The Ultimate Egoist Read online

  Theodore Sturgeon, age eighteen December 1936, aboard the school ship Annapolis

  Copyright © 1994 the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Previously published materials copyright © 1939, 1940, 1941, 1947, 1948, 1955, 1973 by Theodore Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust. Forewords copyright © 1948 by Ray Bradbury and © 1994 by Arthur C. Clarke and Gene Wolfe. 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: Amok Harvest, © 1993 by Jacek Yerka. All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Paula Morrison

  The Ultimate Egoist 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.

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

  Sturgeon, Theodore.

  The ultimate egoist : the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon / edited by Paul Williams : forewords by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Wolfe.

  p. cm

  Contents: V. I. 1937–1940.

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-745-6

  I. Williams, Paul. II. Title.

  PS3569.T875U44 1994

  813′.54—dc20

  94-38047

  v3.1

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  THEODORE HAMILTON STURGEON was born February 26, 1918 on Staten Island in New York City, and died May 8, 1985 in Eugene, Oregon. This is the first of a series of volumes that will collect all of 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 earliest volume contains stories written between the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1940. Some are being published here for the first time; many 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, Marty Traynor, Stephen Pagel, Jeannie Trizzino, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Wolfe, David G. Hartwell, Jonathan Lethem, Charles N. Brown, Judith Merril, Eric Van, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Gordon Van Gelder, Sam Moskowitz, Robert Lichtman, Donna Nassar, Robert Silverberg, Russell Galen, John Clute, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

  My thanks also to the staffs of North Atlantic Books and Publishers Group West for their enthusiasm and their efforts on behalf of this challenging project. Succeeding volumes in this series will be appearing regularly until the collection is completed.

  BOOKS BY THEODORE STURGEON

  Without Sorcery (1948)

  The Dreaming Jewels [aka The Synthetic Man] (1950)

  More Than Human (1953)

  E Pluribus Unicorn (1953)

  Caviar (1955)

  A Way Home (1955)

  The King and Four Queens (1956)

  I, Libertine (1956)

  A Touch of Strange (1958)

  The Cosmic Rape [aka To Marry Medusa] (1958)

  Aliens 4 (1959)

  Venus Plus X (1960)

  Beyond (1960)

  Some of Your Blood (1961)

  Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)

  The Player on the Other Side (1963)

  Sturgeon in Orbit (1964)

  Starshine (1966)

  The Rare Breed (1966)

  Sturgeon Is Alive and Well … (1971)

  The Worlds of Theodore

  Sturgeon (1972)

  Sturgeon’s West (with Don Ward) (1973)

  Case and the Dreamer (1974)

  Visions and Venturers (1978)

  Maturity (1979)

  The Stars Are the Styx (1979)

  The Golden Helix (1979)

  Alien Cargo (1984)

  Godbody (1986)

  A Touch of Sturgeon (1987)

  The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff (1989)

  Argyll (1993)

  Star Trek, The Joy Machine (with James Gunn) (1996)

  THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES

  1. The Ultimate Egoist (1994)

  2. Microcosmic God (1995)

  3. Killdozer! (1996)

  4. Thunder and Roses (1997)

  5. The Perfect Host (1998)

  6. Baby Is Three (1999)

  7. A Saucer of Loneliness (2000)

  8. Bright Segment (2002)

  9. And Now the News … (2003)

  10. The Man Who Lost the Sea (2005)

  11. The Nail and the Oracle (2007)

  12. Slow Sculpture (2009)

  13. Case and the Dreamer (2010)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editor’s Note

  Other Books by This Author

  Forewords:

  Ray Bradbury

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Gene Wolfe

  Heavy Insurance

  The Heart

  Cellmate

  Fluffy

  Alter Ego

  Mailed through a Porthole

  A Noose of Light

  Strangers on a Train

  Accidentally on Porpoise

  The Right Line

  Golden Day

  Permit Me My Gesture

  Watch My Smoke

  The Other Cheek

  Extraordinary Seaman

  One Sick Kid

  His Good Angel

  Some People Forget

  A God in a Garden

  Fit for a King

  Ex-Bachelor Extract

  East Is East

  Three People

  Eyes of Blue

  Ether Breather

  Her Choice

  Cajun Providence

  Strike Three

  Contact!

  The Call

  Helix the Cat

  To Shorten Sail

  Thanksgiving Again

  Bianca’s Hands

  Derm Fool

  He Shuttles

  Turkish Delight

  Niobe

  Mahout

  The Long Arm

  The Man on the Steps

  Punctuational Advice

  Place of Honor

  The Ultimate Egoist

  It

  Butyl and the Breather

  Back Words:

  Story Notes by Paul Williams

  Look About You by Theodore Sturgeon

  Three Forewords

  by Ray Bradbury,

  Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Wolfe

  ABOUT THEODORE STURGEON

  by Ray Bradbury

  PERHAPS THE BEST way I can tell you what I think of a Theodore Sturgeon story is to explain with what diligent interest, in the year 1940, I split every Sturgeon tale down the middle and fetched out its innards to see what made it function. At that time I had not sold one story, I was 20, I was feverish for the vast secrets of successf
ul writers. I looked upon Sturgeon with a secret and gnawing jealousy. And jealousy, it must be admitted, is the most certain symptom a writer can know to tell him of another author’s superiority. The worst thing you can say of a writer’s style is that it bored you; the most complimentary thing I can think to say of Sturgeon is that I hated his damned, efficient, witty guts. And yet because he had the thing for which I was looking, originality (always rare in the pulps), I was forced, in an agony of jealousy, to return again and again to his stories, to dissect, to pull apart, to re-examine the bones. Whether or not I ever really discovered Sturgeon’s secret is a moot question. It is pretty hard to dissect laughing gas with a scalpel. Wit and spontaneity are far too evasive, they are brilliant gaseous material all too soon exploded and vanished. You put your hand up, as to a pulsation of fireworks in a summer sky, cry “There!” and pull back, for even while you tried to touch the wonder it blew away.

  Sturgeon has many of the attributes of a magnificent firecracker string, ending in a loud 12-incher. There are sparklers and wondrous snakes and Vesuvian cones of invention, humor and charm in his stories. And before essaying your journey through this book and its attendant wonders, it may well reward you to have your glands x-rayed. For it is evident that Mr. Sturgeon writes with his glands. And if you do not read with your glands functioning healthily, then this is no book for you.

  Now, writing with the glands is a precarious occupation. Many a good writer has tripped over his gut, you might say, and plunged to a horrible death, vanishing in writhing messes of tripe, down within the maw of his black monstrously evil typewriter. This is not true of Sturgeon, for it is evident that his viscera, at midnight, cast a most incredible glow upon all nearby objects. In a world of mock-pomp and towering hypocrisy it is wonderful to find stories written not only with the large enwrinkled object above the eyes, but most particularly with the zestful ingredients of the peritoneal cavity.

  Above all, Sturgeon seems to love writing, delighting in the swiftly paced and happy tale. True, some of the tales enclosed herein are not monuments of gaiety, but, perversely, are cold green edifices of fear. This book is to be recommended by those blackly unscrupulous physicians who wish to dispatch such violences of warmth and coldness to their patients that influenza is the inevitable result. The extremes of temperature herein are incredible. “It,” a very serious tale, an unsmiling mask of a story, was evidently written in a black refrigerator at two in the morning. “Brat,”1 on the other hand, was culled from a daisy field on a hot summer’s day. “Shottle Bop”1 and “The Ultimate Egoist” reside in some half-twilight, speckled here and there with flashes of sunshine, deepening into shadow at the last.

  I have never met Mr. Sturgeon, but his letters have been exploding in my mailbox for some time now, and from several days of theorizing, I see Mr. Sturgeon as a child run off from home on a spring day never to return, to take refuge and nourishment under a bridge, a bright small troll with whisking pen and ink and white paper, listening to the thunder of a timeless world overhead. And this incredulous troll, under his roaring bridge, unable to see the secret world rushing by above, has effected his own concepts of that hidden civilization. It might be 1928 up there, or 2432 or 1979, who knows? Part of his picture is drawn from a life he has guessed with hilarious accuracy from the sounds of the footfalls above, the clickings and talkings of people passing on the high paths; the rest is pure fantasy and invention, a giant carnival distorted but all the more real for its unreality. We see ourselves caught in grotesque gesture, in mid-act.

  If you ask for the names of those stories most agreeable to me I would select “Poker Face,”1 a tale with a nice, if coincidental, irony and some very humorous writing in it, “Microcosmic God”1 for its fascinating generation on generation of Neoterics plus its unself-conscious hero, plus the Breather stories for their screwball antics. I also believe that “It,” partaking of a locale all too often neglected by American writers, will be with us for a good number of years as one of the finest weird tales in the genre.

  Some day I hope to meet Sturgeon. I shall take me a walking trip across the midwest and the east, down country roads and along sycamore lanes, stopping by every old stone bridge to listen and look and wait, and perhaps one summer afternoon, in the silence of which such days partake, I shall look down and beneath a shale arch I shall find Mr. Sturgeon busily writing away with pen and ink. It will be hard to find him. For I have not as yet figured out what sort of bridge he prefers, the tall metal soaring architectural bridges like those of Brooklyn and San Francisco, or the little, forgotten, moss-covered creek bridges in home town ravines where mosquitos sing and the silence is green. When I have figured the two halves of his split writing personality I shall start my trek. And if it is night when I come upon some lone bridge somewhere I shall recognize his hiding place by the pure shining glow of his viscera making a light you can see across the furthest night meadow and hill.

  In the meantime, I compliment Mr. Sturgeon by concluding that I still hate him.

  ABOUT THEODORE STURGEON

  by Arthur C. Clarke

  THOUGH I DON’T suppose I met Ted Sturgeon for more than a half dozen times, he is a person of whom I still have very warm memories. I was, of course, familiar with his work long before I made my first visit to the United States in 1952, and he was one of the authors I was most anxious to meet.

  Our first encounter is still remarkably clear in my mind. It was at his own home, shared with his wife Marion and their beautiful little son Robin. I can still remember two of the stories he told me. The first is how his stepfather had discovered the precious hoard of science fiction magazines Ted had hidden in the attic, and had carefully reduced all of them to confetti. The job, Ted added, must have taken him hours …

  The other incident is more heartwarming, and now that both Ted and Bob Heinlein are gone, I can safely report it. Once, when Ted was even more broke than usual, Bob sent him not only a cheque but something even more valuable—plots for a half dozen good stories. It would be interesting to know which of these Ted was able to use.

  I have just realized, rather belatedly, another Sturgeon/Heinlein connection. Ted’s original name was Edward Hamilton Waldo—and of course the word Waldo, for a remote-controller, was made famous by Heinlein. (I also wonder if Ted’s amendment of his first two names was made to avoid confusion with the famous “Universe Saver” of the 1930s pulps.)

  As I wander back through my memories, the titles of many of Ted’s stories are appearing in a kind of slow flashback. “Mewhu’s Jet,” though a minor piece, has long intrigued me as a kind of precursor to E.T. (For my own involvement in this tangled story, via Satyajit Ray’s never-produced “The Alien,” see the recent Life & Death of Peter Sellers.) “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” is also one of my favourites—even though I’m a dog- and not a cat-person.

  Ted’s stories have an emotional impact unmatched by almost any other writer (though two entirely different examples now come to my mind: Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison). “Thunder and Roses” is a classic example, and I’ve just realized, without the slightest embarrassment, that I used the same theme in “The Last Command.” It must have taken some courage for an editor to publish so downbeat a story during the depths of the Cold War, and I’m sure it must have evoked protests from the “Better Dead than Red” brigade.

  For such a gentle and sweet-natured person, Ted had a talent for provoking controversy. Just as “Thunder and Roses” must have infuriated pathological patriots, so “The World Well Lost” enraged incurable homophobes—who, he told me, mailed him lavender-scented letters. And I won’t even mention “Affair with a Green Monkey” or Some of Your Blood, which I’m sure he wrote just to see what he could get away with …

  Of all Ted’s stories, “The Man Who Lost the Sea” is my favourite, and the one which had the greatest impact on me, for personal as well as literary reasons. I too lost the sea for many years, and only rediscovered it in later life. “Transit of Earth,” which I con
sider my best story, owes much to Ted’s, even though the treatment is completely different. I feel sure I had Ted’s brilliantly-described skin-diving episode in mind when I incorporated a hair-raising incident from my own career.

  “The Man Who Lost the Sea” is a complex, stream-of-consciousness story which may go over the heads of many readers. (Did Ted anticipate the New Wave?) But perseverance will be rewarded. This small masterpiece was anthologized as one of the best short stories of its year, in any category—not only science fiction. I can’t even reread it without the skin crawling on the back of my neck.

  One final comment: I have just discovered that though Ted’s date of birth was a year after mine, I’ve already lived a decade longer than he did.

  What might he have done …

  ABOUT THEODORE STURGEON

  by Gene Wolfe

  THREE DAYS BEFORE my fortieth birthday, I was as sick as I have ever been in my life; and on my fortieth birthday Rosemary took me to the doctor, who told her to take me to a hospital. She did, and I was shoved into a wheelchair, wheeled rapidly into the Contagious Disease Ward, and ensconced in a small private room without a door. I had the mumps.

  Doctors shot me full of antibiotics, and by the next day I had discovered myself in possession of a television set and a remote control. Ever since TV was a big black box with a tiny screen, I had been working forty-two and a half hours a week and cutting the grass and writing in my spare time; I had never watched daytime TV. That second day in the hospital I did, and it was marvelous. There were soaps and amusing game shows and a rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show at twelve thirty—I still remember the time slot. On the third day I grabbed my remote full of happy anticipation and convalescent optimism.

  And it was just the same, with the sole exception of Dick Van Dyke. They might have been rerunning the previous day’s programs, and every ten minutes or so I thought they really were. Rosemary came to visit me, and I begged her to bring me something to read. Anything!

  God, it is said, arranges everything for a purpose—and He’s often real mad at us when He does. Rosemary brought me Sturgeon Is Alive and Well …, that wonderful, wonderful book.