“Cargo” was also included in the last collection of Sturgeon stories published in his lifetime, Alien Cargo (1984). Introducing the story in that book, TS wrote:
—either alien, or very definitely not alien, just different. Depends on how you use the word. Also written in ’39 or early ’40; England was at war, and I wrote out of my experience in the Merchant Marine. Also, it was a fun story. Later on, I stopped writing fun stories for a very long time. I got pretty grim, I did … (I can’t think of any period when Sturgeon was actively writing for which this comment seems accurate.)
In an undated letter probably written in late August, 1940, Sturgeon told his mother: You notice this missive is written in two types. I just got this, my precious, back. (He’s referring to his typewriter with a script typeface, on which he wrote most of these early stories.) It wrote my baby masterpiece, “Cargo,” and then quit—absolutely refused to write another word until it was rebuilt. I didn’t mind—it was a great big check for a lovely yarn about a crummy old outlaw tankship that was taken over by war refugees—all the Little People who didn’t like bombs and shells and thought that this country would be a nice haven. Ye ed. was nuts about it, bought it on sight, and begged me for a sequel. (Sturgeon’s concern for his mother—he urges in the same letter that she return to the U.S. in order to escape the war in Europe—may have helped inspire the story-idea).
Unknown typically ran story blurbs (teasers written by the editor) in as many as three places: on the cover, on the contents page, and on the title page of the story. The title page blurb for “Cargo” read: THE OLD TRAMP STEAMER WAS UTTERLY DISREPUTABLE AND MANNED BY A CREW OF WANTED MEN. AND SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF EUROPE SHE PICKED UP THE WEIRDEST CARGO ON RECORD!
“Shottle Bop”: first published in Unknown, February 1941. This one is the descendant of a story called “Abraxas,” written January 1940. The first seven pages of the earlier story survive among Sturgeon’s papers, and they tell basically the same story as the opening pages of “Shottle Bop.” On January 26, 1940, TS wrote to Dorothe:
Hope I never have to live thru another such week … Sunday settled down to work on “Abraxas.” Finished it Tuesday morning; no sleep Sun or Mon … stopping only to eat, eating only oatmeal and cocoa because that’s all there was … took it down to JC, came home and passed out … up at 9:30 that nite, over to Woodie’s; bed again at 2, slept till 2 Wed. afternoon … so to work again on “Salty Peanut.” It came back. “Abraxas” came back. I’m working for nothing and the more I work the lousier it is and the less I eat … you would ask me to write a letter instead of a card … Wed. nite worked all nite. Thursday nite worked till twelve, went over to Martin’s where I met my two protegés … they wanted some back-number McClure releases so brought them home with me … bull-session lasted until ten this morning … so that’s two more nites without sleep … didn’t known then about “Abraxas”; was hoping for a check. Hung around until 2nd mail, still nothing, called up JC who said come down and talk it over … dead on my feet I went down, first to McClure’s to pick up a life-saving finn for the rent … they’ve owed it to me for two weeks but I was saving it for just this eventuality … JC commented as I expected and feared he would; story had too many ramifications, spread out so much it couldn’t support its weight … tremendous amount of material in it; comedy, horror, Gnosticism, Basilidian Philosopy, possession, and so on … hero wound up to be not only the Messiah but the f—ing Holy Ghost … too big … JC calmly suggests that I knock it down and make at least five shorts out of it … so as soon as I get to bed, which is right after I finish this, will get to work on it … and that means another two day stretch with oatmeal and cocoa … good diet. Vitamins ABB1CD and roughage … pound of sugar every three days, can of milk every day. Thrive on it.
The opening paragraph of “Abraxas” is: Seems to me either you have an inferiority complex or you just don’t admit you have one. Phooey. There, in its entirety, was my attitude on the day I bought bottles.
At the time he began writing this story (the evidence from his correspondence is that he didn’t write the published version till spring or summer), Sturgeon was living at 146 Tenth Avenue, Manhattan, not far from the Shottle Bop’s fictional location.
TS’s introduction to “Shottle Bop” in Without Sorcery:
This one almost disqualified the book-title. I maintain stoutly, however, that the plot strikes sorcery only a glancing blow. The verse was included as an experiment to see if I could get the two-bits a line the magazine was paying for poetry, with verse put into the body of a story. I didn’t get it, a fact which has denied posterity, to its great benefit, several bushels of my doggerel. I think it pertinent to cite this story as an example of the “blind grope” technique of story telling. Start with a situation, give it a vaguely directional push, and let happen what may. If the author does not know what is to happen next, the reader cannot possibly know.
The blurb on the original magazine cover read: A VERY QUAINT LITTLE STORE, WITH A SIGN THAT SAID ONLY ‘SHOTTLE BOP—WE SELL BOTTLES WITH THINGS IN THEM.’ BUT THE THINGS IN THE BOTTLES WERE—THINGS!
“Yesterday Was Monday”: first published in Unknown, June 1941. Because John Campbell had already selected it for his 1948 anthology From Unknown Worlds, this gem was not included in Sturgeon’s first collection Without Sorcery (also 1948). It continued to be overlooked until The Golden Helix, 1979. Sturgeon’s introduction to the story from the 1979 collection:
“Where do you get your crazy ideas?”
Every writer gets this question in various inflections, some of them downright insulting. Where this one came from is a mystery; why I set about writing it is another. Everything I had said about “The Ultimate Egoist” [earlier in the same collection] applies to this one too: I was a beginner, I was unpracticed, I was eager—ready to write everything that came into my head. Often I would write myself into situations in which I had no idea where I was going or what might happen before the end. I do not recommend this as a technique; but if it does happen and you find a way out, you have written a story which doesn’t ‘telegraph’ to the reader what the ending will be. If the author doesn’t know, the reader can’t.
This is one of those. And also: it was fun to do.
“Yesterday Was Monday” is an example, like “Microcosmic God,” of Sturgeon presenting an idea that is not new to fantasy or science fiction (or literature in general), but executing it so well that it is the Sturgeon version that leaves a permanent impression on anyone who encounters it. It seems likely that Robert A. Heinlein’s short novel “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” and the “heaven” sequences in Stranger in a Strange Land were influenced by this story; one also hears its echoes in the many “constructed realities” of Philip K. Dick, especially The Cosmic Puppets and Time Out of Joint.
“Yesterday Was Monday” was adapted as an episode of the television program “The New Twilight Zone.”
Original magazine blurb (from the contents page): THE ACTOR SLIPPED BEHIND THE SCENES—TO FIND THE SCENE-SHIFTERS AT WORK BUILDING YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW!
“Brat”: first published in Unknown Worlds (same magazine as Unknown; the title changed with the 10/41 issue), December 1941. It would be interesting to know whether this was written before or after the birth of the Sturgeons’ first child (Patricia, born Dec. 21, 1940), but I have seen no hard evidence either way. I’m guessing it was written in anticipation rather than from first-hand experience—placing it as, perhaps, a summer 1940 story. In any case it’s intriguing that in Theodore and Dorothe’s divorce decree, the name of their second child is not Cynthia, as she has always been known, but Michaele.
Story introduction from Without Sorcery:
When this was written, I had the bad habit of running out all my copy in one draft, without a carbon. As a result, there were actually a half-dozen stories which I forgot entirely. Some appeared during the war when I was out of the country and could not get copies. When I returned I spent many a narciss
istic night in reading my own stuff. It was with great joy that I ran across this one; I had absolutely no recollection whatever of having written it. I wandered around for days murmuring, “Did I write ‘Brat’? Did I really?”
The above is a proper tribute to an underrrated story that in some ways is a breakthrough work: a true story of transformation (and thus one of the first truly characteristic Sturgeon stories), a transformation arising not through the author’s preconceived plot but from something that happens to him and his characters as the tale tells itself.
There are times, however, when a literary caretaker wants to kick the author (who in turn, we can be sure, often feels the same way about the caretaker). In 1984, for Alien Cargo, Sturgeon wrote:
Not fun. A horrid little fantasy, derived from true-life observations by a man who loved children, but not children like this one. Those ones.
If you are reading these notes after reading the story in question—and if not, shoo, scram, go away, you’re doing it wrong—you will immediately realize that this latter introduction was written by an author who had not recently read the story he was commenting on; who had, as it were, absolutely no recollection of what it was about emotionally. (Emotional content is primary in most Sturgeon stories—for example, the real power of “It,” and that story’s influence on later horror writers, lies not in the concept of the creature but in the emotional impact of the characterization and the setting.) Sturgeon couldn’t have written this 1984 comment after actually rereading “Brat” and re-meeting its four characters.
Sturgeon’s descriptions of his interactions with his paternal aunt Alice Waldo, in letters to his mother in 1938, suggest she may have been a model for the prissy Aunt Jonquil as she is portrayed at the start of “Brat.”
Magazine blurb, from the contents page: ‘BUTCH’ LOOKED LIKE A NINE-MONTH-OLD BABY. BUT HE LIKED HIS STEAKS RARE, AND HIS COFFEE BLACK—AND TROUBLE IN MASSIVE DOSES!
“The Anonymous”: unpublished. From the trunk left behind by Sturgeon on Staten Island in 1941 and returned to him in 1972. The typeface of the manuscript and the inscription on it saying “please note change of address” both identify it as having been written or completed circa August 1940.
The date is significant because the story (in my opinion) is so flat and energyless, yet seems to have been written during a period of time when the author was also producing excellent and exciting work. While many authors appear to grow in self-confidence (for better or worse) as their careers progress, Sturgeon from the beginning of his writing career found himself moving almost cyclically between real extremes of self-assurance and self-doubt. Highs and lows. Some of these cycles, in terms of his writing, were in periods of years (of writing a lot and writing nothing at all). But there is also considerable evidence in Sturgeon’s correspondence of brief, intense fluctuations between energy and paralysis tormenting him even during relatively productive or prolific periods.
I’ve applied for a job with the British Purchasing Commission, he wrote his mother in December 1940, shortly before his daughter was born. The idea is to establish some sort of regularity to my income, which, although ample, isn’t steady enough to live comfortably on. My checks are large and fairly frequent, but just one reject can throw me out completely for weeks. The more work I do the worse I feel, the worse I feel the less money I make. Bounce two stories in a row—and science fiction is very hard to write—and I start having bad dreams when I’m wide awake. And I mean bad dreams—horror is my specialty. Can’t sell stories while that goes on. But when I sell a couple a week or two apart, I go on a spurt, and months go by in the life of Riley …
Sturgeon did submit his 1940-era rejects to other markets—the magazine Weird Tales for one, and no doubt other science fiction or fantasy magazines—but not very persistently and certainly not successfully (he sold no sf or fantasy to any magazine editor other than John Campbell until 1946).
A comment in a letter from TS to his mother and stepfather March 20, 1938, after thanking them for sending his birth certificate and adoption papers as requested, shows Sturgeon already chewing on the notion of identity alteration: For quite a while now I have had an idea buzzing around in my sconce to the effect that someday, sometime, I would like to change my identity—notice, I said identity, not just name, and disappear most melodramatically from the sight and mind of man. Sort of a Jekyll-and-Hyde affair, you know; I’ve always thought that it would be amusing to start a verbal war on some subject with myself through the public press. Well, it’s all conjecture and daydreaming; but like a good scout I must be semper paratus. And don’t worry about it; I’ll most certainly keep you informed.
“Two Sidecars”: unpublished. Also from the trunk left on Staten Island.
The only specific mention in the surviving correspondence from 1940 and 1941 of Sturgeon attempting to write for markets other than Astounding and Unknown (and the Street & Smith comic books he wrote scripts for) is in a letter to his mother dated April 22, 1941: Another thing we are hopeful about is the Writer’s Digest contest, in which I entered two stories. First prize of two hundred prizes is $250; all winning entries go to Liberty magazine, and those that are printed there knock down an additional hundred. It would make me very happy to win, I think! This story could have been for that contest, or could have been written much earlier (anytime between August 1940 and spring 1941) for submission to a non-fantasy market.
A sidecar, according to my dictionary, contains “brandy, an orange-flavored liqueur, and lemon juice.” This story and “Nightmare Island” might raise the question of Sturgeon’s own relationship with alcohol. He did drink, of course, in his years as a merchant seaman, and afterward (February 1940: New Year’s wasn’t bad. I went to Philly, did the rounds with Wally, got pleasantly tight four times in three days), but there is no suggestion in his correspondence that it was ever a problem for him. Nor is there much specific evidence that he used alcohol to help him write, though he no doubt tried it. But his drugs-of-choice for writing seem to have always been coffee and sleep-deprivation (but in a 1952 letter included in the chapbook Argyll he also speaks of writing under the influence of dexedrine and “soggy with beer”).
However, although alcohol wasn’t the problem, the utter paralysis of the husband in this story in the face of his imminent loss of his wife is an eerie foreshadowing of the circumstances of Ted and Dorothe’s divorce in 1945 (as described by Sturgeon himself in correspondence and later fiction).
“Microcosmic God”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941. I date it as having been written after August 1940, based on a comment in a letter apparently written that month: I’m only selling to one market—Unknown, I have five stories coming up in that, and one in Astounding—a sequel to “Ether Breather.” This suggests that “Microcosmic God,” “Completely Automatic,” and “Poker Face,” all published in Astounding near the start of 1941, were written in the fall of 1940. “Microcosmic God” is further dated by the existence of five pages of an early draft, typed on the script (or italic) typewriter and with the return address that was used starting in mid-August 1940.
Sturgeon’s 1948 comments on the story, from Without Sorcery: This was written just at the beginning of the shooting phase of World War II, and is the result of mulling over a possible end product—in miniature—of dictatorship and isolationism. I have been asked repeatedly to do a sequel to this. I know better!
And his 1984 comments, from Alien Cargo:
I have always disliked this story—not for its basic idea, which has been called unique, but for its writing. Just out of my ‘teens, I had not yet learned that nobody is ever and altogether good, and nobody is all bad. Ignorant of that, one can produce 100% purified vintage dyed-in-the-wool cardboard characters. The story’s basic idea, however, is indeed unique, and many years later, at the Artificial Intelligence offices in M.I.T., a truly great scientist introduced himself to me, to tell me (as many scientists have) that he had gotten into science in the first place beca
use of reading science fiction as a youngster, and further, that he had gotten into microbiology because of this one story. And this is a guy who might win a Nobel Prize! So … what price literary judgments?
Science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz offers a different perspective in his book Seekers of Tomorrow (1967):
“ ‘Microcosmic God’ … had all the reaction of a bomb with a fast fuse. It was not that the idea was new; the concept of intelligent creatures in a microscopic world producing inventions at an accelerated rate relative to their own time span had been used in ‘Out of the Sub Universe’ by R. F. Starzl (Amazing Stories Quarterly, summer 1928), had been defined in complete detail by Edmond Hamilton in ‘Fessenden’s World’ (Weird Tales, April 1937), and had been recognized as a poignant classic in Calvin Peregoy’s ‘Short-Wave Castle’ (Astounding Stories, February 1934)—but Sturgeon did it best.” [James Gunn in Alternate Worlds (1975) credits Fitz-James O’Brien’s 1858 story “The Diamond Lens” as the first in the general category of “world in a microcosm” stories.]
Moskowitz goes on, drawing partly on his 1961 interview with Sturgeon: “The modest fame as master of fantasy which Sturgeon had attained with ‘It’ was far transcended by the acclaim brought to him by ‘Microcosmic God.’ Far from being pleased, Sturgeon was first annoyed and then infuriated. The kindest thing he could say for ‘Microcosmic God’ was that it was ‘fast paced.’ He deplored the fact that it did not have the ‘literary cadence’ of many of his other less complimented works and he deeply resented the fact that readers didn’t even seem to get the point: that a superman need not be a powerful, commanding person.
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