STURGEON, Theodore

(1918-1985)

   Working name of US writer born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name; Argyll (coll 1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter TS wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes. Certainly TS early suffered or entered into several exiles: illness cut him off from any chance he might become a gymnast; when still a teenager he went to sea, where he spent 3 years while at the same time making his first fiction sales (1937) to McClure's syndicate for newspaper publication; after beginning to publish sf with "Ether Breather" for ASF (1939) he remained active as a member of the small band of genre-sfwriters for only a few years before he abruptly stopped producing; he then spent half a decade abroad, variously employed, before returning to his primary career in 1946. The next 15 years saw him produce, in an almost constant flood, virtually all the remaining stories and novels for which he is remembered. Then, for the last 25 years of his life, except for 2-3 short periods of renewed flow, he was silent. Given that all of TS's best work somehow or other moves from alienation to some form of transcendent community, it might - crassly - be suggested that, in his own life, it was story-writing itself which represented that blissful movement towards acceptance and resolution which makes so many of his tales so emotionally fulfilling, and that when he was silent he was in exile. Certainly there can be no denying the green force that shoots through even the silliest PULP-MAGAZINE conceits to which he put his mind, or the sense of achievedand joyful tour de force generated by his best work.He had, one might say, a binary career: either he was writing nothing or he was writing at a high pitch. Of his approximately 175 stories, a very high proportion are as successful as he was allowed to be in a field not well designed, during his active years, to accommodate sf tales told with raw passion. TS was, in fact, initially less comfortable with ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION than with UNKNOWN, and that magazine's demise may have had something to do with his first departure from the field. In those first 3 years, however, he produced more than 25 stories, all in ASF and Unknown, using the pseudonyms E. Waldo Hunter or E. Hunter Waldo on occasions when he had 2 stories in an issue; several of the 25 remain among his best known, including "It" (1940 ASF; 1948 chap) and "Microcosmic God" (1941). Along with A.E. VAN VOGT, Robert A. HEINLEIN and Isaac ASIMOV, TS was a central contributor to and shaper of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's so-called GOLDEN AGE OF SF, though less comfortably than his colleagues, as even in those earlyyears, while obeying the generic commands governing the creation of Campbellian technological or HARD SF, he was also writing sexuallythreatening, explorative tales like "Bianca's Hands" which, refused by US markets, finally appeared in the UK in 1947.In the late 1940s and the 1950s TS came into his full stride, and almost all his collections sortand resort this material. They are Without Sorcery (coll 1948; cut vt Not Without Sorcery 1961), E PLURIBUS UNICORN (coll 1953), A Way Home (coll1955; with 2 stories cut 1956; with 3 stories cut, vt Thunder and Roses 1957 UK), Caviar (coll 1955), A Touch of Strange (coll 1958; with 2 stories cut 1959), Aliens 4 (coll 1959), Beyond (coll 1960), Sturgeon in Orbit (coll 1964), . . . And My Fear is Great/Baby is Three (coll 1965),Starshine (coll 1966; 3 uncollected stories plus reprints), The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (coll 1972), The Stars are the Styx (coll 1979), The Golden Helix (coll 1979) and Alien Cargo (coll 1984). A late compilation, A Touch of Sturgeon (coll 1987 UK) ed David PRINGLE, usefully selects from this mass; and a definitive attempt to publish his entire short fiction began with The Ultimate Egoist (coll 1994) ed Paul WILLIAMS. Although he continued to contribute to ASF for several years, most of the work assembled in these collections first appeared in newer and more flexible markets like GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, where he published much of his best work after 1950. Though shibboleths (TABOOS) still haunted editors of GENRE SF, he clearly felt increasingly free to write stories expressive ofhis sense that sexual diversity, sexual "abnormality" and love - however manifested - constituted a set of codes or maps capable of leading maimed adolescents out of alienation and into the light. Though most of his explorations of this material seem unexceptionable in 1992, stories like "The World Well Lost" (1953), about ALIENS exiled from their own culturebecause of their homosexuality, created considerable stir in the 1950s (SEX). Though the road to liberation (or transcendent community) wassometimes solely internal, the dictates of sf and fantasy, and TS's own romantic impulses, generated a large number of tales in which CHILDREN, gifted with paranormal powers, must fight against a repressive world until they meet others of their kind. TS's short stories read like instruction manuals for finding the new world.The most famous examples of the sense of enablement he generated, however, were his 3 best novels. The Dreaming Jewels (1950; vt The Synthetic Man 1957) is an enjoyable and sophisticatedtale whose young protagonist, forced to run away to a circus by wicked step-parents, gradually becomes aware of his powers, and defeats the evil adult forces about him. MORE THAN HUMAN (fixup 1953), winner of the 1954 INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD and TS's most famous single title, consists of3 connected stories, "Baby is Three" (1952 Gal) plus 2 novellas written around it. With very considerable intensity it depicts the coming together of 6 deeply alienated "freaks" into a PSI-POWERED gestalt, where they achieve true maturity. In The Cosmic Rape (1958) a HIVE-MIND from the stars invades mankind but finds itself - to its ultimate betterment - catalysing Homo sapiens as a racial entity into one gestalt: the sense of homecoming generated by the final pages of this short book is deeply touching.Though TS won both HUGO and NEBULA for one of his infrequent later stories, "Slow Sculpture" (1970), his later career was not happy. Venus Plus X (1960), however, bravely came as close to a traditionalUTOPIA as any US genre-sf writer had approached before the efforts of Mack REYNOLDS. Charlie Johns awakens in Ledom (that is, Model), a melodious unisex society, longingly and effectively depicted as having transcended that sexual divisiveness of mankind against which TS always argued, and finds that he has been roused so as to examine Ledom and judge its success. Though he discovers to his distress that the androgynous bliss of Ledom depends not on a mutation but on surgery immediately after birth,the final message of the novel combines didactic arguments for and against this vision of human paradise with longing for its realization. Later stories were assembled in Sturgeon is Alive and Well . . . (coll 1971) and Case and the Dreamer (coll 1974). Godbody (1986), a short novel on whichhe had been working for some time before his death, weakly reiterates earlier paeans to transcendence. But the continued publication of stories from the years of his prime helped maintain an appropriate sense of TS as a writer of very considerable stature. His influence upon writers like Harlan ELLISON and Samuel R. DELANY was seminal, and in his life and workhe was a powerful and generally liberating influence in post-WWII US sf. Though his mannerisms were sometimes self-indulgent, though his excessesof sympathy for tortured adolescents sometimes gave off a sense of self-pity, and though his technical experiments were perhaps less substantial than their exuberance made them seem, his very faults illuminated the stresses of being a US author writing for pay in an alienated era and in the solitude of his craft.

   JC

   Other works: The Rare Breed (1966), a Western, as are the stories in Sturgeon's West (coll 1973), 3 of which are with Don Ward; I, Libertine (1956), a historical novel as by Frederick R. Ewing; The King and Four Queens (1956), a detective novel; Some of Your Blood (1961), a non-sf study of a blood-drinking psychotic; Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea * (1961), a novelization of VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (1961); an Ellery Queen detection, The Player on the Other Side (1963) as by Ellery Queen; The Joyous Invasions (coll 1965 UK), which includes 2 stories from Aliens 4together with "To Marry Medusa", which was later exp as The Cosmic Rape, both being reissued as The Cosmic Rape and "To Marry Medusa" (coll 1977); To Here and the Easel (coll 1973 UK), all stories previously collected;Amok Time * (graph 1978), a STAR TREK "fotonovel"; More Than Human: The Graphic Story Version (graph 1979); Maturity: Three Stories (coll 1979); Pruzy's Pot (1972 The National Lampoon; 1986 chap); The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff (1955 FSF; 1989 dos); The Dreaming Jewels/The Cosmic Rape/Venus Plus X (omni 1990).

   About the author: Theodore Sturgeon: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) and Theodore Sturgeon (1981 chap), both by Lahna F. Diskin; Theodore Sturgeon (1981) by Lucy Menger.

   See also: BIOLOGY; CITIES; CLONES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DEFINITIONS OF SF; DIMENSIONS; ESP; EVOLUTION; FEMINISM; GODS AND DEMONS; GREAT AND SMALL; INVASION; ISLANDS; LIVINGWORLDS; MACHINES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MARS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MESSIAHS; NEW WORLDS; NUCLEAR POWER; PARANOIA; POWER SOURCES; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SCIENTISTS; SOCIOLOGY; SUPERMAN; SUPERNATURAL CREATURES; THEODORE STURGEON MEMORIAL AWARD; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST.