Sturgeon did own an automobile at the time he wrote “Biddiver”—a deep maroon Buick coupé with chromium wheels and my initials on the doors (letter to his mother, circa August 1940).
Another element of what Sturgeon later called his “optimum man” theme (he told David Hartwell in 1972 that his stories since 1945 have all had this preoccupation with the optimum man) begins to emerge here: the superman looking for a purpose (“Maturity,” More Than Human).
Magazine blurb (title page): BIDDIVER WAS A LITTLE MAN WHO GOT RICH, GOT DRUNK, GOT INTO THE WRONG “AUTOMOBILE” AND—BECAUSE IT WASN’T AN AUTOMOBILE BUT SOMETHING ELSE—GOT CHANGED!
“The Golden Egg”: first published in Unknown, August 1941. It would be interesting to know why John Campbell chose to run this story in his fantasy magazine rather than in his science fiction magazine.
The “phenomenal young man” aspect of this story makes it an early appearance of a recurring Sturgeon character, the superman/aesthete (Robin English in “Maturity,” Horty Bluett in The Dreaming Jewels). The attractive adult male who knows nothing of the world (because he’s a created human, or an alien, or an amnesiac) and has to be educated is another recurring character: for example, Nemo in “The Clinic,” Anson in “The Other Man,” the reborn Guy Gibbon in “When You Care, When You Love.”
Sturgeon’s unfinished manuscript “Cory Drew,” dating perhaps from January 1940, also concerns a “very handsome” adult male newly created (in a laboratory by a couple of mad scientists), his childlike nature, and what happens when he meets a woman who falls in love with him. Ariadne Drew in “The Golden Egg” has the same last name as the hero of that unfinished effort. Sturgeon had evidently forgotten that he’d already used the name in “It” (which, although a very different sort of story, shares with “Egg” the driven, detached curiosity of its nonhuman entity).
One common thread in these “education” stories, illustrated by the comic sequence in “The Golden Egg” when Elron talks first like a hobo and then like a debutante, is Sturgeon’s interest in how ordinary human behavior would appear to the proverbial “man from Mars,” the outsider who knows nothing of our built-in cultural contexts and assumptions.
Why Sturgeon chose the name “Elron” is not known. He was certainly aware of and a reader of fellow sf writer L. Ron Hubbard.
Magazine blurb (title page): THE GOLDEN EGG WAS ANCIENT BEYOND MAN’S UNDERSTANDING—AND WANTED A MEASURE OF AMUSEMENT IN MAN’S SMALL WORLD—
“Two Percent Inspiration”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1941. In a 1953 essay, “Why So Much Syzygy?” (reprinted in Turning Points, Damon Knight, ed., Harper & Row 1977), Sturgeon describes his fiction as a series of investigations of “this matter of love,” and lists the “love motivations” driving some of his stories: In “Two Percent Inspiration” it was hero worship, a kid and a great scientist.
1948 introduction (Without Sorcery): The title, of course, is from the old saw about genius—“ninety-eight percent perspiration.” I have since revised my conception of genius and now define it as an infinite capacity for taking beer. This story is the only one I ever wrote which has three (count ’em) plot twists at the end. I am proud of one thing in it: Satan Strong, Scourge of the Spaceways, Supporter of the Serialized Short Story, and Specialist in Science on the Spot.
1984 introduction (Alien Cargo): More early don’t-give-a-damn fun; actually a lampoon on some of the more dreadful contemporary (1940) examples of science fiction. So come on and meet, Satan Strong [etc.].
Although this seems to me a quite minor Sturgeon story, and granted the existence of many common sources (E. E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space, for one), it is intriguing how much it anticipates, in tone as well as content, the excellent series of young adult science fiction novels Robert Heinlein wrote between 1947 and 1958. Heinlein’s The Rolling Stones even features a space-going engineer who makes a living writing trashy sci-fi, possibly an acknowledgement of the influence of “Two Percent Inspiration.”
The pre-story fragment surviving in Sturgeon’s papers, in this one instance a kind of plot summary of “Two Percent” rather than a false start/early draft, seems worthy of inclusion here in its entirety. Read in conjunction with the story, it provides us a good glimpse of how Sturgeon transformed plot (note that the plot outline in this case also establishes the mood of the story) into narrative, circa 1941:
Professor Thaddeus MacIlhainy Nudnick, followed by ninety-three sections of the alphabet, was a genius. He found himself aboard the good ship Stoutfella, named after a mythological character from the literature of the ancients who was always popping up in In-lish writings. Also aboard is a man-child by the name of Hughie, who was addicted to trashy literature in general and science-fiction in particular. Hughie was always pining away for an emergency, and dramatizing the possibility, particularly this trip; for he knew Professor Nudnick and some of his feats. He knew in his heart that come the emergency, the prof would take down the ultraradio, swiftly twist two wires, weld a connection, wind a coil, and—zooie! Everyone would be safe in the Betelgeuse system via space-warp. Or something.
Comes the Emergency. The Earth-Mars Navigation Board, which is composed of an equal number of both races and decides by majority vote, is under the thumb of one Arthur Horn, who, oiled by Mars, has frightened the rest of the Earthmen on the Board to vote the way he wants. It seems that the Stoutfella has discovered a huge deposit of prosydium, a rare-earth metal invaluable as an “atomic catalyst” in the molecular-collapse process for hardening copper. Nudnick is aboard to guide them to it; he spotted it by improvising a detector when he was travelling on a Martian pasenger liner. He has kept his mouth shut because if the existence of this unclaimed treasure were ever made known, it would precipitate a deadly war between the planets. Independently, Nudnick is trying to claim it for Earth; he can’t acquaint the Earth Government of it for fear of their sending an armed fleet to seize it, which in space law is an act of war. He considers the headstrong government stupid fools for such characteristics. The prosydium asteroid is much nearer Earth than Mars anyway; once he has claimed it Earth can protect it. Anyhoo, this feller Horn has got some suspicions that Nudnick is up to something, and so has the Stoutfella stopped and completely disarmed on suspicion of piracy, knowing that when he later sends a private ship to squeeze the secret out of Nudnick, the old boy won’t blast them, as he has every right to do. Nudnick annoyedly gives up his weapons, even to sidearms.
The Stoutfella proceeds; since Nudnick is wise to the fact that Horn is up to some monkey business, he leads Horn’s little Martian-crewed ship a gay chase. He can’t, however, keep this up forever; he is an old man and his ship will have to be fueled one of these days. The kid, meanwhile, is completely disgusted with the scientist. Keeps on quoting science-fiction to him, saying, “Why don’t you blast ’em? Why don’t you go into hyperspace? Why don’t you make a light-deflector so the ship will be invisible? Why don’t you do something really scientific?” The old guy just laughed at him and slapped him on the back. The kid tried a couple of things himself word for word out of the science-fiction rags, with little or no effect. Finally, with fuel almost gone, the Stoutfella is forced down on Mercury, on the twilight strip a bit toward the day side. It is hot and damn windy; the two of them sit the ship down and jump out, hightailing it for the mountings [sic]. The Martians come right away after them, land beside their ship and come ashore. A futile chase, and the Earthmen are caught. Halfway back to the Martian ship for torturing, the Martians drop dead. The only gadget Nudnick has whipped together is a beamed spy-ray, and he has forced the dying Martians to confess “all” about Horn, out there in the heat. Once back in the ship, explanation and delight.
The opening scene of the completed story seems to draw partly on Sturgeon’s childhood punishments at the hands of his professor stepfather, as described in his 1965 essay “Argyll,” and perhaps also on the “bloody unfair” brutalization he and other cadets suffered at the hands of upperclassmen and of
ficers at the Penn State Nautical School in 1936. However, the idealized brilliant professor Nudnick also probably derives to some degree from Sturgeon’s childhood admiration of his Scottish stepfather Argyll.
Magazine blurb (contents page): A MARTIAN MIGHT BE AS GOOD AS ANY EARTHMAN IN MOST THINGS—BUT WHEN IT CAME TO A SHORT HIKE ON MERCURY—
“The Jumper”: first published in Unknown Worlds, August 1942. Written before July 1941.
This is an early example of Sturgeon examining the psychopathic personality, who seems compelled to manipulate and irritate the people around him just because he can (see “When You’re Smiling,” “The Other Man”). The “jumper” is another fascinating, though unrelated, psychological or parapsychological conceit (Sturgeon may have learned of this when visiting his uncle in Canada). But unlike later Sturgeon stories, the psychological ideas are merely presented, not explored in a rigorous or imaginative fashion.
Magazine blurb (title page): THE NAZI PRISON GUARD WAS PLAIN NASTY—AND SOMETHING MORE. THE CANADIAN RECOGNIZED THE SYMPTOMS—AND MADE THE VICIOUS GUARD SIGNAL THE R.A.F. FOR HIM!
Corrections and addenda:
I have not had the opportunity to compare the texts of all the stories that were collected in Without Sorcery with their original magazine texts (manuscripts are unavailable for most of these stories). The reader is advised that there may be textual variants in such stories as “Microcosmic God,” and “It” and “Ether Breather” from the first volume. We have used the Without Sorcery text as the source in this series for all stories included in that book.
A comparison has been made of the texts of the story “The Ultimate Egoist” since the first volume was published. Sturgeon evidently went over the story carefully, removing (or adding) a word or a phrase from a sentence to improve the flow of the writing, and rewriting awkward sentences. The most significant changes are the dropping of a passage of reminiscence from the start of the paragraph that begins “Looking at Drip, putting sugar in his coffee” (Vol. 1, p. 295), and the conversion of the last two paragraphs of the story from past tense to present tense, which considerably heightens the dramatic effect.
The passage dropped from the magazine version reads: I poured him a cup of coffee, thinking about the ships, thinking of the live surge of a steel deck, and the whip of a wind, and of a double rainbow by moonlight in the Caribbean. The pulsing rustle of valves and pistons. Aces backed up in a marathon stud game in the messroom. Heat in the fireroom, making your lungs too big for your chest. Breakdown in a hurricane off a rocky coast, and you smell death in the wind—death and kerosene. A load of high-test aviation gas, so your ship is a five-hundred-foot stick of dynamite. A Louisiana Cajun using his knife and a Boston Irishman using his feet. Breath of life, the very warmth in a man’s blood, these things, once he’s been to sea.
With rare exceptions, Sturgeon did not revise his texts for book publication for his collections after the first one (he did revise his novels that were based on magazine material, The Dreaming Jewels and More Than Human). It is possible that he may have revised a story before it was anthologized by another editor, in the early years of his writing career, and that we may have missed such changes by working from the magazine text rather than the anthology text.
I have now examined the May 1947 issue of Argosy in which “Bianca’s Hands” first apppeared and can confirm that the text is the same as in Sturgeon’s collection E Pluribus Unicorn. The introduction to the story in the magazine reads, “It is with pride that Argosy presents the prize-winning story in our £250 competition. Its strange imaginative quality and the brilliance of its technique convince us of the author’s sure mastery of the art of short story writing. The sinister and beautiful hands of Bianca will linger long in the memory of all who read this story. We congratulate the winner, Theodore Sturgeon, on a powerful and moving piece of work.”
The editor would appreciate hearing from readers who have information about alternate texts or stories omitted from Sturgeon bibliographies, or who notice errors or omissions in these notes.
Microcosmic God
Unfinished Early Draft
HE OPENED THE door wide to me. He looked like the kind of man you forget easily because you see so many like him.
“Yes?” But his voice wasn’t one to be forgotten.
“Mr. Samuel Kidder?”
“Yes?” A different intonation, a different attitude. He was a gentleman, and the force of his mind was an aura about him. I said, “I’m a freelance writer, Mr. Kidder. I’ve heard of you and your work and would like to do an article. May I—”
He stood aside. “Certainly. Come in.” I did. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him except to glance around the room and back again, and that was looking at him too, for this was his room, so much of the man himself. A weird place. Stacks of magazine fiction. A pulmotor. Velvet drapes. A platinum cigarette case on the same small table with a hookah, or water pipe. Window-frames like picture frames; windows scattered about the walls like pictures. There were plenty of things in the room, but there was no clutter. The place was different from all other places, but you wouldn’t say it was a crazy place. The place was like the man that way too.
Kidder’s papers had been read before the Geographic Society; the Psychical Society; the Institute for Psychological Research. He was an authority on atomic power; naval architecture; thermodynamics; Romansh literature. And yet he had, as far as anyone could find out, never graduated from any college or university. He had, or claimed, no titles. He was Samuel Kidder. Mr. Samuel Kidder. Period.
“What do you want to know, Mr.—”
“Egan,” I said. “Just—who you are, why you do the things you do—you know. I’ll write it. You say it. Just tell me what you’d like to read about yourself in a Sunday supplement.”
“If I did,” said Kidder, smiling, “I’d take up your time in talking about someone else.” He motioned. “However—come on. I’ll show you around.”
I followed him. He flung aside one of the great drapes, stepped into a low doorway behind it. We found ourselves in a huge room with balconies on two sides. Kidder flipped a switch; scarlet light blazed from forty or fifty four-foot squares of plate glass set evenly around the walls. Brilliant as the light was, I could barely make out the features of the man beside me. It looked like hell, and I’m not trying to be funny.
“What is it?” I whispered the question, because I had to. You have to in a church too.
“Just red light with a lot of infrared thrown in,” he said. “They can’t see it. Don’t know when they’re being watched.”
“Who can’t?”
“The ants. Come over here.” We went to the red-lit glass nearest the door. I had to stare for nearly a minute before I realized what I was looking at. An anthill, cross-sectioned, up against the glass. I looked around. The room was lined with them. It was like an aquarium, with ants instead. I made a surprised noise.
“Savages,” said Kidder softly. He lifted a pointed stick from a rack over his head, began using it. “See there? That big black one?”
His pointer indicated a monster black ant which crept slowly along one of the bisected corridors in the anthill.
“Big,” I said, for lack of anything else to say. “What is it—a queen?”
Kidder looked at me and back at the ant. “King,” he said, and I saw his teeth flash redly in the light.
“I never heard of—” He silenced me with a wave of his hand, pointed with the stick. A smaller ant was coming the other way along the corridor.
“He better get out of the way,” breathed Kidder.
He didn’t. The big ant’s antennae whipped out, struck the other’s from side to side. Then he lunged forward, over the small one’s back. His powerful mandibles caught just behind the other’s thorax, sliced through. The king idled on, disappeared up a side corridor.
“And that’s why he’s king,” said Kidder, as he pulled me over to the next window.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Hold on. Wh
at’s the idea of all this? What did you mean by ‘king’ ant? I never heard of a king ant!”
“One thing at a time. ‘The idea of all this’ is a study of the mass psychology of my ants. As for the king ant—Yes, I know you never heard of one. These ants are—different. You never heard of one ant attacking another in his own hill, either, did you?”
“No; but then I don’t know very much about ants.”
“Forget everything you know about ants, then. These aren’t really ants, you know. They’re under treatment.” Before I could ask anything more, he was pointing out a clodlike lump of grayish sand in the second ant village.
“The first temple,” he said. “That’s all there is here to differentiate this village from the last. It’s all due to the presence of one ant, too. I call him John. He rates as something of a prophet among the rest. Know why? He is just barely sensitive to red light rays. Heh! He’s—psychic!”
“I think,” I said grimly, “I’ll shut up and learn. Mr. Kidder, all this is Greek to me.”
He laughed. He had a good laugh, which is a rare thing. Keep your ears peeled if you don’t believe it. “You’d find it a little hard to take all in one dose, Mr. Egan. What I meant by saying that these aren’t really ants is about what you’d say about the guinea pigs they tried insulin shock on. They weren’t normal guinea pigs, with normal appetites and normal actions. They were temporarily something different. So with my ants, although my particular treatment is a far, far cry from insulin. About John here, my psychic ant. Watch him.”
There was a great deal of activity around the clod Kidder had designated as a temple. By accident or design, one whole wall of it was formed by the glass, so it was easy enough to see everything that went on. A five-legged ant was holding off swarms of others who crowded in. As we watched the throng quieted down, seemed to be watching intently. The five-legged one turned around, facing us, and spread out his legs so that his quarter-inch black body lay on the floor of the temple.
Microcosmic God Page 45