So I don’t know if I’ll get through this project or not. I’m still working on it, and enjoying it, but he produced a pretty big body of work, much of it short fiction, which I am only beginning to develop a taste again for as I withdraw from social media.
Why Sturgeon?
He wrote one of my favorite things, a novella my father loved too, called Baby is Three. The novelization, an extension, is to some degree is less satisfying, even though it is more complete; Baby is Three is the first act of something. But the acts you imagine coming after that set up? Glorious. The novella was published in Oct 1954 in Galaxy magazine, a year after the end of the Korean war, my father’s war.
I’d publish a story in Galaxy, (a brief revival) in the 90s…
I try to do this first act thing in my novellas; I mean, complete a major character arc for the main character… and set up something to ponder in the end. Something that lives on, where the best is yet to come. A few characters you like, earning something, winning something. A new lease on life. Powerful technology. A better future. Romantic fulfillment. A sense of meaning and purpose.
At that point? Invent as much more story as you want.
There is a Penguin / Randomhouse collection of Sturgeon’s life work, a massive thirteen volume thing curated for over a decade. I’ve read about three or four books of Sturgeon shorts at this point, maybe five, mostly shorts, mostly award winners, scattered over his 40 year writing career. He wrote shorts and novelettes and a very few novels. You could do that, in the old days, though just barely.
Sturgeon’s ISFDB page illustrates the range of his influence and staying power in the form of the hundreds of translations, collections, anthologizations, interviews and reviews of his work.
I’m not a scholar of SF, just a long time reader, old enough to remember the days when fans read some sizable fraction of the canon in one form or another. Maybe only a few books, by someone you didn’t care for, but yeah, we read a bit of everybody and a ton of whoever we really liked. It’s too big now. You’d be insane to even try.
And so much of that old stuff is so toxic to today’s readers. You can’t recommend it to anyone but historians. Sturgeon? He’s an exception.
The canon was so much smaller, before Star Wars and Star Trek. The complexion of course, very WASPy. But it was always, always, neurodivergent, as I think a lot of SF fandom is, so, the insular, clannish, tightly knit and yet fractious quality of the community was always there. Readers became writers in the span of a year or two, often, writing letters or creating and sharing review zines. Zine after zine, before zines were a cool gen-x thing.
Sturgeon is a link to my father. The novella Baby is Three is one that sent chills down my spine on first reading. Thinking of it now, I still shiver.
A third of the way through The Ultimate Egoist, the earliest collected-works Penguin collection, I am reading a fair amount of what must be fiction written for women’s magazines and /or military men / men’s adventure markets, many with no genre element. Somehow, the original publications these stories appeared in are not mentioned in the copyright pages of the texts, and I can’t find a complete list online. Not even for this respected, remembered figure…
This is infuriating.
Because magazine fiction was first absorbed in the context of the magazine, the expectations of that magazine, that genre. If you became successful enough to have single author collections of your magazine work published under your name it would be by genre. At least every Sturgeon collection I bought was all SF, spec fic, though of course, of his sort, which was always earthbound, often contemporary in feel.
Which I do too.
So Sturgeon’s SF / Fantasy work is collected; a single non-genre story is included in many collections, “And Now the News,” which is a masterpiece–but it was published, with controversy, in a science fiction magazine, the august Magazine of Fantasy & Science fiction.
I’ve sold that magazine two stories by the way. I wept when I sold the first. And howled with joy at the second…
Moving along.
But these other non-genre stories are new to me. I wish I knew where they were originally published. This was in the magazine era, and you could make living writing shorts, but of course, you had a better shot if you could write in every genre.
And it seems Sturgeon could. I’m enjoying the romances. I’m enjoying the sea stories. The military themed stories. The O’henry twist stories.
I was going to write a line about each story. I’ve read about 20 so far. Maybe I do that. Maybe I don’t. I’m gonna create a category for this project, so anyone interested in it can read the whole thing. Again, far better writers, far better scholars, have crawled around in Sturgeon’s life and work. There’s no reason to imagine I have anything important to add.
But what the hell.
I may read biographies and critical books, too. I don’t know yet. But it beats farting around on Facebook. I hope.
Sturgeon died in 1985, almost 40 years ago now. He was born fifteen years before my father… so I can imagine my teenage father reading a man not quite old enough to be his. My father is temporal my yard-stick. Dead at 67, Sturgeon had 19 years less life than my father… but my father completed his life’s work before Sturgeon’s 67. He goofed around for twenty three years with my mother after retiring from his tenured Professor gig, traveling the world, eating and drinking wine in nice restaurants.
They were both very happy. I wish my parent’s fate on us all.
But I also want to be someone who lives some mark. I’ll never approach that of Sturgeon. But maybe I can amount to something? Probably not. I write too slowly. I’m too old already. But I’ll poke around now in the life of this man who could have been my grandfather. A man of the future. A man of his time. A man who translated some good fraction of his spirit, of his being, into texts, which float through the ether, in a dozen languages, decades after his death. Moldering paperbacks. Ephemeral e-texts.
I would prefer Sturgeon’s fate to my parents. But that gives me only eight more years to do my work.
I need to get cracking.
But first, I need to remember how to read.
