Microcosmic God (56 page)

The early draft also reveals that “Microcosmic God” evolved out of a hoary “Sunday supplement reporter comes to interview eccentric inventor/scientist” plot frame that Sturgeon had been trying to use for several years (on the evidence of other unfinished story-beginnings found among the Sturgeon papers from the Staten Island trunk).

The second sentence of the early draft casually summarizes the main gimmick of “The Anonymous,” suggesting, I guess, that when Sturgeon had something on his mind he didn’t mind repeating himself. (In fact, as in the case of his reflex put-downs of “Microcosmic God,” he was quite capable of repeating himself almost verbatim over a period of 40 years. The patience of his wives etc. is legendary.)

“The Haunt”:
first published in
Unknown
, April 1941. Sturgeon’s interest since childhood in building crystal radios shows up in a number of his stories, notably “The Bones” and “The Martian and the Moron.” Ghost stories (“Niobe,” “Shottle Bop,” “Ghost of a Chance”) are another recurring theme. The following quote (from a letter TS wrote his mother in October 1937) could well have been included in the notes on “Cargo”
or “Turkish Delight” (
Vol
. I), but I think it fits here as well:

This ship is supposed to be haunted, a propos of your remarks about the worker’s influence on his product. It seems that two people have jumped overboard from the foc’sle head where I stand my lookout watches. And for apparently no reason. I had only one unusual experience up there, but it really was something to remember. One night about three AM I was standing up there, absolutely groggy for want of sleep. I forget just why; I think that tank-mucking
[work in the gas tanks, under the influence of the fumes]
was responsible for it. Finally I could stand it no longer. I crawled down between the riding-chocks on the anchor-engine and went to sleep. Suddenly I found myself wide awake, in a cold sweat, and staring up into a threatening sky; I saw nothing that could have awakened me with such a start, and so lay back and dozed off. Immediately I awoke with such a jolt that it threw me right up on my feet, and then I heard, gradually fading away, and already almost imperceptible, the most extraneous possible sound for my environment. Of all impossible things, the skirling of bagpipes! I stood absolutely frozen, staring out over the bow, and there, dead ahead, at two hundred yards, the ugly stub snout of a Swedish freighter poked out of a fogbank, throwing two fountains of spray as she headed unerringly for our port bow. I whipped around to the bell behind me and rang three times (“Dead Ahead!”) and yelled “Hard left!” as loud as I could bellow. Yes, we missed her, but only just. It was one of those awful moments that you dream about, but never see the end of. We practically scraped; to be more accurate, I should say that we missed her by about 40 feet. Later, when the excitement had died down, and I had taken the wheel, the mate told me that he had seen absolutely nothing until almost a minute after I rang the bell. What would have happened if those phantom pipes had not been so insistent? Note: I never sleep on watch any more!!

Magazine blurb (title page): IT SEEMED A GOOD IDEA TO CRACK THE CAST-IRON POISE OF THE GIRL BY A LITTLE SYNTHETIC HAUNT. SOUND EFFECTS, RADIO VARIETY, WERE INTENDED, BUT—

“Completely Automatic”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, February 1941. Written fall 1940.

Two pages of an early draft of this story survive in Sturgeon’s papers. As with the “Microcosmic God” draft, they show an author who has his basic story idea and is experimenting with how to tell it. It’s possible that these two pages were all Sturgeon wrote before rethinking the story and
writing it in its present form. The early draft does not have the “one space-sailor tells another a story” narrative structure. Instead the story starts with a new, green crewman meeting his bunkmate (and being razzed by him), a very skeletal version of the Babson-meets-Fuzzy scene in the finished story. This is followed by a long, incomplete clump of exposition, concerning the funkiness of the
Maggie Northern
and the recent elimination of the “Apprentice Chemical Controller” job aboard this automated ore-ship. One imagines Sturgeon stopping at the bottom of the second page and saying, okay, I think I’m ready to start writing now.

When Sturgeon wrote “Completely Automatic” and “Microcosmic God,” he had already sold at least eight fantasy stories to
Unknown
, but his only science fiction sales were the two “Ether Breather” stories. He was still trying to find his voice as a science fiction writer.

Magazine blurb (from the title page): A YARN ABOUT A PERFECTLY AUTOMATIC SHIP, AND HER PERFECTLY INCOMPETENT CREW, HER HOPELESS, PRACTICALLY MINDLESS CREW TRAPPED BY HER PERFECT MECHANISMS WHEN THINGS WENT WRONG.

“Poker Face”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, March 1941. Written fall 1940. Moskowitz in
Seekers of Tomorrow
says “Poker Face” is “historically important as one of the earliest science fiction stories based on the notion that otherworldly aliens [
sic;
actually in this case it’s men from the future] are living and working among us.” It could also be considered a forerunner of Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the perfect city at the end of time, lost in a self-sustained stasis.

Sturgeon (from
Without Sorcery
):
No one can change my conviction that there are people among us like “Face.” Not necessarily people from his strange point of origin, but from many. The reasons these folk have for concealing themselves are more obvious than any they might have for self-advertisement. You do not attempt to alter what you see on your visits to a museum—or to a zoo …

And later, from
Alien Cargo:

I’m so very glad to see this one back in print. Written sometime in early 1940, this and the next four were written in an extraordinarily prolific (for me) period in early 1940, during which my editor, the late John Campbell, hoarded them and pieced them out; I saw none of them in print until I returned to the States after managing a hotel in Jamaica, then, when the U.S. got into the war, working as a heavy equipment operator in Jamaica (for the Army) and in Puerto Rico (for the Navy). From
1940 until late ’46 I wrote only one story (a novelette called “Killdozer!”)—six solid years of “writer’s block”—the worst I have ever known
.

But about “Poker Face,” 1940: I wonder what was in George Orwell’s mind just then, eight years before he wrote his terrifyingly prescient
1984?

Sturgeon’s account (written in 1984) requires a few factual corrections: his “writer’s block” began in June 1941, when he moved to Jamaica; and he began writing again on a regular basis near the end of 1945.

When Sturgeon put together his first collection of stories in 1948, he evidently did some light editing on several of the stories (one, “Maturity,” was substantially rewritten). The text included here is the book version. In the case of “Poker Face,” two sentences have been trimmed from the middle of the first paragraph of the magazine version, four sentences cut from Face’s description of how he arranged the cards, and, more significantly, there are several large cuts from Face’s description of his future city, cuts that may help explain why Sturgeon remembered his story as being related to the dystopic vision of
1984
. The biggest cut starts at the end of the paragraph that starts,
“I came from that city.”
In the magazine it ends,
Imagine it if you can—let me describe the life of an individual to you
. And goes on:

“He was born when he was needed. He was an individual from a mold. He was a certain weight, not the thousandth of a gram more or less than that of any of his contemporaries. He was fed the same food as they, slept exactly the same hours, learned precisely the same things at the same time. His pulse, mental powers, rate of metabolism, physical strength, range of vision—all were exactly the same as those of the same age. He needed no individual attention. He fought no disease, because there was no disease in the city. He was fed and clothed and housed by machines, and he was taught by them and quickly learned the way of them. When he was adult he was bred. When he was eighteen he had been schooled for two hours a day for eight years. He then spent one year working two hours a day tending one of the millions of machines that took their power from interstellar space and transmuted it into usable energies for the people and the structures. When he had finished that year he spent an hour each day for eight months in teaching the young the things he had observed about the work he had done. He gave instruction for twenty days less each year for twelve years and then died because he ceased to get fed, as there was nothing left for him to do. His body was transformed into raw materials of various kinds, with no waste. There was never any waste in the city
.

“Now the city was divided into two halves, like the halves of a great brain. One half was dedicated to the supply of power, and one to materials. There were forty-five million people in each half, equally divided in age and sex. The flawless smoothness of the city’s operation depended on the maintenance of that exact balance between supply and demand, manufacture and the means to manufacture. For every death there was a birth …”

The paragraph that begins, “Face shook his head,” originally ended with these added sentences:
Remember—it wasn’t only that these people were educated that way and brought up in those surroundings. They were bred for those traits.”

And slightly later, the paragraph that begins “I was coming to that,” had these added sentences at the end:
Now the machines which supplied the people with everything from baby pap to muscle rubs, transportation to air conditioning, naturally covered such a vast number of highly specialized fields that it was necessary to maintain quite a number of men educated along these lines. There was only one of these men detailed to each field—astronomy, astrophysics, biology, and so on. He learned what his predecessor knew and spent the years of his life learning what else he might and teaching it to the next in line
.

No text was added or rewritten for the later version, although there are additions and light rewritings on the text of another
Without Sorcery
story, “The Ultimate Egoist.”

Magazine blurb (title page): “FACE” WAS A REMARKABLE POKER PLAYER. EVEN MORE REMARKABLE THAN HIS FELLOW PLAYERS THOUGHT. IT WASN’T JUST THE WAY HE STACKED DECKS—

“Nightmare Island”:
first published in
Unknown
, June 1941, under the pseudonym E. Waldo Hunter. This was the exciting month that Sturgeon had four stories published at the same time, two in
Unknown
and two in
Astounding
. One story in each magazine was under his name; “The Purple Light,” in
Astounding
, was published under the pseudonym Sturgeon had used earlier in
Unknown
(for “The Ultimate Egoist”), “E. Hunter Waldo.” But “Nightmare Island” was credited to “E. Waldo Hunter.” Campbell, in the next issue of
Unknown
, explained: “Waldo sort of forgot whether he’d put the ‘Hunter’ before or after ‘Waldo’ and we forgot to check. Hence the discrepancy of the name on ‘The Ultimate Egoist’ and ‘Nightmare Island.’ ” Sturgeon, in a letter in that same issue, says,
It will no doubt surprise a great many people to learn that I was
christened Edward Waldo, and that Hunter is my grandmother’s maiden name. Of course, I was only a kid at the time
. The letter is signed, “E. Hunter Waldo Hunter.”

Sam Moskowitz reports (based on his 1961 conversation with Sturgeon) that the idea for “Nightmare Island” was “derived from a reference in a 1910 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, concerning the ‘tube worm’.”

The tropical setting of the story seems to conjure up Sturgeon’s years in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, but in fact it was written (and published) before he left New York. He had, however, had some transient experiences in the tropics already, traveling through the Gulf and the Florida Keys as a merchant seaman. (To his mother, 12/3/37:
Now please don’t try to tempt me away from the coastwise runs again; in the first place, they are ideal for winter weather, as we are so often south of Florida
. He had recently made what may have been his only Latin American run as a merchant seaman, stopping in Panama and Guatemala; but every trip between New York and Port Arthur, Texas took him through the Bahamian waters where this story probably takes place.)

Magazine blurb (contents page): ONLY A MAN WHO’D BEEN IN HIS CONDITION FOR A LONG TIME COULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD, ACCEPTED, AND ACTED REASONABLY ON NIGHTMARE ISLAND.

“The Purple Light”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, June 1941, under the psedudonym E. Hunter Waldo. A science-fictional rewrite of Sturgeon’s 1939 vignette “Watch My Smoke.”

Magazine blurb (contents page): ONCE IN A WHILE, IT’S A SMART IDEA TO CRAWL RIGHT INTO THE MIDDLE OF TROUBLE!

“Artnan Process”:
first published in
Astounding Science-Fiction
, June 1941. Written early December 1940. TS to his mother, 12/6/40:
This morning I finished a science-fiction opus dealing with isotope-transmutation as she is done on the third planet of the Procyon system. It will with certitude bounce: I didn’t like the idea before I started the yarn
. Same letter, now 12/12/40:
Ye ed. seemed to think highly enough of my vegetative-metabolistic transmutation process to pay me a hundred and a quarter for it. That pays the hospital bill and feeds us for a week, though it leaves damn little for Christmas
.

A manuscript fragment from the Sturgeon papers indicates that there was an earlier (probably incomplete) draft of this story, also starring
Slimmy and Bellew, in which Mars is not a factor; the cheap power deal is directly between Artna and Earth.

Introduction from
Without Sorcery
(1948):