(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: warm drone)
Sturgeon background, non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature and history podcast. This episode, we are covering the magazine Galaxy and several stories published in it. In previous sections, we gave some background on the magazine and discussed "Contagion" by Katherine MacLean, "The Marching Morons" by C. M. Kornbluth, "Something Bright" by Zenna Henderson, "Rainbird" by R. A. Lafferty, and "Roberta" by Margaret St. Clair. In this section, though, we are looking at a story by Theodore Sturgeon.
A work by Theodore Sturgeon has already been discussed on the podcast before, "Ether Breather" from 1939, which was an initial foray into science fiction for him, though he had published other stories beforehand. This story was covered in our twentieth episode and included some background on Sturgeon. However, as we are covering a story from a few decades later in his career tonight, revisiting and expanding his biography here feels appropriate.
As mentioned in that previous background, Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo on February 26, 1918. In his youth, he started to go by Theodore because he liked the nickname Ted, and he would take on the surname Sturgeon with the marriage of his mother to a man named William Dickie Sturgeon. Sturgeon and his stepfather had a very fraught relationship, in part due to the discipline that the latter showed toward his stepson.
In a work that Sturgeon later wrote about this relationship, an excerpt that Samuel R. Delany quoted in his introduction for a volume of Sturgeon’s collected stories, he describes the punishment William Sturgeon doled out after discovering Sturgeon’s secret, forbidden stash of science fiction magazines:
"I breezed home from school full of innocence and anticipation, and Argyll looked up briefly and said, there’s a mess in your room I want you to clean up. It didn’t even sound like a storm warning. He could say that about what a sharpened pencil might leave behind it. The room was almost square, three windows opposite the door, Pete’s bed and desk against the left wall, mine against the right. All the rest open space, but not now. It was covered somewhat more than ankle deep in a drift of small pieces of newsprint, all almost exactly square, few bigger than four postage stamps, showing here and there was a scrap of glossy polychrome from the covers. This must have taken him hours to do, and it was hard to think of him in a rage doing it because so few of the little bits were crumpled. Hours and hours, rip, rip, rip. It is hard to recapture my feelings at the moment. I went ahead and cleaned it all up and put it outside. I was mostly aware of this cold clutch in the solar plexus, which is a compound of anger and fear. One never knew when one of his punishments was over, or if any specific one was designed to be complete in itself or part of a sequence. I do feel, however, that this episode had a great deal to do with my becoming a science fiction writer and should be taken into account when evaluating the special interest that the field has had for me."
Along with this antagonistic relationship with his stepfather, he had an ambivalent one when it came to his formal education. In part, this was because of the aggression of his peers. However, Sturgeon took up gymnastics in high school and developed a great deal of strength and athleticism. He originally wished to pursue a path in gymnastics, taking on the job of an acrobatic performer with Barnum & Bailey Circus, but these hopes were cut short when he became sick with rheumatic fever at fifteen, leaving him with a permanently enlarged heart and unfit to do too strenuous work.
Instead, Sturgeon went to sea as an engine-room wiper at the age of seventeen in 1935 and soon began writing stories. As mentioned, Sturgeon initially wrote non-speculative fiction, which was published through the McClure Syndicate, until he sold two works to John W. Campbell’s magazines: the fantasy story "The God in the Garden" to Unknown, and the aforementioned "Ether Breather" to Astounding. Over the next year, he wrote about two dozen stories, half of which he sold to Campbell.
In 1940, Sturgeon married the first of his wives, Dorothy Fillingame. By the following year, she had given birth to a daughter, and Sturgeon needed more money than what his writing was providing them. He and his family moved to the Caribbean when Sturgeon was given an opportunity to manage a resort hotel, but the involvement of the U.S. in the Second World War killed the prospect of any profit in tourism. Struggling again to make ends meet, Sturgeon found work for the U.S. Army at a military gas station. His work here inspired a love of machinery that would eventually find its way into his literary work, particularly in his story "Killdozer!", written and published near the end of the war in 1944.
Also during this year, Robert A. Heinlein headed a group of science fiction writers conducting a brainstorming project for the Navy, and he recruited Sturgeon to be a part of it. In an afterward for another volume of the Sturgeon story collection, Heinlein writes this anecdote.
"On Sunday afternoon, the working meeting was over, and we were sitting around in my living room. Ron and Ted had been swapping stories and horrible puns and harmonizing on songs. Both were fine vocalists, one baritone, one tenor. I think it was the first time they had met, and they obviously enjoyed each other’s company. Ron had run through a burlesque skit, playing all the parts, when Ted got up and made a speech explaining Marxism, featuring puns such as 'Angles with Dirty Faces,' groan, and ending with, then comes the revolution. At that last word, he jumped straight up into the air and into a full revolution, a backflip. His heels missed the ceiling by a scant inch, and he landed as perfectly as Mary Lou Retton on the exact spot on which he had been standing. This with no warning, which is how I learned that Ted was a tumbler. This in a crowded room, this with no wind-up. I don’t think he could have done it in a phone booth, but he did not have much more room. Ron Hubbard leaned toward me, said quietly into my ear, 'uh-huh, I can see him now, a skinny kid in a clown suit too big for him, piling out of that little car with the other clowns and bouncing straight into his routine.' Ron was almost right."
I really had to share that anecdote because I think it’s just, it’s really a great one.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Sturgeon is a really fun character, and he’s another example of somebody who, yeah, I’ve read a lot of his short stories, and I kind of feel like I recognize certain things in what he does. You can tell us when we get there, but I’m curious to know what made you pick this story in particular.
Gretchen:
I know that when Delany was asked, it seemed like Sturgeon was just always able to bring out this inhibition in people, and he always seemed to have a lot of fun with other writers that he met. But after "Killdozer!"’s publication, Sturgeon suffered from a two-year period of writer’s block. During this time, Dorothy Sturgeon asked him for a divorce, their two daughters staying with her. Deeply depressed, Sturgeon was supported by Campbell and his assistant, L. Jerome Stanton, with whom he moved in. The two eventually helped him get over the writer’s block, with Sturgeon writing the story "The Chromium Helmet" in Campbell’s basement.
With the breaking of this writer’s block came one of Sturgeon’s most fruitful periods as a writer, though he had also learned not to rely solely on his literary talents for his income. He had also taken up working as a literary agent, representing authors such as Judith Merril, who became a lifelong friend. He also learned about looking into other publishers besides Campbell, unearthing the works rejected for Astounding and Unknown, and publishing them in other magazines. In 1948, Sturgeon’s first story collection, "Without Sorcery", was published, followed by his first novel, "The Dreaming Jewels", in 1950.
Of course, this was also the year Galaxy debuted, which he considered" the most important single element in my science fiction career, except of course for my meeting in the late 1930s with John W. Campbell." He said that H. L. Gold taught him "that if you have real convictions, if you really believe in something, it’s going to come through no matter what you’re writing about. And since then, I have been able to write what I please, secure in the knowledge that my convictions will come through as long as I am a convinced human being. Take care of that, and that quality called message or meaning will take care of itself."
Between 1950 and 1959, Sturgeon published more than fifty short stories and novellas, as well as five novels, including "More Than Human", one of his most celebrated works. Several other novels came in the 1960s, and so did television scripts, such as, of course, the two episodes he made for "Star Trek", and book reviews in National Review. This decade also included, though, another bout of writer’s block. As it continued, Sturgeon would consult with Harlan Ellison, and it was once again alongside a fellow writer that he was able to break it, writing a dozen stories over a few weeks, many of which make up the majority of the collection "Sturgeon Is Alive and Well...", including the story we’ll be discussing tonight.
The publication of story collections continued steadily throughout the 1970s, a decade when Sturgeon also took more interest in helping other writers develop their work. He taught at the Clarion Writers Workshop and at the University of California, Los Angeles, among other positions. Though he was still writing at the start of the 1980s, his output began to decline, and in 1985, after several months of suffering from lung fibrosis, Sturgeon died on May 8.
JM:
Yeah, it was just really remarkable. Like, he was there almost at the beginning, not the beginning of the pulp science fiction era necessarily, but the beginning of the so-called Golden Age.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And right up until the 1980s, and just cranking out the short stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And changing as he went, because I actually did go through these a bunch of years ago, and I kind of started at the very beginning with the first volume of short stories that I was looking at, like the newspaper stories he was writing in the 1930s, and seeing that some of them are formulaic, but you can see him trying different things. And some of the stories, there’s the odd story that he wrote back then in the 1930s that’s really out there, and really like, wow, this guy’s got some talent, right? And he can write in different styles and different genres. There are horror stories, there are life stories, there are stories that don’t really have any fantastic or science fiction elements at all, and throwing it all in there. And he’s got a little bit of mainstream cred, but maybe not as much as you would think that he should.
And I guess maybe we’ll bring up an author who made fun of him at a certain point later on. Nate, yeah, we know he’s a favorite of yours. And yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, we like this guy better. We like him better. I think we all do.
Nate:
Yeah, I certainly do. I mean, I’m a very vocal Vonnegut non-fan, even though, I don’t know, I didn’t mind "Slaughterhouse-Five". I didn’t mind "Cat’s Cradle".
JM:
Yeah, I like that book.
Nate:
I thought "Mother Night" was actually really, really good. But yeah, "Breakfast of Champions", which really makes fun of poor Theodore Sturgeon quite heavily, I didn’t really like. And I thought "Galápagos" was just crap.
JM:
Yeah, "Galápagos" was the one I was thinking of reading next. So I didn’t get to it yet, but it was like, okay, maybe I’ll try this one, right? The last one I read was "Breakfast of Champions", and I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it now. It’s just completely gone from my consciousness. It’s so weird.
Nate:
Yeah, I don’t know. The thing that really irks me about his writing is he’s really, really full of himself, and it comes off so much across the page. It makes it hard to really get into the writing sometimes. And "Mother Night" really has the least of that of all the stuff I read by him. So I think that’s why it’s the most enjoyable stuff I read.
But yeah, this one here is just a great story. I mean, this is probably my favorite of the six that we’ve covered during this block, and I’d certainly like it more than any of the Vonnegut stuff that I’ve read.
Gretchen:
This is definitely my favorite of the stories that we are covering.
JM:
That’s really interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think it’s just a beautiful story. This story, “Slow Sculpture,” was published in the Galaxy issue of February 1970, and it won the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Short Story and Best Novelette. You asked, J. M., why I chose this particular story when we were first deciding which stories to pick. Looking through just all the stories that Galaxy had published was pretty overwhelming. And so I remember just thinking of looking at what had been the picks, if there had been ones that had been nominated or had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, just as a reference point. And then getting this book of stories from this collection of stories from Galaxy and seeing that this one was included. And of course, I know Sturgeon mostly from his “Star Trek” work.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
I really wanted to try one of his short stories. And I’m really glad that I chose this one. I think what’s really interesting is this almost feels a bit, even though I did enjoy this story, like an antithesis of “The Marching Morons,” at least in tone, where you have a character who is very angry about the world and has this very pessimistic and misanthropic feeling about everyone. And this is like a really beautiful refutation of this defeatist mentality and this really strong argument for optimism and for hope. And I really liked that about the story.
Nate:
Yeah, it’s really tender. It has a very human touch. I just love the way he deals with the interpersonal relationships between the two characters here.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, you just kind of get the sense of their personalities.
JM:
The interactions feel very real. They feel very, very strong and very like, I don’t think realistic is the right word, but it just feels very authentic, I guess.
And the other thing I would say, so this happens to me all the time. It happens with Lafferty. It happens with Margaret St. Clair. But as I read somebody’s work and I read a whole bunch of the stories, I start to get a picture of what that person likes to write about and the themes and the feelings that they have and that they come back to over and over again, that they like to talk about. And yeah, Sturgeon’s pretty varied. But one thing that he likes to come back to over and over again—remember when we were talking about Kornbluth and we were talking about the, I was linking it back to van Vogt and the “fans are slans” kind of thing. And you could kind of extend that all the way past the science fiction Golden Age and into, I don’t know, like “Revenge of the Nerds” or something like that. You’re basically like, oh, all these special people, they’re being pushed down by society and we science fiction fans are superior. Kind of this mindset that a lot of it is like, the kind of thing that a lot of, I don’t know, I almost hate to say this, but like younger boys who are really smart, they kind of have this sometimes where they know almost that they’re better than everybody else and science fiction fandom, science fiction literature almost wants to verify that for them.
And I almost feel like Sturgeon is the antidote to that. Because I feel like what Sturgeon is doing is he says, well, people can be special. People can be really awesome on their own. And they could be this and that and remarkable. But really, when it comes down to it, one person is not enough. And you need to merge your personality and merge your doings with somebody else, maybe more than one somebody else. And that synergy is what really gives you the power. And that person that you might be merging with might be somebody very different from you who might have a whole host of different experiences that you don’t know anything about. In all your intellect and all your smartness, you might have no idea of the kind of experiences that this other person has had. And when you meet this other person, there’s going to be some remarkable connection that’s going to happen, and it’s going to change your entire life.
And I feel like that’s Sturgeon in a nutshell almost, that he’s going on that repeatedly. And you can see that in some of his stories from the 1940s and 1950s, and some of the later stories. I mean, his novel “More Than Human,” which is a fix-up, is basically like telling about all these people with different life experiences eventually forming a kind of telepathic gestalt, where they become like a single individual almost, because they have disparate experiences and different ways of life. But somehow they’re able to connect. And he does that many, many times. And this story is basically a romance. It’s not explicit. It’s not sexual, necessarily, that much. But it’s a romance story.
It’s really interesting that you both like this one so much. I mean, I liked it a lot too. I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but I actually thought of that. I thought, like, at the end, if I would ask you guys how you would rate the stories. And at the end of the day, I don’t think I will, because I think they’re all pretty good and interesting in their own right. I don’t really know. I think it was cool when we did that for that issue of Astounding that we did. But like these stories are just, yeah, I think they’re all pretty interesting and all pretty good.
This was a really interesting story because it’s a romance, maybe on some level, not a lot happens. But on another level, a whole lot happens. And you get to see these characters and how they, in a very short time, in a very succinctly written way that just works, express their personalities. And she challenges him in really important ways. And he does the same thing to her. And it’s this dialogue between two people. And that’s the whole story really. And there’s also cool tech, like there’s audio generators and stuff like that. There’s like Hawkwind noise. So that’s cool too, right?
But yeah, yeah, it’s a really interesting thing. I read the story in “Foundations of Fear” by Sturgeon. Of course, I can’t remember the title. But yeah, it is again, another synergy kind of story where in the end it was kind of positive because it was these people coming together. And this time it was a triangle that had been like sort of a fucked-up love triangle in the beginning. And in the end, they kind of came together and figured out how they could work together in an interesting way that would also improve not only their own lot, but also maybe the human race. And it was in a horror collection, and there was like some horror stuff in there. But at the end, he’s actually very positive. And I was sharing the story with somebody, and she didn’t really feel as positive about it as I did. Because like, no, I feel it’s good. It’s a good ending, right? Like it makes you feel maybe things will work out and they’ll be able to do something awesome together, right? It’s the same with this really.
Gretchen:
Yeah, one of my biggest resources when looking into Sturgeon and looking into his background had been the several, what is it, thirteen volumes of “The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon,” which has all these really great introductions and story notes and everything by other authors, like Delany, like Ellison. There are also some other, even non-writers, that are writing in it that are really interesting to read. But I think what a lot of them come back to, and I think that this is very much what you’re saying, J. M., that his central theme is love and is that connection between people. That is very much what this story is about. It is a romance between these two people. And I think that this story also just illustrates a love of, in general, of humanity.
I think that the reason this story struck me so much is, especially at this time politically and socially, there are a lot of reasons to feel this antagonism toward other people and this misanthropic feeling that you may have toward people that one of the characters, the man in the story, has. But I think that it’s just reading the hope that Sturgeon has at the end is very inspiring to me.
JM:
Yeah, I feel like in terms of the writers that we’ve covered so far on the podcast, I think that there’s something really unique about Sturgeon. And we’ve jumped kind of far in. I mean, we started with his first, arguably his first science fiction story in 1939. And now we’re in 1970. There’s a whole lot we should cover in between. And I would like to. It’s funny because he’s done some really, really dark stories. He’s done some really, really dark ones. But overall, I would say his viewpoint is very positive. And even in some of the stories that have darker elements, it’s hard not to see that coming through a little bit.
And just the variety of the way he handles things too. Like, he has a story set in the future where it’s called “How to Forget Baseball.” I’ll never forget this story, because it’s just about like, this guy who goes into the future, and he’s seeing some weird sport, and he’s like trying to relate it to baseball. It’s this sport with all these really bizarre rules that don’t seem to make any sense. It’s just so funny the way he talks about it. It would have been fun to see Sturgeon and Lafferty get together over some drinks and stuff like that. Because I bet, even though they might have had different viewpoints about certain things, they would have had an interesting time. Our authors in this block, those are the two that I would like to see have synergy. I would like to see Sturgeon and Lafferty getting together and doing something cool. And Sturgeon would probably be the one to encourage that because he’d be like, I’m nothing without you.
This is the closest thing to a pure romantic story that we’ve done so far, I think. I thought before we were ready to do this, I thought I had read this story before, that I read it again, or maybe for the first time, I’m not really sure. I guess maybe it was a long time ago, if at all, or maybe I was getting confused with another story. But I do remember the feeling being like it was more like this, like it was more like a romantic story with a little bit of a set background that was just used in a way to bring the people together, but also was really cool because Nate, I’m sure you noticed all the acoustic references and stuff like that in the story and everything. All the cool things that he’s using. And he’s almost like a Rainbird-like figure, right? He’s got all this stuff that he’s done that’s like a secret, basically, though, right? Nobody knows about it. And it’s a real coincidence that they’ve come together. He just happens to be able to fix her problem. And he’s got the key to all this stuff that he’s too angry and uncertain to use. And she’s the one that’s going to help him figure it out, basically. I don’t know, it’s really sweet. It makes you feel really good when you’ve finished it, actually.
(music: low echoey rumbling)
spoiler summary and discussion
Gretchen:
“Slow Sculpture” opens with a woman coming across a man conducting an experiment of some kind in an orchard using an electroscope and is recruited by him to help with it. Once he’s gathered his findings, he asks if she came to this place looking for something, to which she responds with uncertainty. She then bursts into tears and reveals to the man she has a lump in her breast. He then tells her to come to his house and he’ll fix it. When asked if he’s a doctor, he says no, but she continues with him all the same. Going first through a garden where there is a tall bonsai tree, the two reach the house.
Once inside, the man asks the woman to take a seat and relax while he prepares something for her, and she surveys his large and eclectic library. The man works with some laboratory equipment and, finishing, returns to the woman. He asks if she’s afraid and if she wants to continue with this, to which she says that this would be preferable to the alternative. He muses on the nature of panic as a survival mechanism, since, as the woman also concludes, it occurs when reason doesn’t work.
The man assumes that is what the woman feels, having found out from doctors about the lump and what has led her here. He then shows her a needle and tells her the liquid inside is built around an isotope of potassium. He explains that just as atoms and molecules are supposed to be electrically balanced, but not in wild cells; the imbalance acts as interference, garbling messages between cells and spreading that garbled message. If one is able to stop the spread of this interference, this thunderstorm, the rest of the cells can fix it on their own, as only the immediate cells around the wild clump of cells are affected. He concludes that he can flood the woman with a medium that can distribute this unbalanced charge.
As he prepares and delivers the injection, he tells her that this is an analogy rather than how the cells actually work, arrived at from the static charge built up after this treatment is administered. With the use of the substance in the needle, he can use an electroscope to detect that charge and determine that an organism has wild cells. The woman is reminded of a demonstration of a Van de Graaff generator when she was younger, getting charged by it so her hair stood on end, which the man says is the same as now, but twice the voltage is going through her. She just has to stay back from grounded objects, such as himself, and everything will be safe.
As the charge starts to go through her, she grows worried and starts to grow restless as the man checks her with the electroscope. When he finds and confirms her lump, she faints. She wakes to learn she was in and out of consciousness for three days, which concerned the man, as the actual treatment itself shouldn’t have caused such a reaction. But then the woman reveals that it was the shock of learning the lump was there with certainty. The man had been wrong about her already seeing a doctor about it.
The woman is still distressed, but the man assures her that she is cured and that he has cured the cancer. As she takes in the information, he then grows bitter, expecting her to try to convince him that he has an obligation to share this cure with the world, starting out by trying to persuade him to share it with a price attached to it, then just to share it out of a moral duty. He grows upset about these arguments, even as the woman can’t get a word in herself. The woman says she just wanted to express her gratitude. He says she won’t be grateful until she is tested for cancer. Before that, such gratitude is just an act of faith, which he claims just doesn’t happen anymore.
He asks her to wait until morning to leave, as it is rather late, and finds her gone when he wakes up. He walks out to the garden and contemplates the bonsai, only to find her beside it. She says she has thought a lot since the night before and that she isn’t going to the doctors to be tested: her act of faith. She also tells him he is a frightened and angry man, then asks why he is so angry.
He tells her about an invention he created which can cut down on pollution, a relatively cleaner engine, but after selling it to an automobile company, it hasn’t been used, as it would do damage to the oil-refining industry. He doesn’t want to make such a mistake again, wasting an invention that won’t be of any use to anyone now. He tells her he’s angry that he keeps wanting to ask the next question but other people don’t want to. She then suggests that he can ask why people keep rejecting his questions in a way that provides the answer. When he says the answer is that people are stupid, she refuses it, even though she doesn’t know the real answer herself. But she does know that one must keep trying to find it, must keep asking.
She tries to go, but he senses she is afraid of asking her next question. He tells her he’s afraid of her, of forming a human connection, and I’m going to just read the last passage of this story:
“You do it by watering one side,” she said softly, “or by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai. It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care.”
“I think,” he said, “that you are making me some kind of offer. Why?”
“Sitting there most of the night,” she said, “I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted trees ever made bonsai out of one another?”
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
Nate:
Yeah, really, really great story, and I really like the juxtaposition of the cultivation of the bonsai tree with the development of the interpersonal relationships between the two characters. In particular, there’s one really good quote from the woman where she says, “People are living growing things too. I don’t know a hundredth part of what you do about bonsai, but I do know this: when you start one, it isn’t often the strong straight healthy ones you take. It’s the twisted sick ones that can be made the most beautiful. When you get to shaping humanity, you might remember that.”
There are just so many good lines of dialogue like that, and they make this a tender, touching story in a way that not a lot of the stuff that we’ve covered has been.
JM:
It felt really real for sure. It felt really like, yeah, again, very authentic. I could just really hear it in my head, especially at certain points when she goes to him and she’s like, why are you really angry? Why are you so angry?
Nate:
It’s not one of the plot-heavy stories with tons of crazy science fiction ideas or anything like that. I mean, it’s cool that he’s using electroscopes and, you know, Van de Graaff generators. Always neat to see a reference because it always makes me think of the prog band.
JM:
Van der Graaf Generator got a namecheck.
Nate:
Right, yeah. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s just nice to read one of these stories that really focuses on the human element, well the human element in general, really, because I think sometimes that can get lost and be dropped out of a lot of these science fiction stories when they’re focusing on crazy gadgets or extrapolations of technology or big-picture stuff like what’s going to happen when there’s a nuclear war or whatever.
JM:
At the same time, in a really weird way, I was reminded of a book we did a long time ago when it was just you and me again Nate, neither of us thought this book was awesome: “A Romance of Two Worlds” by Marie Corelli. There were certain reminiscences here, and it was funny because, yeah, that book wasn’t very good. Sturgeon is a little bit kooky, right? Like, he just writes another story about how powerful mushrooms are and how they can change everything, right? I’m right there, right? I love the psychedelic experience. It’s great, right? I get it. It’s important for people to have those kinds of experiences, but the way he delivers it, some people maybe, some people would be like, oh, that’s just too kooky and weird. Like it feels like California in the 1960s or something like that.
At the same time, he’s so awesome and sincere about it that you can’t doubt him too much. You can’t be cynical about what he’s saying or what he’s writing, and that’s one of the things that I like about Sturgeon. Maybe that’s what Vonnegut didn’t like about Sturgeon, because Sturgeon is very sincere and very earnest, right? Vonnegut maybe is not.
Nate:
Yeah, maybe he should have been making fun of Marie Corelli instead. She is certainly a bestseller, but I mean, I’m sure she sold more books than Theodore Sturgeon did, considering how huge she was. But yeah, “A Romance of Two Worlds” I think was probably the only other romance, really, that we covered on the podcast. And yeah, it’s not really the greatest book, but it had some weird stuff in it. But this was definitely great, much better than Corelli for sure. And yeah, yeah, it’s really, really good.
Yeah, I don’t really, again, have a lot to say about it because it is very low-key and tender, and there’s not a lot of huge ideas in here. But it’s just refreshing, I think, to read, yeah, a story about a relationship between two people and how that can be developed and nurtured.
Gretchen:
Yeah, when reading the stories for this episode, I saved my two stories for last just so I could take notes on them. The others I had read more as, like, I would take quick notes for them, but of course for these I needed to take the summary notes and everything when I was reading them. So I read them after all the others, and it felt pretty fitting to end on this one. I think it also feels pretty fitting to end this episode on it. It feels like a really beautiful story and a very positive one that leaves you really hopeful about things.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
We did consider a theme of romantic SF stories. We still haven’t really gone there, but this would certainly fit in. It’s very wholesome, I guess. When people think of romance novels nowadays, they tend to have certain elements to them that this story maybe doesn’t have, but the connection between the characters is very much there, and it’s just those two through the entire story. And I don’t know, I mean, I can see perhaps some people thinking that there’s not enough happening, there’s not enough this or that. But it’s just such a human story, and it’s just so evocative of human relationships and feelings. I mean, this is like the next level of approaching that. This is the next level where science fiction needs to be in 1970, and it’s really fun and cool that this is coming from Theodore Sturgeon, somebody who was there pretty early on, right? Yeah, writing right in the John W. Campbell era, he’s right there.
Gretchen:
It is really interesting how his career does overlap with all these very important moments within science fiction. And even him saying meeting H. L. Gold and being part of Galaxy was one of the most important parts of his life, besides also getting to be in Astounding and getting to be published under Campbell, like two greats of this magazine era.
JM:
It’s not like he doesn’t understand humor. It’s not like he doesn’t understand the distance required for certain types of storytelling. But his short story collections, it’s like thirteen volumes, right? And you can read all these short stories, and there’s so many. I don’t know how many it is in total. I imagine it’s similar to the Lafferty count or something like that, you know?
Nate:
I think it’s around like 130, 150, something like that.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. There’s so much sincerity and earnestness. I feel almost like we’re in a time now where people have a hard time with that. Like, people have a hard time with people looking right into your eyes and being like, did you ever think about this? Being really, really 100% earnest. And it’s not the same thing as being really serious all the time. This complete sincerity, and that’s precious in a really cool way. And Sturgeon as the writer is capable of a few different things, but that kind of voice does shine through, even though he’s not afraid to tackle some pretty dark subject matter. He’s got stories in both “The Dark Descent” and “Foundations of Fear,” and some of his early stories I think definitely feel like horror stories. He’s capable of writing in different modes, and he’s not afraid of these human connections. He’s always wanting to express that and how important it is, and he wants to get something through to the science fiction community, maybe especially.
And maybe in the book by Alec Nevala-Lee about Astounding, he has a recounting of a scene where this is probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s, where John W. Campbell’s there and he’s pretty old, and Sturgeon’s there. Campbell’s trying to reminisce a bit. He’s like, yeah, it was great when we were all good. Why don’t you write stories for me anymore? And Sturgeon is like, well, I just kind of feel like you’re standing for something else, like something that I’m not really standing for now, and I feel like we’ve drifted too far apart in terms of our ideologies and stuff like that.
And there’s one of the Strugatsky brothers’ books, “Prisoners of Power,” that I have where Sturgeon wrote the introduction. And he was one of those writers who were always singing the praises of other writers and trying to tell people, no, you should check out this guy. You should check out Lafferty, he’s great. You should check out, you know, the Strugatsky brothers, they’re awesome. This is how he spent his late, late science fiction career pretty much, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The stories that he wrote were increasingly low-profile in a sense, like people talking to each other, having an emotional connection, a dialogue where something maybe has to change before the end of the story, or somebody maybe has a realization, maybe everybody has a realization, and the connection is made. And that’s super important. And I guess when you see the kind of person that Sturgeon apparently was, where people talk about him and how he was the Pan kind of figure, or where he was the guy who was playing guitar and singing songs, and all these people would gather around him and they’d all want to be a part of that and learn something from being in the proximity, I suppose, of his ultimately positive nature and stuff like that, it’s pretty touching, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the anecdote that I gave of Heinlein talking about him is pretty representative of other anecdotes and other stories that you hear about him in the other introductions and other people speaking about him.
JM:
Yeah, it was really interesting that he was good friends, actually, with Robert A. Heinlein, and they would write to each other. Sturgeon would be upset because he’d be having writer’s block, and Heinlein would be like, all right, well, here’s a whole bunch of story ideas. You could use any of them you want. And he’d just send him a bunch of stuff. The two of them, again, they feel like very different kinds of people, but they were able to get on and they helped each other. I think Sturgeon’s definitely much more of a stylistic kind of writer. I definitely prefer Sturgeon so far anyway. It’s interesting seeing the connections between all these different people, because yeah, a lot of the time it’s people who had very different beliefs, and they’re able to reconcile. They’re able to talk to each other, and it’s good. A lot of the time the fact that these two guys were friends, at least to an extent, I don’t know if it lasted up until the 1970s and 1980s, but it’s interesting and cool.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, we all really like this story. I think, again, you just have to read it. You have to read it and introduce yourself to the idea of the romantic Sturgeon-style connection science fiction story. It’s really good. It’s really good. Again, I don’t know if it’s my favorite. I don’t have to pick one, right? Do I?
I don’t know.
Nate:
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.
JM:
These were six really cool stories, so yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like this one, as I said, I think I would choose this as my favorite. After that, it gets a little hard. I don’t know if I could say what my second favorite is. I enjoyed a couple of these, and I think also even just having them all in conversation and discussing all of them together, it really makes it even more difficult.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, this one stuck out to me as being my favorite, but yeah, after that it would be hard to rank them, I think. And yeah, it’s an interesting set of the six that span from issue number one to after Pohl leaves the editor position. So pretty much spanning the Golden Age of Galaxy.
But next time we’re going to continue talking about Galaxy, kind of. So some of the other pulp magazines, like Amazing and Astounding, had international reach in that they were sold in other countries, but Galaxy really, really pushed themselves out there. And they had the magazine translated into tons and tons of languages, and the flow of science fiction went both ways. So we’re going to be talking about Galaxy going international next time, as some of those local publications and translations of Galaxy also published stories by authors in their native language.
There was a very, very short-lived magazine called International Science Fiction that was published by Galaxy very, very briefly. It only ran for two issues, so we’re going to be taking a look at two stories from that, namely The Strugatsky Brothers' “Wanderers and Travellers” and Luigi Cozzi’s “Rainy Day Revolution No. 39.”
From the local versions of Galaxy, we’re going to be taking a look at Sandro Sandrelli’s “The Prototype,” which appeared in Galassia, which was the mostly Italian novel companion to the Italian version of Galaxy, though for one issue they published an all-Italian-author special issue. That’s where this one comes from. And we’ll be taking a look at the Argentinian magazine Más Allá, or “Beyond,” which was kind of, sort of, a Spanish translation of Galaxy, though not 100%. We’ll be talking about why that is next time.
We’re going to be taking a look at three authors from that: Abel Asquini, the pseudonym of Oscar Varsavsky, and his “The Crimes of the L.I.O.” series; two stories by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, “Beware of the Dog” and one that he wrote with his brother Jorge, “Boomerang”; and a story by Francisco Baltzer, “Summer Vacation.”
These stories that were published in Más Allá and the Sandro Sandrelli, you can read on our Blogspot, which we produced original translations of. And very, very soon we will have the complete Más Allá set on our Blogspot. The only one remaining is Francisco Baltzer’s “The Factory Ship,” which we will have up by the time we record next month’s episode. So you can take a look at these stories. You can take a look at all the other stories that were published in there. There are a lot of really cool stories in there, and I think this will be a fun episode to do next time, to see how Galaxy’s reach expands outward throughout the world and how some of these stories come back to the United States.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.
JM:
Great. Yeah, me too. I’m definitely anticipating all that. And yes, so as we know with Galaxy and its offshoots, we’re definitely not dealing with the space westerns. We don’t like those space westerns. We may get back to them at some point, but we hope you’ve enjoyed this rundown of Galaxy magazine from 1950 to 1970. We’ve talked about some really great stories, but there’s a lot of other stuff published in those magazine issues, so you can find a lot of this stuff online.
We’ll probably come back to stories during this time period in this magazine at certain points as we go. We have a lot of interesting themes to cover, a lot of host choices that I think we’ll be doing, some more random short story episodes and stuff like that. We’ll all get to pick our stuff. I know I’ve written down a pretty long list of different things that I’d like to cover, especially short stories. And it just kind of goes to show that short stories are a really awesome form for this genre, because I mean, we can still sit here and talk for a really long time about some of these short stories and how interesting they are and how much they actually really have to offer within a relatively small number of pages.
And it’s really cool. I think we will probably cover a lot more longer works as we go, but the short story form is something we’re always going to return to and want to return to. I personally love this format. It’s almost like the essence of this genre to me. But yeah, we hope you really enjoyed this. We really did too, and we will see you soon on Chrononauts. For now, we’ll say good night and enjoy the birth of spring, and make your connections, and have a good one. And we’ll see you next time on Chrononauts. Good night.
Bibliography:
Delany, Samuel - introduction from "The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (Vol. II)"
Ellison, Harlan - introduction from "The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (Vol. XI)"
Heinlein, Robert - introduction from "The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (Vol. III)"
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