Microcosmic God Read online

  Theodore Sturgeon, back row far right, at twenty-three years old, with his maternal grandmother and grandfather Dicker, other members of the Dicker family, his first wife, Dorothé, and their first child, Patricia, in Jamaica, 1941.

  Copyright © 1995 the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Foreword copyright © 1995 by Samuel R. Delany. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

  Published by

  North Atlantic Books

  P.O. Box 12327

  Berkeley, California 94712

  Cover art: Returning Home, © 1992 by Jacek Yerka. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Paula Morrison

  Microcosmic God is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-746-3

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Sturgeon, Theodore.

  Microcosmic god : the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon / edited by Paul Williams : foreword by Samuel R. Delany.

  p. cm

  Contents: v. 2 1940–1941

  I. Williams, Paul. II. Title

  PS3569.T875U44 1995

  813′.54—dc20

  94-38047

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Note

  Foreword by

  Samuel R. Delany

  Cargo

  Shottle Bop

  Yesterday Was Monday

  Brat

  The Anonymous

  Two Sidecars

  Microcosmic God

  The Haunt

  Completely Automatic

  Poker Face

  Nightmare Island

  The Purple Light

  Artnan Process

  Biddiver

  The Golden Egg

  Two Percent Inspiration

  The Jumper

  Story Notes by Paul Williams

  Microcosmic God (Unfinished Early Draft)

  Other Books by This Author

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the second of a series of volumes that will collect his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This second volume contains stories written between April 1940 and June 1941. Two are being published here for the first time; several others are appearing for the first time in book form.

  For invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume, the editor would like to thank Noël Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Sturgeon, Ralph Vicinanza, Lindy Hough, Richard Grossinger, Debbie Notkin, Tom Whitmore, Samuel R. Delany, Dixon Chandler, Jeannie Trizzino, David G. Hartwell, Jonathan Lethem, Charles N. Brown, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Gordon Van Gelder, Sam Moskowitz, Robert Silverberg, Frank Robinson, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

  Foreword

  THEODORE STURGEON

  by Samuel R. Delany

  SOMETIME IN THE early fifties when I was ten or eleven, in a fat anthology of science fiction tales I read my first Theodore Sturgeon story—“Thunder and Roses.”

  Understand, I was a bright and profoundly unimaginative child: Much of what passes for intelligence in children is a stark deafness to metaphor coupled with a pigheaded literal-mindedness.

  Roses didn’t have much to do with thunder, so it was kind of a silly title. The story was largely about a singer named Starr Anthim, who mostly wasn’t there and, when she was, sang a kind of anthem, which only made you think about the word itself, its sounds, and the way it kept fitting in with other words, instead of what was happening. And what was happening? Well, the tale was full of ordinary guys doing ordinary things like shaving and taking showers, all of which, for some reason, seemed disturbingly more vivid than I would have thought anyone could make such commonplace actions seem in a story, because it described the feel of warm water down the back of your neck between your shoulder blades and what it felt like, after the shower, when your clean foot landed on the bathroom tile half in and out of a puddle and a crinkled toothpaste tube lay on the glass shelf under the mirror. And the only other thing about it was that the world was coming to an end and everyone felt as powerless as a ten-year-old boy to stop it. And when I finished, I was crying …

  It couldn’t have been very good, because that wasn’t what stories—especially science fiction stories—were supposed to do …

  By the time I was twenty-one, Theodore Sturgeon was my favorite fiction writer of any genre, literary or paraliterary. And for all my lack of imagination at ten, Sturgeon’s tales had taught me, as much as or more than those of any other writer, the incredible range of effects words could whip up, sharp and electric, in the human psyche.

  Twenty-three years later, I met Sturgeon—in 1975. One afternoon while I was signing books at the Science Fiction Shop (then on Hudson Street in New York City), someone at the front desk called back, “Hey, there’s a phone call for you, Chip,” and, when I got there and lifted the receiver to my ear, for the first time I heard that tenor voice with a quality like the middle register of an A-flat clarinet and a pacing I want to call a drawl—only “drawl” connotes region and class, while what I heard over the phone that afternoon was much more a considered and personal rhythm, overlaid on a speech with such geographical variety lingering under its L’s and R’s and over the length of its O’s and U’s, that its articulate U.S. ordinariness put to shame the whole notion of “Midwestern Standard.”

  “Chip Delany … ? This is Ted Sturgeon …” He’d called to thank me for a passage I’d written in a novel, set some four thousand years in the future, in which a young poet speaks about a wonderful Twentieth Century writer.

  The passage reads: “There was one ancient science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who would break me up every time I read him. He seemed to have seen every flash of light on a window, every leaf shadow on a screen door that I had ever seen; done everything I had ever done, from playing the guitar to laying over for a couple of weeks on a boat in Aransas Pass, Texas. And he was supposedly writing fiction, and that four thousand years ago. Then you learn that lots of other people find the same things in the same writer, who have done none of the things you’ve done and seen none of the things you’ve seen. That’s a rare sort of writer …” (Empire Star, p. 83).

  Sturgeon’s comment to me about it? “That somebody might be reading something I’ve written forty—much less four thousand—years from now, that’s the sort of thing a writer like me is afraid even to let himself think about.” But he seemed very pleased that I had thought about it. And the fact is, if I had a single vote as to which SF writer from the decades of Sturgeon’s finest productions would be read in the centuries to come, tha
t vote would have to go to Sturgeon.

  A few weeks after the signing, during a Lunacon SF convention, as I was walking through the hotel lobby, whose decor vacillated between scarlet and orange, Wina Sturgeon—Ted’s diminutive then-companion—took my arm and said, “Chip, Ted would like to actually meet you. Why don’t you come up for a few minutes? The kids are all there, of course. But if you don’t mind … ?” and gave me a room number and left.

  Minutes later, I took the elevator up, turned down the hall, knocked on the wood beside the painted metal laundry bin that hung outside, and inside heard kids laughing.

  Someone said, “Come in.” Then someone opened the lock.

  Yes, the room was filled with Sturgeon children: Robin, Tandy, Noël, Timothy, Andros … and Wina and a couple of other friends.

  Sturgeon sat on the bed, back against the headboard, wearing some handmade embroidered pants—maybe sandals, I don’t remember. A medium-height man and deeply tanned, he was on the upper side of middle-age, with gray hair grizzled on a thin chest. The only picture I’d ever seen of him was the portrait in the Ed Emsh fantasia that formed the cover for the special Sturgeon issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for September, 1962. What I saw, there in the hotel room, was that face, with its beard and fine bones—described in one or another article I’d read as “Puckish” or “pixie-ish.” But it was that face aged a decade. Sturgeon gave out a measured calm that glimmered through the confusion of the children’s questions and visitors’ comments, very natural and very winning. An impossible situation for conversation?

  Not at all.

  It was a pleasant and friendly evening, with lots of mutual good feeling; but all saying it makes me want to do is take the cliché “pleasant and friendly” and figure out some way to retrieve the meanings that have worn off the words from overuse: because what pleased that evening started like a warmth behind the knees and rose through the body till it reached the shoulders, letting loose—now at a bemused chuckle from Ted, now with someone’s conversation about some situation two thousand miles way, now with a sterner word to a child and a hug to the same child a moment later—all the tensions that comprise what Freud called “unpleasure” (that includes those states where we do not feel good without actually being in pain), so that the expectation and nervousness and awe I’d brought with me could settle finally into the simpler and more intense feeling of friendliness. (Indeed, if, in vivid visual descriptions of the natural and social world, Sturgeon is surpassed—now and again just barely—by Nabokov or Gass—no other writer describes so accurately what it feels like to have a feeling—how feelings sit in or move through the body, tangling in its muscles, playing its nerves, wriggling under the skin or jarring its sensitive tissues.) A pleasant, friendly evening.

  Sadly, it seemed a long time before I saw Ted again.

  Our acquaintanceship—and I know Ted would have let me call it a friendship—was limited to the last decade of his life, during which I met him perhaps five times. Once he showed me the silver Q he wore on a chain around his neck—with the arrow through it. His personal emblem, it stood for, “Ask the next question”—his motto. I have two brief, warm letters from him, in answer to two of mine. Once I spent an afternoon with him while he recorded some of his stories at a midtown recording studio. Twice we made plans to get together, sit down and really talk—even going so far, the last time I saw him in Vancouver in June of ’84, as to fix a summer date.

  But somehow summer came and went. So did winter.

  Then Ted was dead.

  If I may strain a metaphor: Language is a sky we all live under. It’s a total surround, both to thought and to action. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden wrote of Yeats. But once in a while, by luck or by skill, in poetry or in prose, a writer puts words together so that, if they don’t make things happen, they make us see and sense things happening. The range of Sturgeon’s work is an immense and astonishing galaxy of such dazzling and precise lights shining out against the twilight of ordinary rhetoric.

  Theodore Sturgeon was the single most important science fiction writer during the years of his major output—the forties, fifties, and sixties. He was by no means the best known. He was popular—from time to time, greatly so—but he never had the crossover appeal of a Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, or Isaac Asimov. But the “crossover” machinery that took up the first two of these was film: Heinlein in 1950, with Destination Moon, and Clarke in 1968 with 2001: A Space Odyssey. And Asimov’s popular science books and official textbooks had far more to do with establishing him as a household name than did his science fiction—which, not counting reprints, comprises only some thirty-five titles out of his more than 300 volumes. But though on occasion More Than Human came close to reaching the sound stages, no film based on a Sturgeon story ever got done.

  In no way am I suggesting that he displaces the other indubitable artists of our field … Stanley Weinbaum, Alfred Bester, Philip Dick, or Cordwainer Smith. But if we can read Sturgeon, read him deeply, carefully, and with the nuance and insight his texts invite, then we can read any of these others; and our readings will be enriched by what we learn of science fictional language possibilities from Sturgeon.

  This is not, however, a commutative proposition. For if we do not read Sturgeon, our readings of all these others will be deeply, and possibly irrevocably, impoverished: What our greatest SF artist—Sturgeon—does for the broader range of our art is takes what in other writers becomes dead convention or trope and, within a shared historical context, infuses it with life and demonstrates its vital use.

  II

  Sturgeon’s theme was love. At least one of his methods was to physicalize the emotions and move them through the body, describing their weight and resistance, their frictions and trajectories. He articulated the ripplings in the tapestry of day that enwraps us all—articulated it with an economy and accuracy that again and again impinges on his reader with electric insistence. He loved the physical world of weather and scents, and, especially, machines—glittering in the sun, glimpsed through a laboratory window, rising blackly to block the stars, or rusting behind an old garage. He loved the commonsensical demands of the body—and, as well, had vast patience with the intricate excuses the mind raises against them.

  More than half a dozen years ago, I first wrote:

  Right now there is a yawning fourfold need in Sturgeon scholarship. First, we must have a reasonably and responsibly edited edition of Theodore Sturgeon’s near 150 stories (more than a hundred of which are superb) as well as his half-dozen-plus novels.

  Second, someone must undertake a major, scholarly biography of Sturgeon.

  Third, efforts must be marshaled to preserve his letters, ephemera, and other writerly remains.

  Fourth, we must establish a Sturgeon Society and Sturgeon Newsletter to distribute information and inform those scholars and readers of Sturgeon of what is going on in Sturgeon studies.

  The book you hold now, the second volume in a projected ten volume set of Sturgeon’s complete short fiction, reflects on all four of those exhortations.

  Spearheaded by Paul Williams and Noël Sturgeon (the fifth of Sturgeon’s children and the Trustee of his literary estate), The Sturgeon Project is an incipient Sturgeon Society. No regular newsletter exists yet. But I know that will be coming. And anyone who has looked at the first volume of these tales (The Ultimate Egoist [1994]) will be aware of how much the story notes for this series already depend on the letters: the whole set will certainly have to be at the center of any future biographical study.

  Sturgeon was a superb artist: we’ve seen that from his writing from the forties and fifties. But with the first volume of his earliest work now available, we can see, with the rediscovered stories and letters from his late adolescence, an artist who, in his commitment to his work and in his perseverance, has much about him of the hero.

  Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absor
bed into the particular practice of science fiction writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically. (I use the terms in the same sense that allowed the young Ludwig Wittgenstein to jot in his notebook, on the 24th of July, 1916, almost two years before Sturgeon was born, “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same”—the very sense, I presume, that allowed the young Georg Lukacs to write, only a year before that, in his Theory of the Novel, that fiction is “the only art form in which the artist’s ethical position is the aesthetic problem.”) And if Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956) is regarded by many as the single greatest SF novel and therefore minimally outshines Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), it is because Bester’s book is a novel, whereas Sturgeon’s is three connected novellas, two of which are superb and the third of which is merely fascinating.

  To talk about science fiction with any sophistication, however, especially to talk about that science fiction which flowered in the forties and fifties, we must locate coequal forms. One, near-future science fiction, posits a familiar landscape, familiar social patterns, and familiar social surfaces. Into it the author intrudes one or a limited number of marvels. The game is to explore the resultant alterations in behavior. The other form, far-future science fiction, begins the game with a landscape where behavior patterns, social texture, and societal workings are already highly altered. Here, as the text proceeds, the game is to recognize which patterns of behavior—or, in the more sophisticated versions of this form, which abstracts of these behavior patterns—remain constant despite material reorganization. In this form of science fiction the question is: What is the human aspect of the structure of behavior—no matter how much the behavioral content or the context alters?

  The newcomer to science fiction (often a young newcomer to science as well) is usually more at home with the near-future sort. The long-time reader, especially one at home with the technical underpinnings that support the multiple distortions of landscape in the far-future variety, often finds the second type the greater intellectual challenge.