January 21–28, 1999

critical mass

Man & Superman

A new audience discovers Theodore Sturgeon, one of the century's most innovative sci-fi writers.

by Mark Zepp

The cover's pretty. It's swell. It's covered with a palette of soft, zoned-out colors, warped matrices of quantum space superimposed on inert humanoid profiles, an out-of-focus doll head, little circles and dots—all in all a graphically trenchant display, a well-informed collage of the elements of consumerist postmodernism. On top of it all is imprinted the slightly slapstick but superbly hip title More Than Human, and in greenish translucent italics, the biggest word on the page: Sturgeon.

Sturgeon is the name of the author, and despite the cover's mishmash of contemporary glossalia, Theodore Sturgeon is neither a contemporary writer nor a very hip one. He lived from 1918 to 1985, resided in New York, Philadelphia and California, and wrote for the science fiction pulps of the '40s and '50s, whose covers featured bug-eyed saucer men and rogue tractors eating farmers alive with exclamations like IT WASN'T VICIOUS; IT WAS SIMPLY CURIOUS—AND VERY HORRIBLY DEADLY! Vintage has brought two of his novels from that time into contemporary light, reissuing this month More Than Human (1953), regarded as his masterpiece, and To Marry Medusa (1958), originally published as The Cosmic Rape.

At the same time, North Atlantic Books is releasing The Perfect Host, the fifth volume of a projected ten of his collected stories. Clearly there is an assumed audience for these projects; indeed, although largely ignored by the literary mainstream, Sturgeon's stories and novels have enjoyed an astounding popularity in the science fiction community (he even wrote a few Star Trek scripts), and his work has influenced many of the genre's great writers.

The Sturgeon revival continues a trend that began in the '80s, when Vintage reissued over a dozen of Philip Dick's novels as glossy trade paperbacks, and his letters and short stories were similarly published in five-volume projects. More recently, Vintage reissued three novels and selected stories by science fiction legend Alfred Bester that have enjoyed surprising popularity. Like Dick and Bester, Sturgeon offers a body of work which has a tremendous potential for mainstream palatability, although it will have taken decades for these authors to achieve the popularity and regard their works deserve, and posthumously at that. There is good reason to argue that these writers were innovative enough that only after their time could their works be appreciated.

Sturgeon's fiction is distinguished by two things, which, in their impact on other authors, revolutionized science fiction. The first is his ability to twist around the codes of his genre and subvert many of science fiction's restrictive assumptions of plot and character. The second is the effortless, bizarre and playful style which powers some of his most compelling stories, and which remains unrivaled in American science fiction. Both aspects of his work have been praised by science fiction and mainstream authors from Samuel Delany to Kurt Vonnegut (who based his character Kilgore Trout directly on Theodore Sturgeon), and have invited favorable comparisons to similarly groundbreaking works by Cordwainer Smith, Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner.

John Campbell, editor of the leading '40s and '50s pulps Astounding and Unknown, favored stories about mutated super-men who necessarily represented a golden future for mankind, and his writers obliged him. Sturgeon wrote prolifically about the Superman, but he complicated prevalent assumptions by envisioning him (and her) as a societal outcast. In his very hyper-humanness, in his embodiment of human advancement, he emerged more as a discreet threat to humanity than a savior.

In To Marry Medusa, which is an expanded form of his short story of the same name, the Superman figure is anything but super. Filthy, homeless and hateful, Gurlick is distinguished only by the fact that he's been possessed by an alien spore of a vast hive mind, the Medusa, which is set on ingesting homo sapiens and assimilating the species into its galactic consciousness. Sturgeon's vision of human transcendence is a grim one: When Gurlick mates, the Medusa will invade humanity and create a single mind by disintegrating the multitude of distinct personalities which make up the race.

In More Than Human, built of three closely related novellas, a similar group dynamic looms on humanity's horizon. Homo gestalt is a group of five misfit individuals who together constitute a new kind of human with abilities and power previously unimagined. With the future of mankind at stake, this super-human—which comprises a speechless infant genius, teleporting twin children, a precocious girl endowed with telekinetic and empathic powers, and a dilapidated vagabond more animal than man—struggles to reconfigure and unify the social and moral codes of each of its parts.

		Trout's Prototype: Sturgeon circa 1960.

There is no question that Sturgeon wrote far-out stories, well informed by the excesses of pulp science fiction. What's especially unnerving and intoxicating about his work, however, are the creepy domestic sketches that often dominated his narratives. For all his explorations of hive minds, aliens and hyper-humans, Sturgeon is most graceful when he sets his sights on the bachelor haunted by weird scurryings in his brain, or the child confronting drunk dandies at her mother's cocktail party, or the love affair between a man and his bulldozer. His emphatically self-reflexive humor garnishes his characters with a welcome, if unflattering, sheen of humanity too often absent in the mechanical stories of his peers. Science fiction, with all its outlandish possibilities, provided Sturgeon a narrative tool with which to upset consensual assumptions of reality, and in turn to offend complacent notions of what it means to be human.

Strategies of this sort are illuminated by the extensive story notes edited and compiled by Paul Williams in the volumes of the collected stories. Included in these notes are excerpts from Sturgeon's letters, biographical sketches and story revisions, all of which reveal much about the author and his intentions, as well as his pervasive frustration at the censorship and creative restrictions of the pulp publishing world. Whatever constraints he worked under, however, Theodore Sturgeon managed to release stories wonderfully drenched in science fiction's extravagances, and which at the same time overturned, humanized and rejuvenated the genre.

The recent availability of Sturgeon's novels and stories marks a significant literary event which, in addition to exposing a host of new readers to a frequently neglected genre, will assure the much-deserved and long-overdue recognition of some of this century's most innovative literary works. And the covers are pretty, too.