Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  On July 20th, 1969, I had been married just three months, and the previous week, learned that we were pregnant. My husband was a science fiction writer. The moon landing was as important to him as the child inside was to me; but then, in some mysterious way, the two became connected in my mind; the child that would come out of me and the astronauts that would come out of the ship and walk on the moon.

  I remember Ted and I sat on the edge of the bed, watching our small black and white television set, our shoulders pressed together, both of us feeling a tinge of worry.

  The moon landing was not a certain thing. No one knew what the surface was; it could be quicksand that would suck the lunar module into oblivion or it could be a glassy hardness that would not give traction to the landing legs. Neither Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin, the other astronaut in the module, could see beneath them and had no way to know how close to the surface they were as they descended.

  If one leg set down in a deep hole, that could tip the craft over and make it impossible to blast back to the command ship.

  The lander settled slowly while a countdown measured how much time they had left. If it got to zero, they would have to abort the landing to make sure of having enough fuel to fly back to the command module.

  Ted and I had been holding hands; now our hands moved up to grip each other's arms. I remember gasping for air because I had been forgetting to breathe. It seemed to take forever.

  The astronauts had to check that the spacecraft was stable, that nothing had been damaged.

  Then the words were sent over the radio back to the mother planet, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."

  Ted and I burst into sobs, crying like little children, our arms so tight around each other that they went numb.

  Armstrong came out of the craft. He turned on the cameras attached to the ship, and they showed his careful foot searching for the rungs of the ladder. He kept one foot on the ladder while his other foot went down and dabbed at the moon's surface.

  In my memory, that's when he said those first words, telling his fellow humans what the surface of the moon was like. It was such a human thing to say. Only then did he put both feet on the moon, take a step back and say the majestic remark fitting for such a momentous occasion.

  There are many differing memories of those moments, even by those who were involved.

  Our American space effort lasted three more years. It was an incredible time of genius and ingenuity and courage that blossomed less than a decade after President Kennedy told Congress in 1961 that he wanted to land a man on the moon.

  But even before that first landing, Presidents Nixon and Johnson cut the space budget.

  Apollo 17 was the last ship to land on the moon from earth. Gene Cernan was the commander of Apollo 17. On December 14, 1972, he said the last words of the last man on the moon, "...we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed, the crew of Apollo 17."

  But there is a practically unknown piece of history from back then that is perfect for today, when there is little hope and even less peace in the world.

  One of the engineers who was essential to the American space effort was Farouk El-Baz, an Egyptian scientist who selected the moon landing sites and helped train the astronauts.

  There had been problems with the Apollo 15 ship, and the scientists were worried that something might go wrong during the mission, as it did with Apollo 13. El-Baz told the Apollo 15 astronauts that he wanted to protect them, so he was giving them a Qur'an to take on their flight.

  Commander Dave Scott said he wanted it, because "We need all the help we can get."

  Not many people know that the Muslim sacred book went with the American astronauts on one of the final missions of peaceful exploration into outer space.

  EROS IN THE AGE OF MACHINES

  (an essay on Theodore Sturgeon)

  “Eros in the Age of the Machines”

  John Clute

  _______________________

  Why did Theodore Sturgeon's great love stories languish in the ghetto of science fiction?

  Any reader who traverses the entirety of Theodore Sturgeon’s “Selected Stories,” now published, 15 years after his death, by the prestigious Vintage Books division of Random House, is almost certain to wonder just what happened here, once upon a time. There is greatness, and there is a tragedy. Why is it only now that these stories have come out of the dark? Why wasn’t their author recognized long ago as an innovative and ambitious short story writer, one of the best America has produced? Why do so many of his stories shake themselves apart? Why do some of them tear us apart?

  There’s also a mystery here. Sturgeon’s stories — even when astutely selected, as in this volume; even when they’re heartbreakingly fine, as most of these tales are — give off a sense that something terrible must have happened long ago, almost certainly to Sturgeon himself. Which is not to say that Sturgeon was a writer who could not control his talent, or that the work in “Selected Stories” is anything like incompetent. Neither is the case, though some of the tales assembled here seem to run away from their author, and Sturgeon himself was certainly capable of spouting the awfullest flapdoodle, like some inebriated Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three in the airport lounge, and saith, “All you need is love, all you need is love, get me?, all you need is love,” ’til the cows come home.

  But most of the “Selected Stories” do not read like that. They are far more dreadful, and more fine, than that. They are like the residues of some terrible accident, one of those mass pileups on the interstate only visible from the CNN helicopter, anguished Edvard Munch faces turned up to the television cameras trying to convey something.

  The intensity is shattering, so shattering that some of the tales burn right through the usual conventions of storytelling, and their protagonists — some of them so bound in passion that they are nearly mute — also tend to fall through the fabric of normal life, like the inarticulate hero of “Bianca’s Hands,” whose ultimately demented adoration of the slim beautiful hands of an idiot girl named Bianca leads him to marry her. The end is grotesque, grand guignol, profoundly pathological. We are left with ashes, a sense that someone (the author? the lover?) has been screaming into our skulls.

  “Bianca’s Hands” is a tale of horror, a form given over to the imparting of “unnamable” emotional states that give you the vicarious shakes, but most of these stories are science fiction, a genre whose protagonists, during the period Sturgeon wrote most of his work, tended to be gripped not by passion but by some sort of world-changing project. Sturgeon was first and foremost a genre writer. The 13 titles assembled in “Selected Stories,” which constitute a mere 12 percent or so of his output of short fiction, were mostly written between 1944 and 1955, and almost all were published in magazines like Astounding, Galaxy or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Only “It” (1940), an atypical horror tale featuring bad slime gussied up as Swamp Thing, and “Slow Sculpture” (1970) are from outside that central period. One story alone went straight into book form: “Bright Segment,” an overdrawn tale of psychopathology with no genre content, was published for the first time in “Caviar” (1955), a Sturgeon collection.

  For most of these stories to get published, therefore, they had to wear sheep’s clothing. They had to look as though they were a natural part of science fiction’s Big Story during those years, when the field was gripped by an extroverted, expansionist dynamic. The Big Story was about heroes who intended to make this world work better or to discover new worlds to conquer. The physical universe was something to manipulate, not to commune with. Love was a reward for good service, not the heart of the matter. Aliens were to be fought if inimical, or domesticated if not; they were not often found to have lessons to impart to us, certainly not soppy lessons about how humans should relate to one another, as in “The Sex Opposite,” where aliens who breed by exchanging cell nuclei, like paramecia, show humans how to really get
it together. “The Sex Opposite” is a story that needed some genuine over-the-top sex to cement its message, but — unlike Robert Heinlein a few decades later in “Stranger in a Strange Land,” with its explicit lessons in heterosexual grokking — Sturgeon could not in 1950 come out into the open and clearly say what he wanted to convey: He wanted to tell his readers to love each other, and to have lots of sex while doing so.

  But he continued all the same to plow the fields of genre, whether he did so because he couldn’t publish elsewhere or because he loved the feel of speculative fiction, which gave his rampaging talent tools to work with. It is not the fault of that genre that, in the end, those tools — that field, those editors, these readers — cramped a great talent until he became silent; he wrote very few stories after the 1950s. It is not the fault of science fiction that Sturgeon tore himself to bits in its teeth. But he did. And it is our great good luck that his rage to express himself generated so many tales whose emotional rightness pierces through the veils of circumspection, moving us all the more through the upwelling pressure of the almost said. You could almost hear the wail.

  It was the wail of a man with universes to say, and no tongue. But fortune really was with us, as most of “Selected Stories” demonstrates. Every once in a while Sturgeon found his tongue — and it happened frequently enough to make up the contents of one big book like this, and probably a couple more. His best stories about sex, like “The Sex Opposite” or “The Skills of Xanadu” — where liberated, seemingly primitive villagers trick a visitor from another planet into carrying back to his totalitarian state the seeds of Sturgeonesque rebellion — are as full of hidden dynamite as those great Hollywood romantic comedies made when literal obedience to the Hayes Code didn’t clear the air of sex but rather charged it with the stuff. (A movie like Howard Hawks’ “Bringing Up Baby,” in which Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn never actually kiss, is perhaps as erotically charged a film as it’s possible for a viewer to experience without bursting.)

  So the emotions were, occasionally, fed into stories that could sustain them. This is perhaps clearest in the climax of “The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff,” which argues with palpable intensity that men and women are unnaturally isolated from one another; that the normal forms of human social interaction are forms of bondage; that when humans open themselves to one another and to the world, it is not just love that they feel, though human beings are only truly human when loving. What they feel is an instinctive equilibrium of joining, a balancing of the entire human species in something like a dance. This is what governs the actions of the alien couple (the Widget and the Wadget, to give them their names) who, disguised as boardinghouse proprietors, test their boarders nearly to destruction by forcing them to be honest about themselves. Honesty, Sturgeon suggests, is almost intolerably difficult for the unaided human to achieve; and absolutely necessary, if we are to gain the universe. And the heart of being honest is to share love, as one of the awakened protagonists eventually understands:

  That’s what Bitty and Sam [which is what Widget and Wadget call themselves on Earth] gave us — a synaptic reflex like the equilibrium mechanisms, but bigger — much bigger. A human being is an element in a whole culture, and the culture itself is alive … I suppose the species could be called, as a whole, a living thing.

  We may doubt that Sturgeon’s passionate longing to share is the answer, as he thought it was, to all our woes upon this planet, but there is no gainsaying the deep urgency of his plea. Over and above the pleasures of his storytelling — for he could tell a rattling yarn when it suited his deeper needs to do so — it is why he should be read today. These stories, taken together, brief us about species togetherness; they plead to us: Do not shut down. Do not become less than human. Do not become a solitude.

  Please, says Sturgeon, staring up at the cameras.

  The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award

  Starting in 2004, winners of the Sturgeon Award began receiving personalized trophies.

  The permanent Award, beside the new trophies in this photo, bears the names of every winner

  The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year was established in 1987 by James Gunn, Director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU, and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his widow Jayne Sturgeon and Sturgeon's children, as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction.

  He was a popular lecturer and teacher, and was a regular visiting writer at the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction. Sturgeon died in 1985.

  His books, manuscripts, and papers have been deposited at the University of Kansas, as he wished, valued at over $600,000

  Selection Process

  For its first eight years (1987-1994), the Sturgeon Award was selected by a committee of short-fiction experts headed by Orson Scott Card. Beginning in 1995, the Sturgeon Award became a juried award, with winners selected by a committee composed of James Gunn, Frederik Pohl, and Judith Merril. After the 1996 Award, Judith Merril resigned and was replaced by Kij Johnson, the 1994 Sturgeon winner; in 2005, George Zebrowski joined the jury. Since 1999, one of Sturgeon's children has also participated in this process, usually Noel Sturgeon.

  The current jury consists of James Gunn, Kij Johnson, Frederik Pohl, George Zebrowski, and Noel Sturgeon, Trustee of the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Estate.

  Eligible stories are those published in English during the previous calendar year. Nominations come from a wide variety of science-fiction reviewers and serious readers as well as from the editors who publish short fiction. Nominations are collected during the winter by Chris McKitterick, who produces a list of finalists based on nominators' rankings. The jury then reads all of the finalists and debates their merits during the spring until they arrive at a consensus decision in May. The winning author is usually contacted in May and invited to attend the Campbell Conference; the winner often attends the last day or two of the SF Writers Workshop, as well.

  The Sturgeon Award is presented during the Campbell Conference Awards Banquet at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas, as the focal point of a weekend of discussions about the writing, illustration, publishing, teaching, and criticism of science fiction. Award-winners are listed on the following pages.

  Sturgeon Award Winners

  2011

  1st "The Sultan of the Clouds," by Geoffrey A. Landis

  2nd "The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon," by Elizabeth Hand

  3rd "The Things," by Peter Watts

  2010

  1st "Shambling Towards Hiroshima," by James Morrow

  2nd (tie) "Things Undone," by John Barnes

  2nd (tie) "This Wind Blowing, and This Tide," by Damien Broderick

  2nd (tie) "As Women Fight," by Sara Genge

  2009

  1st "The Ray Gun: A Love Story," James Alan Gardner

  2nd "Memory Dog," Kathleen Ann Goonan

  3rd "The Tear," Ian McDonald

  2008

  1st (tie) "Tidelines," Elizabeth Bear

  1st (tie) "Finisterra," David R. Moles

  2nd (tie) "Memorare," Gene Wolfe

  2007

  1st "The Cartesian Theater," Robert Charles Wilson

  2nd "A Billion Eves," Robert Reed

  3rd "Lord Weary's Empire," Michael Swanwick

  2006

  1st "The Calorie Man," Paolo Bacigalupi

  2nd "The Little Goddess," Ian MacDonald

  3rd "Magic for Beginners," Kelly Link

  2005

  1st "Sergeant Chip," Bradley Denton

  2nd "Voluntary State," Christopher Rowe

  3rd "Mere," Richard Reed

  2004

  1st "The Empress of Mars," Kage Baker

  2nd "Bernardo’s House," James Patrick Kelly

  3rd "It's All True," John Kessel

  2003

  "Over Yonder," Lucius Shepard

  2002

&n
bsp; "The Chief Designer," Andy Duncan

  2001

  "Tendeleo's Story," Ian McDonald

  2000

  "The Wedding Album," David Marusek

  1999

  "Story of Your Life," Ted Chiang

  1998

  "House of Dreams," Michael Flynn

  1997

  "The Flowers of Aulit Prison," Nancy Kress

  1996

  "Jigoku no Mokushiroku," John G. McDaid

  1995

  "Forgiveness Day," Ursula Le Guin

  1994

  "Fox Magic," Kij Johnson

  1993

  "This Year's Class Picture," Dan Simmons

  1992

  "Buffalo," John Kessel

  1991

  "Bears Discover Fire," Terry Bisson

  1990

  "The Edge of the World," Michael Swanwick

  1989

  "Schrodinger's Kitten," George Alec Effinger

  1988

  "Rachel in Love," Pat Murphy

  1987

  "Surviving," Judith Moffett.