Thunder and Roses

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Also on Feb. 3, 1947, Robert Heinlein wrote, “Ted, my respectful congratulations on ‘Maturity.’ I recognized some of the autobiographical touches. You are probably the most accomplished Peter Pan ever to have survived three decades, more or less (except me, maybe, he added with a churlish pout). But don’t let anyone monkey with your thymus gland; we like you the way you are. No kiddin’, it was a swell story.” One autobiographical touch: the biographical note in the back of Sturgeon books published by Ballantine in the 1950s says Sturgeon spent six years in high school and quotes him as saying, “I didn’t graduate; I was released”—precisely what Robin tells Peg in “Maturity.”

  Two years after reading “Maturity,” Heinlein began working on the novel that would become Stranger in a Strange Land. It is not difficult to see traces of Robin English’s influence in the character of Michael Valentine Smith.

  Sturgeon wrote to his mother (Christine Hamilton Sturgeon) on Feb. 9, 1947: I am sending you the current Astounding and the current Weird [with his story “Fluffy”]. Both yarns have received quite a flurry of comment. I would particularly like a careful comment on “Maturity” from you. I’ve quite lost perspective on the yarn, and rather urgently want it back. (The perspective, not the magazine!) Maturity is, as I may have remarked to you before, a thing on which I am qualified to make objective observations.… (He also asked his ex-wife for her written comments on the story.)

  Clifford Simak, a great science fiction writer who had been writing longer than Sturgeon, wrote TS on 2/14/47, “I’m sorrier than I can tell you, but I didn’t care for ‘Maturity.’ … The idea was a honey. It developed well up to about the middle of the yarn, although it seemed to me that you were holding yourself back, that you were positively laboring to make it subjective, determined that you would allow no dramatics and no overtones.… And the ending. By God, Ted, you didn’t believe that yourself. A mature man, a really mature man would have done something other than follow the footsteps of normal humans.… I hope you aren’t angry with me.…” A further letter from Simak indicates that TS responded immediately, although no carbon survives in his papers.

  Philip Klass (William Tenn) wrote TS on 12/30/48: “I have just finished reading the rewritten version of ‘Maturity’ which appears in your book.… Ted, accept my congratulations on your masterpiece.”

  Noted SF anthologist Groff Conklin wrote in 1954, about the second version of “Maturity”: “In [my] opinion, this is one of the most poignantly real stories about the tragedy of a superman in our midst that has ever been written.”

  John W. Campbell’s blurb on the first page of the story in Astounding: IT’S BEEN SAID THAT A MAN NEVER GROWS UP. THERE’S CONSIDERABLE EVIDENCE FOR THE LITERAL TRUTH OF THIS—AND A FASCINATING PROBLEM IN WHAT THE BEHAVIOR OF A TRULY MATURE HUMAN BEING WOULD BE.

  “Tiny and the Monster”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1947. Probably written in the fall of 1946 (judging from the amount of time that usually elapsed between Astounding buying a story and getting it into print) or in February and March 1947 (based on a comment in a March letter that he “got a good start on the dog story”).

  In an interview with Paul Williams in February 1976, Sturgeon said, “Tiny and the Monster” came out of a weekend I spent with [science fiction writers] Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and that was the house that I visualized [in that story]. It was up in Hastings-on-Hudson. I really loved that house; I thought that was such a nice place to be. And the mother-in-law, who kind of took over the story … she was a subsidiary character who took the bit in her teeth and just ran away with it. It’s one of the many instances where one of my subsidiary characters has become so dimensional that I can’t change it or eliminate it, and I’m not going to waste 6000 words of hard-earned copy, so I have to march up and down the road for a couple of weeks or months, or whatever it takes, to readjust the entire story to embrace this character without changing it. Which is nice, because if the author doesn’t know how a story’s going to come out, a reader couldn’t possibly know. But that old lady and her little blue car, that was my mother and her funny little blue car that she had down in Jamaica. It was a fun story … and it really had something to say, too, about ugliness as such. The monster itself was so hideous, and knew it, and didn’t show itself, not only for reasons of security but because it knew the human reaction to it would be so violent. [Arthur C.] Clarke has used that [in Childhood’s End, written five years later, where the aliens hide themselves because they look like devils].

  In July 1947, TS wrote his mother about showing an old friend his “treasures”; first on the list were: the [Edd] Cartier originals [drawings done to accompany the story in Astounding] for “Tiny and the Monster.”

  Of course, the St. Croix elements in the story derive from Sturgeon’s residence on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands in 1944.

  Magazine blurb: TINY WASN’T TINY—BUT THE MONSTER WAS DEFINITELY HORRIFIC. TINY, ON THE OTHER HAND, DISPLAYED A QUITE INCREDIBLE INTELLIGENCE FOR A DOG, AFTER ONE ENCOUNTER—

  “The Sky Was Full of Ships”: first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947. Probably written in the fall of 1946. This has also been published (in The Ancient Mysteries Reader, 1975, and Encounters with Aliens, 1968) under the title “The Cave of History.”

  A radio adaptation of this story was broadcast on the Beyond Tomorrow program, April 11, 1950, under the title “Incident at Switchpath.”

  Your editor can’t resist noting that it seems possible Bob Dylan read this story (or heard it on the radio) as a young man, which would explain the closing image in his 1968 song “Drifter’s Escape”: “Just then a bolt of lightning struck the courthouse out of shape/And while everybody knelt to pray, the drifter did escape.”

  “The Sky Was Full of Ships” can also be seen as a precursor of and possible influence on Arthur C. Clarke’s 1951 story “The Sentinel,” which in turn became the basis of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  The angry prospector at the end of the story who says, “I have a kid reads that kind of stuff, an’ I never did like to see him at it. Believe me, he’s a-goin’ to cut it out as of right now,” is reminiscent of Sturgeon’s often-told-tale of his stepfather’s hostility to science fiction. TS to Williams, 11/75: My stepfather regarded them [science fiction magazines] with total scorn, and finally he forbade me to bring those things into the house.

  “Largo”: first published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1947. Probably written late 1946.

  The setting of this story is drawn from Sturgeon’s experience at age 20 working for a month at a summer resort in Andover, New Jersey. His job and some things that happened to him there turn up in Vernon Drecksall’s saga. On June 13, 1938, TS wrote to his mother (from the Hudson Guild Farm): I am working as pot-walloper, vegetable groom, fire-tender, and general kitchen and dining-room factotum, from 6:15 A.M. until 7:30 P.M.… The pay is microscopic, but all in all I don’t care. I have a splendid opportunity to regain and improve on my swimming, diving and tumbling; I have time to write, and best of all I can observe and enjoy a thousand and one types of the human animal.

  A month later, back in Manhattan, he wrote his mother about the people he met at the Farm, including Patsy Freeman, the darkest white girl alive, and with the reddest cheeks and the blackest eyes, with whose understanding and whose casualness I fell in unprecedented violent love, so that I could hardly bear to be near her or touch her or speak to her … who, when she left me, cried openly and unashamed, and then climbed into the truck and was gone, and I plunged off into the woods in an agony of emptiness with my guitar, and lay on the reservoir dam and beat the strings and played as never before; played her into a moaning swing composition I have called “Slip into a Minor Key” and another which is exactly suited to the phenomenal piano-style of her friend and, I think, fiancé; a Hungarian, Otmar Gyorgy, a man I am proud to know, and who led me to an immense emotional-ethical battle through the strength of my friendship for him and that of my love for Pat; his style … rol
ling minor basses, treble cascading poundingly; that which I composed for him I doubt that he will ever play, for it is so much mine.…

  Lucy Menger, in her biographical/critical chapbook Theodore Sturgeon (Ungar, 1981) cites “Largo” in a discussion of Sturgeon’s “love of the English language,” pointing out examples of “poetic devices” such as alliteration, consonance, assonance, and repetition in the paragraph that begins “Each night after Drecksall had scoured the last.…”

  Gretel in “Largo” bears a distinct resemblance to Cordelia in Sturgeon’s 1948 story “The Martian and the Moron.”

  “Thunder and Roses”: first published in Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1947. Written in January and February 1947.

  TS wrote an introductory note called “Why I Selected ‘Thunder and Roses’ ” for an anthology titled My Best Science Fiction Story (Margulies, Friend, editors, 1949):

  There is good reason to believe that, outside of the top men in the Manhattan District and in the Armed Forces, the only people in the world who fully understood what had happened on August 6, 1945, were the aficionados of science fiction—the fans, the editors, and the authors. Hiroshima had a tremendous effect on me. I was familiar with nuclear phenomena; I sold a story in 1940 which dealt with a method of separating Isotope 235 from pure uranium [“Art-nan Process”]. Years before the Project, and before the war, we had used up the gadgets and gimmicks of atomic power and were writing stories about the philosophical and sociological implications of this terrible new fact of life.

  “Thunder and Roses” is the result of nearly a decade of preoccupation with the idea of atomic energy. It was written in 1947 out of a black depression caused by the uncaring reception of books like One World or None by a public happy to goad the United Nations into a state of yapping uselessness.

  I wrote the words and music to the song in this story when I was seventeen. Mary Mair sang it at the Philcon in ’47—remember?

  The Philcon was the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in August, 1947; Mary Mair was a showgirl who became, briefly, Theodore Sturgeon’s second wife, in 1949. The words to “Thunder and Roses” first appear in Sturgeon’s work as a poem in a 1939 story called “Thanksgiving Again” (included in The Ultimate Egoist, Vol. I of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon). In late 1947 TS wrote to his mother that he was hoping that a phonograph record would be made of the song (lyrics by THS, he told her, music by THS).

  Before “Thunder and Roses” was published in Astounding August Derleth read it in manuscript and selected it for his anthology Strange Ports of Call, published early in 1948. This contributed to the considerable impact the story had on science fiction readers at the time. William Lindsay Gresham (whose novel Nightmare Alley had been made into a film in 1947) wrote Sturgeon a very enthusiastic letter about “Thunder and Roses” in May 1948, after reading it twice in two days: “I couldn’t do any of my own stuff all day for thinking about it. I think it stands with the great short stories of our time, up there with Kipling’s ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ and Paul Gallico’s ‘Testimony.’ For one thing, you have done something so rarely attempted in fiction, and that is to hand the big slice of heroism to the girl.”

  James Gunn, in Alternate Worlds, The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (1975) notes that “Thunder and Roses” was a particularly poignant and powerful (and early) articulation of what the nuclear threat would come to mean to the human psyche for the rest of the century: “Here is science fiction pointing out the ultimate horror of holocaust—the horror is not just that so many will die so horribly and so painfully, but that they destroy the future of mankind—all the unachieved potential, all the untested possibilities, all the art and love and courage and glory that might be; it is not just that some idiot kind of total warfare might destroy the present, but that it might destroy eternity. In a metaphorical sense, science fiction might be considered letters from the future, from our children, urging us to be careful of their world.”

  (One wonders to what extent Carl Sagan’s energetic campaigning to educate the public in the 1980s about the dangers of “nuclear winter” was influenced by his reading of “Thunder and Roses” as a young man.)

  Although it’s a very tiny part of the story and unrelated to its powerful theme, your editor notes that the lines—” ‘What kind of a reproducer have you got?’ ‘Audiovid.’ ‘A disk.’ ”—now seem prophetic.

  Magazine blurb: ATOMIC WAR CAN PRODUCE STRANGE SITUATIONS—FOR AN ATOMIC BOMB CAN EXPLODE MORE THAN ONCE. AND IT MAY BE THAT THE VICTIM OF THE ATTACK DARE NOT REPLY!

  “It Wasn’t Syzygy”: first published in Weird Tales, January 1948, under the (editor’s) title “The Deadly Ratio.” Written January-February 1947.

  In April 1953 Theodore Sturgeon wrote to Redd Boggs, editor of an excellent science fiction “fanzine” called Skyhook, to respond to an article in the previous issue by William Atheling, Jr. (James Blish), in which Atheling said, “I wonder what has happened to Sturgeon’s gift for invention. Every story he has contributed to the field over the past two years has dealt in one way or another with syzygy.…” Atheling was commenting on a Sturgeon story called “The Sex Opposite” and asserted that Sturgeon had already handled the subject of syzygy “definitively” in his 1948 story “The Perfect Host.” With Sturgeon’s permission, Boggs edited his letter into an article called “Why So Much Syzygy?” which was published in the Summer 1953 issue of Skyhook, and reprinted in a 1977 book edited by Damon Knight called Turning Points, Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

  In his letter (and the article, but the quotes here are from the letter, a carbon of which survives in Sturgeon’s papers), TS wrote: Your (SKYHOOK’s, that is) remarks on an apparent preoccupation I have with syzygy came as something of a jolt. One needs to be told about such things. No one knows what he thinks until it’s crystallized for shipment, unspoken thoughts being the formless, tintless things they are. My first reaction is to deny such an allegation and say loftily that you guys haven’t been reading enough Sturgeon, or you never could say such a thing.… My first-and-a-half reaction is to list some recent stories just to show you how wrong you are, and when I do, I find by God you have something there. It isn’t the something you state, but it is something, and I hadn’t realized it before: so thanks, see?

  He goes on to talk about other “thematic repetitions” he has been “accused” of, and says, let’s see if we can get an LCD [lowest common denominator] out of the tangle.… I think that in “Bianca’s Hands” and “The Perfect Host” and [“The World Well Lost”] we have sufficient material for the tentative establishment of that denominator.… I think what I’ve been trying to do all these years is to investigate this matter of love, sexual and asexual. I investigate it by writing about it, because, as stated above, I don’t know what the hell I think until I tell somebody about it. And I work so assiduously at it because of a conviction that if one could understand it completely, one would have the key to cooperation itself: to creative inspiration: to the marvelous orchestration which enables us to keep ahead of our own destructiveness.

  In order to do this I’ve had to look at the individual components. In “The Deadly Ratio” (that, by the way, was the “definitive” syzygy story; its original title was “It Wasn’t Syzygy”) I had two lovers, only one of whom was real. In “Bianca’s Hands” only one of them was human. In “Rule of Three” and “Synthesis” [“Make Room for Me”] I had (in reverse order) a quasi-sexual relationship among three people, and one among six so’s it could break down into three couples and be normal. In “The Stars Are the Styx” I set up several (four, as I remember) different kinds of love motivations for mutual comparisons. In “Two Percent Inspiration” it was hero-worship, a kid and a great scientist; in “Until Death Do Us Join” it was the murderous jealousy between two personalities in a schizophrenic, both in love with the same girl. In “Killdozer” it was a choked-up worship for the majesty of a machine. By this time you get the idea.

 
Now if we can … return to the original question: why so much syzygy?—well, it’s pretty obvious why a clear-cut method of non-reproductive exchange should be so useful in such an overall investigation. It’s beautifully open to comparison and analog. It handles all sorts of attachments felt by any sensitive person which could not conceivably be sexually based. It does this almost as well as the general theme of symbiosis, of which I think you’ll find more in my stuff than syzygy.

  If you can understand non-reproductive love you’ll be able to understand—and convey—those two kinds of awe, the one for Boulder Dam or an atom bomb, and the other for Grand Canyon or a nova. You’ll understand why Casals and Segovia and Landowska work with such exquisite devotion, and what’s with the GI who falls on the live grenade to save his squad. A guy who could understand things like that could get to be a pretty fair writer.

  The opening lines of “It Wasn’t Syzygy” are another striking example of Sturgeon’s gift for projecting his readers into unexpected, unusual narrator-listener relationships. The scene that follows is another (probably the best) of his evocative tributes to love-at-first-sight. The first of many autobiographical tidbits sprinkled throughout this first-person tale of the ultimate love-induced identity crisis comes with the waitress who used to call Leo “The Hungry Fella.” In an interview Dec. 6, 1975, Sturgeon told me, about his life in New York City in early 1945: I went into some kind of funk at the time, it must have been a severe depression. I just slept all the time. Finally I got a job.… And then I went through another thing where I couldn’t get enough to eat. I remember they used to call me at the restaurant the hungry fella. Anything I ordered they brought double orders of, and they served it on a platter instead of a plate.