Microcosmic God

by Theodore Sturgeon

  When near-future science fictions fails, we usually dismiss the failure as “a gimmick story.” When far-future science fiction fails, we usually call its degenerate form “space opera.” But if we accept the division and acknowledge the fine and faulty examples on both sides, then we can go on to say that Sturgeon is the master of near-future science fiction (whereas The Stars My Destination is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the far-future variety).

  Sturgeon was born February 26th, 1918, and grew up first on Staten Island, then in Philadelphia with his mother, his stepfather, and his older brother Peter. An adolescent career as a gymnast was ended by a bout of rheumatic fever. By and large to get away from a fraught relationship with his stepfather, Sturgeon, while still a teenager, entered the merchant marine. But his burning desire was to be a writer. His first fiction sale that we know about (for five dollars—on publication) was a short-short story called “Heavy Insurance” that appeared in the McClure Newspaper Syndicate, in The Milwaukee Journal, July 16th, 1938, when he was twenty. His story “A God in a Garden,” written the following spring, marks Sturgeon’s first sale to John W. Campbell, the great science fiction (and fantasy) editor, for whom Sturgeon was to become one of the prime members in his stable of writers during the later thirties and all through the forties. A contemporary fantasy, “A God in a Garden” appeared in the October Unknown—that extraordinary journal which, over the five years of its life, all but created the genre of contemporary urban fantasy. Sturgeon’s first science fiction story, also sold to Campbell, was “Ether Breather.” It appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, September 1939.

  The Sturgeon oeuvre is magnanimous and expansive. If its verbal texture almost everywhere approaches the exquisite, its edges positively sprawl. The core of that work has been, to date, his four science fiction novels: The Dreaming Jewels, More Than Human, Venus Plus X, and The Cosmic Rape. And clearly on the SF border territory is his 1960 novella (published as a separate volume), Some of Your Blood. He also wrote an historical spoof, I, Libertine (1956) under the pseudonym of Frederick R. Ewing, a novel the tale of whose creation, at the inspiration of WOR-AM disc jockey Jean Shepherd, is a small fifties period comedy in itself. There is an Ellery Queen mystery that he ghosted, as well as some other film and TV novelizations to his credit. (The King and Four Queens [1956]; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea [1961]). His final novel, Godbody, originally written at the end of the sixties for a publisher of erotica who eventually went out of business, only appeared posthumously in 1986 and is somewhere between fantasy, science fiction and erotic mysticism. At various times and in various circles, More Than Human—really a concatenation of three interconnected long stories—has been considered the greatest science fiction novel (certainly of the near-future variety) ever written, in spite of the weakness of its ending. But Sturgeon at his strongest is finally revealed—again and again—in the torrent of wonderful stories, which Paul Williams, in this series, has organized and annotated so brilliantly.

  With the current project, the number both of the ordinary and the extraordinary tales has only risen. As far back as the special 1962 special issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction devoted to Sturgeon’s work, Judith Merril wrote: “[a] quality of voice makes the most unevenly composed Sturgeon story compellingly readable.” But it is astonishing to find that voice clear and recognizable in the very first handful of short-short stories he sold McClure as a twenty-year-old, who (after his first sale) had just broken away from the merchant marine.

  One of the great paradoxes to me has always been that the general flaws one finds in commercial fiction are invariably in the line of plot and structure: The progression of incident in the vast majority of paraliterary fictions is simply and wholly unbelievable. Having done or felt A, it is simply unbelievable that character X would proceed to do B or C. What makes this paradoxical is simply that the explicitly stated esthetic of the writers of these stories is one that holds up craft over art, that says that surface is of a wholly secondary importance as to craft—which, by this esthetic is wholly a matter of a well-structured, well-motivated plot. If craft—specifically the structuring of believable fictions—can be learned, why can so few commercial writers learn it? Equally paradoxical is the fact that without exception, every truly memorable commercial writer, from Chandler and Hammett to Bradbury and Vance, Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester and—yes—Sturgeon is memorable because of a specific writerly surface that is so easily called “style.”

  These paradoxes have produced their share of critical embarrassments.

  III

  In the 1970s, for example, in the pages of Science Fiction Studies, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem attacked Sturgeon’s story “Maturity,” one of the most respected stories in the greater Anglo-American science fiction community. During the late forties, this story greatly excited the SF community of both readers and writers. It was much talked about and several times anthologized, quickly gaining a reputation as a “science fiction classic.” Lem proceeded to point out the story’s very real structural weaknesses. On the strength of those weaknesses, Lem proceeded to dismiss the story, Sturgeon, and the critical community that had held the story to be of value. Though Lem purposely skirted the story’s good points, the flaws he picked out were—again—certainly there. But what Lem seemed wholly unaware of was the underlying cause of the excitement around the story in the first place. And that is: Sturgeon rewrote it.

  SF stories had of course been rewritten before. Editors had often asked for changes, and even the sort of rewriting Sturgeon did is suggested in the memoirs of Isaac Asimov and others from the fine old days. All the same, in 1947 a draft of “Maturity” was published in Astounding. Sturgeon was not satisfied with it. (Presumably it wasn’t mature enough … ?) The story was reworked, and a new draft (mainly the ending differs) was published in an anthology. News of the whole process became generally known throughout that small and volatile group of writers, editors and fannish readers that composed the SF community (a tenth the size, in the late forties, of what it is today.) And the interest suddenly sparked. People wanted to see what an SF story rewritten by someone among them already acknowledged as a master wordsmith looked like.

  To understand why they were so intrigued, however, we have to have some understanding of science fiction as a commercial writing field in the decade after the Second World War. We have to remember that the current respectability of science fiction is less than twenty-five years old. Many writers whose careers extend back before that period—among them many of our best—can still be heard to boast: “Me? No, I never rewrite. It all comes out first draft.” Visitors from the world of mundane fiction, where the paradigms for fictive labor are the legendary travails of Joyce and Flaubert, tend to frown here. They believe these writers (though too frequently the writers who assert these first draft miracles are, to put it politely, overstating things); what bewilders mundane visitors (from a world where a boastful writer is much more likely to talk about how much work went into the text) is the underlying assumption to the boast. They miss the subtext that gives the boast its meaning. As one graduate English student once whispered to me a decade ago at a Science Fiction Writers of America party, where a number of our most eminent practitioners were deep in a round of I-work-less-on-my-best-stories-than-thou: “What enterprise do these men [the writers in question were all men] think they are involved in that not revising is something to brag about?”

  The answer is not so difficult, however, as the graduate student might think.

  Science Fiction is a highly affective mode of writing. Our audience gasps, applauds, rises stunned from its seats, falls back limp with hanging jaw—so that the writerly stance of the virtuoso is a valid one for us. The SF writer leaps up, momentarily casts a silhouette against the stars, effects a few breathtaking turns and recoveries, then lightly sets down, bows, and saunters off; and the little postperformance gesture—“See, it was nothing”—is, of course, just the final part of the perfo
rmance.

  Now there are literary writers—Nabokov, Borges—who are as pyrotechnic in their local effects as, well, Sturgeon—or, to cite another underrated star in our galaxy, Alfred Bester. But although they make our hearts leap as high in our breasts or our breath catch as sharply in our throats, all by a mere dazzle of words, we tend to express our appreciation of those effects by knowing smiles rather than by, as SF readers so often do, falling all over the floor.

  We have all seen the SF reader at an SF convention, two o’clock in the morning, run shrieking from a hotel room, paperback waving, to halt, staggering, among the fans around the ice machine, gasping and panting: “Read that! Just read that paragraph there! I mean, isn’t that amazing!” This is a very intense reaction.

  For the SF writer to take on the public image of either a Borges (the rare work, produced over a vast period of time under the no doubt exquisitely painful pressure of a doubly distilled aesthetic sensibility and not a little political oppression) or a Nabokov (the rich novel written out on innumerable index cards, each individually and endlessly revised, interminably sorted over and, no doubt, cross-indexed, so that the text is finally the result of an unimaginable and eyestraining amount of sheer work) would seem, in light of such intense reader reaction, unseemly. The writer of literary fiction is traditionally the writer ignored or misunderstood. (Borges’s work must wait twenty or twenty-five years for the world recognition we now consider its due; Nabokov becomes famous only through the fluke best-sellerdom of his tenth or so novel, because the public mistakenly considers it obscene.) Somehow it is meet for literary writers (or whoever proselytizes for them) to stress the pain and labor necessary to bring these writers’ valuable works to the world. But that meetness is still proscribed by the career models of Joyce and Flaubert, both writers whose works were tried in court, the one waiting too long for recognition, the other too quickly forgotten.

  SF writers and other practitioners of the paraliterary, within their circumscribed world, get all the recognition they can use and then some. And although recognition is not money, within the paraliterary world of SF writers, editors, and convention goers, those writers who do not start to establish reasonable reputations in their twenties are usually those who do not start writing till their thirties. With a background of such volatile appreciation, to downplay the pain and labor that goes into the work is simply a kind of good manners. The readers are quite impressed enough with the texts already. And though they clamor endlessly to ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” (a question I have never heard any SF writer worth her or his salt seriously try to answer), the question, “How do you put these ideas together?” (which, with a little thought and analysis, is sometimes answerable) is much rarer. I believe an SF reader asking, “Where do you get your ideas?” is simply the audience asking to be reassured that the hat is really empty and the rabbit really gone. But by and large in science fiction, the readers appreciate the trick enough to realize just how much (different for each of us) might be lost if the writer were to reveal how it was done. By comparison, the literary writer is continually in the position of having to say to a rather listless audience, “Well, you may not think much of the trick, but if you could only see what its mechanics are you’d appreciate it a lot more.” And whether the mechanics to be explicated are the subtle recomplications of the textual surface itself, or a catalogue of the rigors, triumphs, traditions, or even personal tragedies that underlie the artist’s personal training, the template is the same. Thus, what looks like befuddled vulgarity from the perspective of the literary world appears as a laudable aesthetic reticence from the perspective of the paraliterary landscape—the world of science fiction. But although this is the synchronic situation that contours such behavior from within the field, there is a diachronic (that is, historical) pressure as well from without, working toward the same end.

  Literary fiction rises out of (or, more accurately, has since the early 19th century successfully appropriated) what Professor Stanley E. Fish calls “The Aesthetic of the Good Physician”: literary fiction is good for you; its goal is a greater understanding of the world and of the passions, which understanding will make you a better person. If you are educated well enough, or lucky enough already to possess the proper temperament, the whole process may even give pleasure … although more serious readers are chary of holding out even this much enticement. And with reason. Satisfaction, yes—but pleasure… ? In the last few years at least two perfectly intelligent persons have told me, with a polemical glitter in their eye, “I never read for pleasure.” One was an Oxford graduate specializing in Italian literature of the Resorgiamento. The other was the chairman of the comparative literature department for an upstate New York university. On the one hand, I can say that this sentence, as it concerns these two readers and as most SF readers would interpret it, is simply untrue. I have seen the first of these folk laugh aloud over one 17th-century lyric and be struck to wet-eyed muteness by another; the second, twenty-five minutes after he made the statement, was (as we shared the comparative privacy of Buffalo’s Albright-Knox cafeteria) in tongue-tied rapture over an ironic trope in the third chapter of Bouvard et Pécuchet. On the other hand, their point on not reading for pleasure is polemical. I understand it, and I agree with its polemical intent. To have read and responded to the written word at a depth great enough to experience satisfaction/pleasure/rapture is to have worked. And if you are a writer, teacher, or critic, that work had best be done with a certain degree of conscientiousness, if not self-consciousness. Pleasure in reading is not innate. It is a learned response, as reading itself (i.e., all the conventions that contour pleasure in a text, from the meanings of individual words to the significance of larger fictive figures) is learned.

  Fans—whether they are science fiction fans or opera fans—are people who, through education or exposure, have simply been able to establish the good working habits without really trying necessary to respond to the work. But unless fans keep up that work by fairly rigorous application, their enthusiasm falls away. They are able to enjoy less and less varied kinds of writing within their desired precincts; and finally none at all. And this atrophy of response is what the reader who reads “only for pleasure”—the reader who says, “I will make no conscious effort over any work aside from what my temperament and my education to date have rendered spontaneous”—always risks, always falls victim to. In this sense a reader must read for the work rather than for the pleasure, if pleasure is to be a rich and continuing experience in reading. The reader is rather like a dancer: s/he must be as committed to the practice session as s/he is to the performance to produce specular delights in either—a delight that even so laborious a reader as the author of S/Z, Roland Barthes, finally consents to call The Pleasure of the Text.

  Now, as we have said, science fiction fans risk the same falling away if they do not work at their reading as do any other fans. But, because of the social matrix around science fiction (of which its extensive fandom, myriad fanzines, and hundred-odd yearly SF conventions are only the most conspicuous emblems), there is a much greater social pressure on SF fans to do the work than there is on most readers of literary fiction. (Outside the university, where is the pressure …?) From science fiction’s initial self-presentation as an “intellectual” entertainment, to the various fictive conventions that must be learned for the reader to make any headway with the texts, to organized fandom, and finally to the rather flamboyant image most readers have of the delights to be achieved, everything allows us to take it on faith that in science fiction the work, to a surprising extent, is done by a large number of science fiction readers. Thus, in discussions of the field set within its borders, we are not so constrained to polemicize for that work by decrying the pleasure as are either our reader of 17th-century Italian or our Comp. Lit. chairman.

  The larger point of all this is, of course, that science fiction does not grow out of “The Aesthetic of the Good Physician.” It grows out of quite a different aesthetic, a
n aesthetic we could easily call Faustian—or even that of the Evil Charlatan.

  It grows out of the dime novel, the pulp tradition, the borderline pornography of violence and romance. It grows out of a tradition that, for most of its history, was not only considered to be Not Good for You, but for much of its existence was considered to be downright deleterious. The Platonic ideal was—and still is—the dominant model by which art is judged, especially art for the young: Art is supposed to supply models for correct behavior. Thus, by definition, anything with too great an element of fantasy, anything that distorts the world, any text with any sort of larger-than-life romanticism, tends to be considered dangerous. This was especially true during the hardship years of the Great Depression, when brilliant men like Sturgeon’s stepfather, William Dicky Sturgeon (whom Sturgeon and his older brother Peter called Argyll), master of half a dozen languages and a crack mathematician, were working well below their capacity at various elementary and high school teaching jobs, simply to hold a family together. It was a time when the good child was the silent child, the scared child, the child wholly intimidated by authority—the child who would do what he was told and could not possibly get into any sort of trouble. Sturgeon learned about this aesthetic at the hands of his stepfather, brutally and painfully. He describes the event in an autobiographical essay he wrote for a therapist, Jim Hayes, in 1965.

  It was about this time that I discovered science fiction; a kid at school sold me a back number (1933 Astounding) for a nickel, my lunch money. I was always so unwary! I brought it home naked and open, and Argyll pounced on it as I came in the door. “Not in my house!” he said, and scooped it off my schoolbooks and took it straight into the kitchen and put it in the garbage and put the cover on. “That’s what we do with garbage,” and he sat back down at his desk and my mother at the end of it and their drink (Argyll, 36).