any time,” he told me gravely, “—matter of fact, I’m actively looking for one—which destroys the myth of the infallibility of the Freudian analyst.” I was speechless with astonishment, and still reverberate like a struck gong. This man is so reverent and awed that he couldn’t recall what he was confessing to me, or what about!

  Don Ward sent the story back to Bob Mills for the EQMM second look, and Bob returned it to me “Wet,” he said, “with my tears.” Don wanted it back to recirculate in the slicks, but this time I said no; you hadn’t seen it yet and should. Not only would its purchase square my account with Mercury [F&SF’s publisher], I think I’d be happier to see it in your readers’ hands than anyone else’s anywhere. They are many and varied, those readers, but the one thing they have in common is that their reverence and awe is more highly placed than that of the general mags, and I don’t think they’ll be hurt. Also, more of ’em appreciate cadence in writing than other readers in the field; I won’t deny that that matters to me.

  (On rereading the above I find I neglected to mention JWC [Campbell]’s other reason for rejection: he would like a rewrite making the story-focus a matter of the protagonist’s “genetic inability to adjust,” a package of goods he’s promulgating these days, which drives me wild.)

  Now in the event that you find this story acceptable BUT, and if that but lies in the area of your logotype, I can save the time of a coast-to-coast interchange [Boucher lived in California] with these suggestions: If you really feel this yarn is not close enough to conventional science fiction (my God what a phrase to use!) I can fix it up in one of two ways: Dishonestly (in terms of my own definition) by making the car a turbine job, the train a monorail, the radios and TV sets more advanced (RCA’s picture-on-the-wall flat set, for example); in short, put the story In the near future and therefore in the s-f matrix. I did this kind of job only once before, adding a space-ship to HURRICANE TRIO [in early 1955] to get it into Galaxy; it was a slick before that [a non-genre story aimed at and submitted to “slick” magazine markets], rejected all over—awe and reverence again. Eleanor Stierham [evidently the editor of a woman’s magazine, circa 1947]: “The woman doesn’t exist who would take such a risk.” Bull’s balls! HT was a true story and I was there! Anyway, if you think an invisible mending job such as this would do, just say the word. Keep the ms and I’ll do you a work-sheet with inserts, keeping your labor to a minimum. I have the carbon.

  Honestly: By framing the story pretty much as is by describing a great plague of suicide-murders which overcomes modern man [notice the accuracy of Sturgeon’s and Heinlein’s off-handed “prediction”!!] due to the creeping gangrene of cultural terror, and this as the first recorded case-history, which, ironically enough, contains both the cause (as MacLyle describes it) and the cure (his kind of retreat). But this will cost you 2,000 more words.

  If you have an alternative, I’ll listen with all my ears. But you must know that for once my art and my pocketbook concur, and my preference and desire is to see it printed as is.

  A final note on the whole subject of psychiatry: I am keeping this very quiet, for several excellent reasons, and therefore exact your confidence: I have been since January in therapy and with a Freudian analyst. She was found for me by Bob Lindner [see the end of the note on “The Other Man,” above] just before he died, and is working with me for virtually nothing because Lindner felt I was worth saving, may he live forever. Anyway, she thinks the story is brilliant and is only amused at the suggestion that anyone might feel it is an attack on her and her colleagues. A wonderful delineation of humanity’s widespread fear of what people might think. Being afraid of what they do think is poltroonish enough: but this …!

  If you bounce it I’ll still love you.

  The “history” above was sent to Anthony Boucher along with the manuscript of this story. In a separate letter to “My dear Tony” sent in the same package, TS referred to the enclosed AND NOW THE NEWS and said, After the last page I have appended a note. I don’t intend for it to sway you if the story doesn’t, but there are things you should know about it which make far more sense after you’ve read the story than before. So I enjoin you not to read that not
e until you’ve seen the story. The two-page “note” begins with no salutation, but the self-conscious lines: What the hell’s an author’s opinion worth? Does it matter to anyone that I like it? Then a paragraph break and: Well, aside from that: here’s its history.

  The name of this story’s protagonist, MacLyle, derives from two of the pseudonyms Robert Heinlein used when writing a lot of magazine fiction in the early 1940s, Lyle Monroe and Anson MacDonald.

  “The Girl Had Guts”: first published in Venture Science Fiction, January 1957.

  A radio dramatization of this story aired on WBAI-FM in New York City sometime in the 1960s.

  “The Girl Had Guts” appeared in the first issue of Venture, a magazine published by the same publisher as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which “put a higher priority on action-adventure sf than did its companion,” according to The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. The editor was Robert P. Mills. Sturgeon had stories in four of the ten issues Venture published during its short year-and-a-half run. He contributed a book review column to the four issues of Venture published in 1958.

  “The Other Celia”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1957. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: SOMETHING DRASTIC SHOULD HAPPEN TO ALL SNOOPERS—BUT NOTHING AS SHOCKING AND FRIGHTFUL AS THIS!

  This is considered a major Sturgeon story by several of his critics. David Pringle, in his introduction to the 1987 collection A Touch of Sturgeon, points out that Slim, the “fumbling, voyeuristic” protagonist of “The Other Celia” is “one of society’s outcasts,” like the protagonists of More than Human, The Dreaming Jewels, and “Bright Segment.” “Alienation,” Pringle writes in the same essay, “is as strong and abiding a theme in Sturgeon’s work as is union or love.” Pringle goes on to say, perceptively, “There is a sense in which all Sturgeon’s protagonists are adolescents, whatever their stated ages.”

  “The Other Celia” is one of three particularly fine Sturgeon stories written in the mid-1950s that take place in a boarding house or rooming house. The other two are “The Claustrophile” and “The (Widget), the (Wadget), and Boff.”

  “The Other Celia” has been anthologized several times as a “horror” story; it is also a fantasy in the tradition of Unknown magazine, which Sturgeon wrote for (and regarded highly) at the beginning of his career. But although the denouement is certainly horrific, and the circumstance the story focuses on (Celia’s two skins or bodies) is quite fantastic and/or science fictional, the essential point Sturgeon makes here, as in much of his work, is that if we look at the human world closely (as this story’s protagonist does in his unhealthily compulsive way) and realistically, we will find more strangeness than is commonly acknowledged or assumed. Shakespeare’s line from Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” is a good summation of Sturgeon’s primary theme, particularly in stories like this that are told in a realistic style or voice. Sturgeon’s own, well-metered, version of Hamlet’s comment to Horatio can be found in these lines from “The Other Celia”:

  And when he came to think about it, as ultimately he did, it occurred to Slim that within the anthill in which we all live and have our being, enough privacy can be exacted to allow for all sorts of strangeness in the members of society, providing the strangeness is not permitted to show. If it is a man’s pleasure to sleep upside-down like a bat, and if he so arranges his life that no one ever sees him sleeping, or his sleeping-place, why, bat-like he may sleep all the days of his life.

  Science fiction writer and critic Algis Budrys (writing in an amateur magazine called Science Fiction Forum) said of this story shortly after its publication: “ ‘The Other Celia’ represent’s Galaxy’s high point for the year. In a way, it seems to be the quintessence of Sturgeon to date. He has pared his human interaction down to just two characters, who never meet and never speak, either to themselves or to the reader. Still there is conflict, action, development, suspense, characterization, and mood … conveyed by wordless symbols, the way the Chinese paint.”

  Sturgeon’s “maunderings” (typewritten notes to himself, trying to develop story ideas and plots) indicate that after writing the first 3/8ths of this story, probably sometime early in 1956, he tried hard to develop it into a much longer and more complex story—i.e., to find a way to use these 3,000 words he had already written (up to the point where Slim first discovers Celia’s box of typing paper) as the start of a novelette he could sell to a magazine for more money than a shorter tale would bring him. These notes do suggest that the idea of Celia’s body-transfer lifestyle didn’t come to him until long after he wrote the beginning of the story as we know it.

  “Affair With a Green Monkey”: first published in Venture Science Fiction, May 1957. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: LOOLYO WAS—DIFFERENT. WHICH WAS WHY FRITZ DIDN’T WORRY ABOUT LEAVING ALMA ALONE WITH HIM. ALMA WORRIED, THOUGH—SHE DISCOVERED THAT THE “DIFFERENCE” COULD KILL HER …

  In August 1957, in a proposal for the short story collection A Touch of Strange, Sturgeon wrote of this story: Though using a science fiction device, it is actually a contemporary study, perhaps a fable. A calculated shocker which is still drawing mail to Venture, though it appeared in the May issue.

  A radio dramatization of this story aired on WBAI-FM in New York City sometime in the 1960s.

  “The Pod in the Barrier”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, September 1957. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: IT WAS A WALL IN SPACE … WITH NO WAY TO GO OVER OR UNDER OR AROUND OR THROUGH IT … AND IT WAS THOSE OUTSIDE WHO WERE THE PRISONERS!

  I have noted before (in the story notes on “Blabbermouth” in Volume III of this series) that one of Sturgeon’s characteristic and almost unique contributions to science fiction is his recognition and contemplation of specific human emotions as energy fields or energy beings that sometimes have enormous yet subtle and mysterious powers to affect aspects of physical reality not usually perceived as subject to psychological forces. Virginia’s ability—in “The Pod in the Barrier”—to “generate clouds of retroactive doubt” is an example of this … and in this story turns out to be the vehicle for rescuing an overcrowded Earth from imminent self-destruction (even though it’s a personality trait that others in the story find quite maddening). “The Pod in the Barrier” got another mention in the Volume III notes when I said it can be considered “an extremely sophisticated rewrite” of Sturgeon’s 1942 story “Medusa.”

  In his proposal for A Touch of Strange, TS said of “Pod”: Space opus, with a “different” treatment and an original theory on the nature of mu mesons. It may make history: it contains a perfectly sound formula for the power field of a cold fusion technique.… Actually, it was written far too recently for seasoned judgment; it could be far better or far worse than the author thinks it is.

  An additional note on Sturgeon’s two non-science-fiction novels published in 1956:

  The King and Four Queens was a paperback Western published at the end of the year to tie in with the release of a new film starring Clark Gable. The paperback is not presented as a novelization of the movie, though the movie is mentioned on the back cover and Gable can be seen on a horse in the cover painting. Instead on the title page is the line “an original Western.” Both title page and cover note that Sturgeon’s novel is “based on a story by Margaret Fitts.” Clearly he was hired by the publisher (Dell) to write this novel expanding on the story that had provided the basis for the film.

  I, Libertine was a historical novel set in 18th century London, published by Ballantine Books in August 1956 and written by Theodore Sturgeon (though published under the pseudonym Frederick R. Ewing) in 30 days in June and July 1956. This book began as a hoax perpetrated by a popular late night (1:00–5:30 A.M.) New York City radio personality named Jean Shepherd. According to a story in the Sept. 3, 1956 issue of Newsweek: “Shepherd’s g
reatest fraudulent success has been the pushing of a nonexistent book entitled I, Libertine, written by an imaginary author.… As a punishment for such ‘list lovers’ among the day people as booksellers and publishers, Shepherd urged his listeners [called the “night people”] to request the volume at their bookstore. Inquiries were promptly recorded in 26 states and three foreign countries. In a short time Shepherd fans reported back with the news that they had heard cocktail-party people claiming to have read it.”

  According to a letter from Sturgeon to Chicago Tribune writer Vincent Starrett on July 16, 1956, the book’s title and the author’s name were invented by listeners when Shepherd announced, “Tonight we’re going to create something. I want you to call me up and give me a book title, and an author’s name, and we’ll pick the best of ’em and plug that as the book of the age.” One day last month, Sturgeon told Starrett, I took Shepherd to lunch with [publisher] Ian Ballantine, and we told him about the thing. Ian blurted, “I’ll publish it!” and I said, “I’ll write it!” Sturgeon then explains that the book came to be a historical novel when Shepherd’s literary agent (he was included in the book contract, though Sturgeon did all the writing) heard about the Ballantine offer and asked him what the book was about. Shep, never at a loss for words, said, “Why, it’s about this Madison Avenue character, see, but in the eighteenth century. An operator, you understand, but sincere. So he …” As soon as he left he raced to a phone and called me. “Hey, I found out what the book’s about …” Sturgeon looked through his Britannica Encyclopedia and like the answer to a prayer came Elizabeth Chudleigh, courtesan, simultaneously the wife of the Earl of Bristol and the Duke of Kingston.… Around her I built my tale, using my Madison Ave. character as protagonist. It isn’t a great book but it’s fun, it’s as authentic as most of its genre and more so than many, and it’s self-consistent. And I still don’t know how the hell I did it.