A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  So I turned the coin over—as you will see.

  In his August 13, 1957 letter to Walter Bradbury at Doubleday describing stories available for a new Sturgeon collection, TS said “The Clinic” is one of the few really successful efforts to tell a tale from the point of view of an extra-terrestrial.

  “Mr. Costello, Hero”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1953. Written in summer 1953. Adapted as a radio drama for the “X Minus One” program (aired March 7, 1956).

  The story behind the writing of “Mr. Costello, Hero,” was told by its author in a 1977 interview with Darrell Schweitzer:

  I had a deadline for a novelette of twenty thousand words or so, and Horace Gold called me up and said, “Hey, where’s the novelette?” And I began to cry a lot over the telephone. This was the time of the McCarthy hearings. The whole country was in a grip of terror that, not having been through it you just would never understand how awful that was. It was a frightening thing. It crept into all the corners of the houses and everybody’s speech and language. Everybody started to get super-careful about what they said, what they wrote and what they broadcast. The whole country was in a strange type of fear, some great intangible something that nobody could get hold of. A very frightening thing.

  I became aware by that time that I had a fairly high-caliber typewriter, and I became alarmed by the fact that I wasn’t using it for anything but what I call “literature of entertainment.” I don’t want to knock entertainment at all, but I felt I had the tool to do something but I didn’t know what to do with it.

  Horace listened to me with great care, and he said, “I’ll tell you what you do, Sturgeon. You write me a story about a guy whose wife has gone away for the weekend, and he goes down to the bus station to meet her, and the bus arrives and the whole place is full of people. He looks across the crowd and he sees his wife emerge from the exit talking to a young man who is talking earnestly back to her. And he is carrying her suitcase. She looks across the crowd, sees her husband, speaks a word to the young man and the young man hands her her suitcase, tips his hat, and disappears into the crowd, and she comes across to him and kisses him. Now then, Sturgeon, write me that story, and by the time you’re finished the whole world will know how you feel about Joseph McCarthy.”

  For the moment I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and it comes right back to what I said earlier. If a writer really and truly believes in something, if he is totally convinced, if he has a conviction, it really doesn’t matter what he writes about. That conviction is going to come through. At that point I sat down and wrote a story called “Mr. Costello, Hero” which was as specific and as sharply-edged a portrait of Joe McCarthy as anyone has ever written. Not only the man himself and his voice and his actions and his speech, but his motivations, where he was coming from, what made him do what he did, which I had never analyzed before.

  In my book The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits (by Paul Williams, Tor Books, 2000) I quote Sturgeon as above, and go on to say: “Actually the story does more than that. It is one of the most valuable (and entertaining) pieces of political fiction ever written, because it gives us a diagram, it demonstrates in much detail precisely how an Adolf Hitler or Joe McCarthy or Jim Jones or Charles Manson or Slobodan Milosevic can charm and seduce a handful of people who become his lieutenants so that they and soon whole nations start jumping to his tune and even believe they wrote it themselves. The more insight we gain into how this is done, the more opportunity we have to protect ourselves and others from this human peril. ‘Mr. Costello, Hero’ is a great story as a story, as a narrative and a work of language, but more than that it offers direct insight into the methodology by which psychopathic and power-hungry personalities manipulate other persons by engaging their fears and hatreds, even of people or things they never thought of fearing or hating until the manipulator caught them in his web.”

  On August 13, 1953, Sturgeon wrote to Horace Gold: Here’s the rewrite of the ending of the work-in-progress tentatively titled “Never Alone.”

  Now let me get something off my chest. Everything that follows necessarily bears the prefix “in my opinion,” so don’t take any of it too much to heart. It’s only me, and who the hell am I?

  First, the title. THE EVIL SOLOIST or THE EVIL SOLOISTS are okay as far as they might look on a table of contents. But in terms of the story they won’t do. In the first place the title implies that the soloists (i.e. “trappers” or people who were so accused) were evil, or that I the author so imply. One of the two important (to me) purposes of this story is to show that they were not evil; or, to put it more generally, that to be accused and to be guilty are two very different things. ’Though the title might conceivably state only Costello’s warped teaching, this aspect is not treated strongly enough to make a switch out of it (i.e., the reader is not likely to review the story in his mind and recognize such a title as Costello’s view rather than as the story’s basic theme.)

  Besides, the story is not about the evils of being alone, in anyone’s view. That “never alone” thesis on Borinquen was simply a tactic, as the suspicion of poison and of cheating were on the ship. I think it is quite clear that the elimination of privacy is no principle of Costello’s; it’s simply a means he uses to his megalomaniacal end.

  NEVER ALONE [Sturgeon’s original title] is therefore wrong as a title, and I freely kick it out. My two suggestions are based on the fact that this story, more than anything I ever wrote, requires the participation of its readers. Therefore, the less the title says, the better. My first choice: MR. COSTELLO. My second: HERO. Don’t forget that after reading a story, the story makes the title, not the other way around. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA is clumsy and arhythmic, AS YOU LIKE IT is meaningless in terms of plot, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY has nothing to say at the outset and in retrospect seems inept. Yet each of these is now touched with magic. So: leave me be tacit. MR COSTELLO or HERO.

  Now, as to the ending—specifically, Costello’s treatment on Nightingale. You have absolutely no right to assume a different conclusion from my extrapolations. Pleading logic is beside the point. Human progress, mike-or-macrocosmically, frequently departs from a logical chain; if it didn’t, we word-merchants would be hard put to it to create characters. The isolation treatment Costello got is consistent in terms of the story. Inventing a machine to make him like ants instead violates the story’s main message. He has got to be seen, in essence, “doing what he has to do.” The fact that he will do it with ants if he can’t do it with men is the strongest single statement about his character.

  Your editor wishes to point out that much of the power of this story results from Sturgeon’s decision to tell the story from the viewpoint of a good-natured fool, the sucker/victim who is still under the influence of the psychopath’s charm in the brilliantly insightful and chilling last sentence of the story (which could almost be the epitaph for our era).

  “The Education of Drusilla Strange”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1954. Written in autumn 1953.

  Sturgeon’s 1979 introduction to this story:

  This is one of my very favorite stories, for a number of reasons.

  Novelettes were for a long time “lost”; once they had appeared in a magazine, book publishers were chary of using them because of a conviction that the moron reader couldn’t sustain his attention span for more than five thousand words, and that he would feel cheated if he didn’t get a dozen or fourteen items in the Table of Contents. This is the chief reason that Drusilla has gotten so little exposure.

  My dream for Drusilla is to see her education as a major motion picture, and then to spin off as a television series dealing with the educated Drusilla Strange. It isn’t the glory (of which my readers have given me fulsomely) or the money (because I have found out that the line between owning money and being honestly broke is the line between owning money and being owned by it) but because it’s a prime opportunity for a strong dramatic role to be given to a woman. I
discount imitation bionic men and imitation male police officers, and of course sitcom pie-in-the-face, perennial teases, and Daddy-is-an-oaf so-called comedies. Drusilla is a super-woman, with super-empathy, super-compassion, super-libido (if you like), but also super-responsibility, so that, because she knows she will live for a thousand years, she knows that with ethical responsibility, she must always move on. The educated Drusilla Strange has a prime drive: her deeply convinced and passionate love for humanity, and her desire, with all her powers, to solve human problems.

  Oh, well … when Hollywood is through with 1927 to 1935 science fiction, and is ready to look at inner space instead of outer space, perhaps it will do right by our Drusilla.

  The biographical note included in the back of some of Sturgeon’s books starting in 1956 says, “He lives with his wife, son and daughter, twelve-string guitar and hot-rod panel truck in Rockland County …” His 1950 autobiographical essay “Author, Author” mentions that I played guitar with a square-dance orchestra once, in the Poconos.

  Original magazine blurb: THE GRASS INVARIABLY IS GREENER ON YOUR OWN PLANET—EVEN IF THERE IS NO GRASS THERE AND IT WOULD NOT BE THAT COLOR IF THERE WERE ANY!

  In a 1972 interview published in the French language edition of Galaxy, Sturgeon told Patrice Duvic about a letter he once received from an architecture student who said that one line in one of Sturgeon’s stories had totally changed the course of his life and of his studies, and his whole attitude towards his work. The line was Drusilla Strange’s thought upon first seeing an automobile: What manner of man [or race] streamlines only where he can see?