SF - Sturgeon 1971 - Sturgeon is alive and well - short stor

220 Pages·2016·11.95 MB·English

by  Sturgeon Theodore

STUR6EON
ISA TIVEA NDW ELL...
a collectiono f short storiesb y
THEODORSET URGEON
6. n Puham'sS onsN, ewY ork
Copynghfi O rgTr Theodore Sturgeon
Publ,ished bg arrangement uith the au,tlwt
All rtghts resen>ed',T hi,s book, or parts thereof, mast mt be re-
proiluceil in ony fonn u:ithout permission. Published simul'
toneouslg in Canadn by Longmans Cenodn Lfunited, Toronto,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
"To Hrnr AND rrru EAsEL," copyright rg54 Ballantine Books, Inc.
"SLow Scur.prr:ns," copyright @ rSZo Universal Publishing and Disbibut-
ing Corp.
"Ir's Youl" @ rg6g Knight Publishing Co{P.
"TANE C*ne "oopr yJnognhyt ," copynght @ rgZo Sirkay Publishing Co.
"CBAIE " copyright @ rgzo Sirkay Publishing Co.
"THE Gru Wrro Knrsw Wsat TmY MEANT," copyright @ rgZo Sirkay
Publishing Co.
"Jonnt's GAp," copynght @ rs6g Knfght Publishing Corp. ,
"fr Wes Notrnr.rc-Rner-r.vl" copynght @ rg6g Sirkay Publfshing Co.
"BnowNsuoEs," eopyright @ rg6g Knight Publishing Cory.
"IJNcr-s FnEMLrs," copynght @ rgzo Knight Publishing Co{P.
"THE Pe:rsnNs or Donwr," copynght @ rgzo Sirkay Publishing Co.
"SrrrcDE," copyright @ rgzo Knight Publishing Cory.
PruNTED IN TEE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
1 . . OnW the simplest go beyond
lucidities in season,
Wh.enh ungrg, eat, ulwn tired, sleeP,
and, looe for tw reoson."
To
JUDITH EISENSTEIN BAGAI
wlw keeps the faith

CONTENTS
FOREWORD u(
TO HERE AND THE EASEL 1
SLOW SCULPTURE
Jt-/
ITS YOUI 79
TAKE CARB OF JOEY 89
CRATE
101
THE GIRL WHO KNBW WHAT THEY MEANT r15
IORRY'S GAP I'25
IT WAS NOTHING-REALLYI L37
BROWNSHOES 153
UNCLE FREMMIS 165
THB PATTBRNS OF DORNE r83
SUICIDE 199

Foreword
Yes, I am alive and well.
Once to a perceptive friend I was bemoaning thu fac{ that
there was a gap in my bibliogaphy from rg4o to 1946. (Actually
some stories were published during that period, but only one
had been written after 1g4o.) What wonders I might have pro-
duced had I not been clutched up, I wailed: And he said no, be
of good cheer. He then turned on the whole body of my work a
kind of searchlight I had not been able to use, and pointed out
to me that the early stuff was all very well, but the stories were
essentially entertainments; \rdth few exceptions thuy lacked that
Somethingt o Say quality which marked the later outtrlut.I n other
words, the retreat, the period of silence,w as in no way a cessa-
tion, a stopping. It was a silent working out of ldeas, of convic'
tion, of profound selection. The fact that the process went on
uqrecognizeda nd beyond or beneath my control is quite beside
the point. The work never stopped.
fve held hard to that revelation in recent years, and no longer
go into transports of anguish when the typewriter stops. I do
other things instead, in absolute conffdencet hat when that silent
subterranean work is done, it will surface. When it does so, it
does with blinding speed-a short story, sometirnes,i n two hours.
But to say I wrote it in two hours is to overlook that complex,
steady,s ilent processinga nd reprocessingth at has been going on
Sturgeon Is Ali,oe and' Well , , ,
for months and often years. Say then that I Erped it in two hours.
I do not know how long it took to write. I eould only typo it when
it was ffnished.
I do not know if the package you hold in your hands will be
regarded as remarkable in the bibliography. Biographically it
represents a miracle, ffid engenders some tributes'
i *", living at the bottom of a mountain in Neverneverland,
far under a rock. Looking back on that time, I now know that I
was unaware of just how far I had crawled and just how immo-
bile my croue,h.S uddenly one day there exploded a great mass
of red hafu attached to a laughing face with a beauty spot right
in the center of her forehead and a totally electric personality'
Her name was Wina and she was a journalist and a photographer
and a dress designer and a dancer and she had traveled 6'5O9
miles with her eat (inside of whom she smuggled four kittens)
to marry me. She crawled way in under that rock and hauled me
out. We acquired a squirrel and some tropical fish and a babf
*Man
(whose o**u is An&; Theodore, wbich means is the gift
of God," Lindsay Sturgeon) and set up housekeeping.
And suddenly I wrote. As I have said, I do not know how long
it took me to write tle stories,b ut I tgped one a week for eleven
consecutive weeks, and after a short hiatus, a twelfth-all while
I was writing a novel. So the first tribute goest o Wina.
My next acknowledgment is to Tom Dardis, not simply for acl
cepting the book for publication, but for agreeing to use this par-
ticular table of contents. For one thing I am delighted to have in
*Wina"
one place otactly (*ith one exception) those stories-but
that's personal and sentimental. My most profound appreciation
is extended to him for his willingness to include some of the sto'
-ssience
ries which cannot be categorized ffction."
Science ffction is my best friend and my worst enemy. But for
one or two notable examples,s cience fiction and science ffction
writers are relegated to the back pages of the book review soc-
'I
tion, not to be taken seriously by serious critics. dont read sci-
ence ftcdon,- says Mr. I. Q. Public, with On the B@rh and Dr.
Strangelooe and Lord of tha Fli,es and Mescinh and a half hun-
Foreword
dred others on the bookshelf behind him, and he marches out to
see 2oor-all sciencef iction but never called sciencef fction and
virtually never written by anyone who has ever appeared rn Ana-
lng or Galaxg or Neu Woilds except,p erhaps,i n reprint, in some
of the magazinesw hich run reprints (and I'm glad they do). The
predicament of the professionals ciencef tction writer who takes
himself and his work seriouslyc ould be called comic if it weren't
for such unfunny things as hospital bills and the IRS, and why
more of them aren't certifiably paranoid is a greater wonder than
any of them have yet wrought. It seemsa literal truth that to have
acquired a reputation in science fiction is to be refexively rele-
gated to the twenty-ftfth century with Flash Gordon and Buclc
Rogers,a ll wrapped up in a colored funny paper.
Yet the best writers in the ffeld (as one of the cognoscentio nce
pointed out) write scienceF ICTION, not SCIENCE fiction. Let
me tell you something:y ou can not write good fiction about ideas.
You can only write good fiction about people. Good sciencef ic-
fion writers are good fiction writers. When a blatant dabbler like
Kingsley Amis gets three columns in Time magazine while no-
body ever heard of a polished and thoughtful writer like Edgar
Pangborn,i t breaksm y heart
Very special thanks must go to trvo bright young editors, Mer-
rill Miller and jared Rutter, who bought most of the stories in
this book. They askedm e for stories. They didnt ask for sciene
fiction or fantasy stories;t hey did not demand the currently ob-
ligatory skin scene-they iust bought my stories as they arrived;
and one can approach the typewriter with a wonderful senseo f
wingspread with a market like that.
Nothing will ever stop me from writing science ffction, but
there sure is a plot afoot to keep me from writing anything else,
and I wont have it. Perhaps now you can understand why I am
so pleasedw ith this collection.
lvly final tuibute has to do with the one story in this book which
'"Io
iS not the product of that astonishing summer. I wrote Here
and the Easel" for a Ballantine book now long out of print. It was
called Star Short Noaels,a nd when Ballantine issued one of the
threen ove^rsY ::;::K"#'{#,;;,wourd notb e
reprinted, and asked and was graciously granted permission to
or" th" story in another book. It was published in 1954a nd has
been seen nowhere else since.
T. S.
xu