Seekers of Tomorrow (31 page)

Those were the opening paragraphs of one of the most remarkable stories ever to appear in a science-fantasy maga-zine.
It
was the title of the story, and it appeared in the August, 1940, issue of unknown, a magazine dedicated to stories that were different from conventional weird science fiction. The intonations of the opening passage set the mood for the introduction of a monstrous life form, a mass of putres-cence and slime coating the skeleton of a dead man that had spontaneously become instinct with life:

It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And—perhaps it could not be destroyed.

Authors had created monsters before, many whose names became synonyms for terror, but none of them had been treated with such objectivity or presented with such incredible mastery of style.

"Styles" would have been the better term, for the author was a virtuoso, possessing an absolute pitch for the cadence of words, altering the mood and beat of his phraseology with the deliberateness of background music in a moving picture.

Theodore Sturgeon was not unknown to the science-fiction world. Four stories of his had appeared previously, the first,
The Ether Breather
in the September, 1939, issue of astounding science-fiction, winning first place in readers' votes over all stories in that number.
The Ether Breather
was a clever spoof of the television industry, in a year when there was virtually no such industry, involving "etheric" intelligences that humorously altered television transmission. Lightly, almost frothily written, it invited examination of the style to no greater a degree than would a theatrical bedroom farce. The same slick, lightweight prose and superficially bub-bling good humor dominated
A God in the
Garden,
which was published in the November, 1939, unknown, a fan-tasy in which a prehistoric "god" grants a man the handy attribute of having every word he utters come factually true, even if it were not so before he opened his mouth;
Derm Fool
(unknown, March, 1940) is built about the plight of several people who shed their skin every twenty-four hours as the result of a poisonous snake bite, and
He Shuttles
(unknown, April, 1940) is a variation of the old tale of a man granted three wishes which ends up with the wishes in such contradiction that the man must back up in time and perpetually repeat his actions. A. E. van Vogt picked up this idea in a spatial superscience story one year later with
Not the First.
Sturgeon's first four stories had entertained but made no permanent impact. They were written, apparently by a lighthearted, pleasing young man with a facile style who intended to do no more than entertain.
It,
however, dis-played that an extraordinary talent was at work, capable of producing serious work of a lasting nature. The twenty-two-year old craftsman who had written
It,
handsome, sensitive, and whimsical of features, with a trim build and a captivating manner, was destined to become a giant of science fiction and fantasy.

Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo, February 26, 1918, in St. George, Staten Island, New York. His father was in the retail paint business and was of Dutch-French ancestry, a line traced back to 1640 in the New World. His literary and artistic inclinations seem to root in his mother, a Canadian-English woman, a poetess, who taught literature in the schools and who, up to an advanced age, produced amateur plays.

A Protestant Episcopalian by birth, Sturgeon came from a background heavily weighted with the pressures of the clergy, with eight ministers on his father's side, one of them, the archbishop of the West Indies, a great-uncle; another, the Bishop of Quebec, a great-grandfather; an uncle, priest in Newfoundland—and his mother's sister had married a British minister. Young Edward and brother Peter, fifteen months older, attended church and Sunday School regularly until the age of 12. Since their parents liked to sleep late, the two boys made occasional excep-tions to this routine, ducking church every time they could get their hands on a copy of ballyhoo, a popular humor magazine of the early thirties. On completing their read-ing, they would return home with a vivid and detailed account of the religious services, which effectively reas-sured their parents.

While the boys' early home life was happy enough, all was not well with the marriage. Sturgeon's father did not live at home after the boy was five years of age, showing up only once a week for Sunday dinner. The parents were divorced in 1927 when Edward had just turned nine, and his father remarried and went to live in Baltimore, having one daughter from that union, Joan.

Edward liked his first father, forgiving his rather strait-laced philosophy, but ran into trouble with his stepfather when his mother remarried in 1929. His stepfather, who had been an instructor of English in Scottish schools, was an accomplished scholar and revered anyone who took learning seriously. It was obvious that both his stepsons were highly intelligent, yet they were very poor students, attaching little importance to knowledge. Edward was more than lackadaisi-cal; he was also perverse in high school, requiring constant discipline.

Though he liked the boys, the stepfather found himself psychologically incapable of excusing this attitude and, while he supported the youths and stood up for them in time of trouble, there were no monetary allowances or special kind-nesses forthcoming.

He did, however, make possible Theodore Sturgeon's present name. The old Scotsman was named Sturgeon and young Edward had always wanted to be called "Ted," so when he was baptized his name officially became Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon and that is his legal name today. Before high school, Theodore Sturgeon had gone to a private seminary in Staten Island up until the fourth grade, then to a boys' preparatory school in Pennsylvania. When he enrolled in high school, at the age of 12, his family was living in Philadelphia, and young Theodore was an emaciated weakling, a suitable subject for the "before" physical culture advertisements. High school proved a place of horror. His mother forced him to wear short pants and he arrived for registration with golden, fuzzy hair, riding on a scooter. Most of the kids, then, wore knickers and he used to hide from them. Whenever he showed himself he was the target of bullies who pushed him around and hazed him unmercifully, despite his gallant attempts to fight back. To top it off he had virtually no interest in study. Then, one day, he watched an exhibition of gymnastics on the school's parallel bars and the sport thrilled him. He begged for a chance to participate and when it was granted, he drilled with fanatical enthusiasm, getting up at five in the morning and leaving hours after the school day had ended. In twelve months he had gained sixty-five pounds and developed powerful arms and a heavy chest. Within that period his schoolmates' contempt turned to respect. The second year he became captain of the gym team and at the ages of 13 and 14 was permitted to instruct the class.

His consuming ambition, now, was to become a performer with Barnum & Bailey's circus and make gymnastics his career. This seemed close to realization when Temple Uni-versity offered him a two-year athletic scholarship when he finished high school. Life now had a purpose. One morning, when he was 15, he woke up sick. He tried to get out of going to school but his stepfather would have none of it. Two days later, he was unable to rise from bed; his case was diagnosed as rheumatic fever. Before he recov-ered there was a 16 percent enlargement of the heart. That was the end of gymnastics, forever. His entire life came crashing down in ruin. He never was going to be a flyer for Barnum & Bailey. Now angry at the world, he began to give everyone trouble. He neglected his school subjects still further and began dressing in weird outfits just to be annoy-ing. To make things worse, his stepfather enforced seemingly harsh home conditions. Though they had a radio, the boys were not permitted to listen to it. Every evening, he and his brother were required to attend a one to one-and-one-half-hour reading in his father's library. The books, both fiction and nonfiction, covered an inspiring selection of subjects and the readings were sustained for many years. It was here that he first became acquainted with
The Time Machine
by H. G. Wells and
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea
by Jules Verne, but Ted had no appreciation of the literary back-ground he was getting. Exercising the prescribed right that the boys could ask any question they wished about what was read, Ted Sturgeon showed an unholy and recurring delight in innocently requesting the explanation of the word "orgy." The father demanded that the boys earn their own spending money. Yet when he caught Ted selling newspapers on a corner one block away from Drexel University where he taught languages, he quickly put a stop to it. Bemused, Ted went out and got a job collecting garbage in an apartment house and failed completely to understand his stepfather's explosion regarding that.

When he finished high school he pleaded to be permitted to attend college, but his stepfather, suspecting that campus frivolity was Ted's motive, refused. This time Ted was sincere, but it did him no good. He settled instead for Penn State Nautical School, which had a two-year course to obtain a third mate's papers. A $100 high school graduation present from his grandmother took care of most of the $125 tuition fee. In nautical school he encountered discipline and hazing on a scale he had not dreamed of. He stuck it out until the end of the term, then, at the age of 17, quit and went to sea as an engine-room wiper. It was during his three years at sea that he began to write. He had thought of a "foolproof" way of cheating the Ameri-can Railway Express Agency, but lacked the immoral cour-age to test it himself. Instead, he cast the mischief in the form of a short-short story which he sold to McClure's Syndi-cate in 1937. McClure's paid five dollars for the story and it was published in dozens of newspapers throughout the United States. During the next two years he sold them forty short stories, none of which were fantasy and all of which were published under his own name. These were not intended as hack work; Sturgeon did his best in each of them.

During this phase of his life he lived with an Italian shipmate who had set up an apartment in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York. These years were punctuated by stints at sea and it was while trying to find a ship out of a Texas port that Sturgeon made a deal with a small-town politician who owned a general store to write his campaign speeches for him. In payment, Sturgeon received day-old cup cakes, literally all that stood between him and starvation at the time. The politician won the election. Sturgeon did write one science-fiction story at this time,
Helix the Cat,
about a scien-tist and his cat, but the story was never sold and the manuscript has been misplaced.

His decision to try to sell to the fantasy magazines came as the result of a friendship with a Brooklyn couple. The wife was a leading writer for "true confession" magazines. One day early in 1939, her husband slapped the first unknown down in front of Sturgeon and said: "This is the kind of thing you ought to try to write." Sturgeon was enchanted. This was not his first acquaintance with science fiction and fantasy. Though one of the taboos insisted upon by his stepfather was "No science fiction," since 1930 Sturgeon had intermittently read amazing stories, wonder stories, as-tounding stories, and weird tales. In the line of pure fantasy he had been deeply impressed by
The Charwoman's Shadow
by Lord Dunsany,
Green Man-sions
by W. H. Hudson,
Alice in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll. Before he seriously began writing fiction, Sturgeon had composed a good amount of poetry and an occasional bit of verse, of very high quality, appears in his short stories. His idols, here, were William Blake and William Morris. One poem by Sturgeon,
Look About You!
which appeared illustrated in the January, 1940, unknown, is exceptional enough to warrant consideration in any substantial anthology of modern poems by American authors. But he abandoned most serious attempts at verse after he began to sell fiction commercially.

With a copy of unknown before him, Sturgeon sat down and wrote a story minutely describing the feelings of a man about to be hit by a subway train. Editor John W. Campbell critically ripped the story apart on the ground that when the protagonist is the same at the end as he was at the beginning of the narrative, the result is not a story but an anecdote.

Fortified with this erudite dictum, Sturgeon went home and wrote
The God in the Garden,
the first story he sold to Campbell. This success caused him to quit the sea and settle down to work as a professional writer. While trying to write more stories for Campbell he found himself persistently dis-tracted by a bizarre notion that kept creeping into his thoughts. Unable to continue with his regular work until he disposed of it, he interrupted the story he was working on and in four hours wrote
Bianca's Hands,
a horrifying tale of a man so enamored of the expressive hands of an idiot woman that he marries her to die in the ecstasy of having those superb hands choke the life from him. Sturgeon thrust the tale into the drawer with no immediate intention of selling it and continued with the story he was originally working on. With sales being made regularly to unknown and astound-ing science-fiction, Theodore Sturgeon decided to marry his school sweetheart, Dorothy Fillingame. Her parents vio-lently objected to Sturgeon's occupation and background, but, a week after the girl turned 21, parental objections were defied and they married. In ten consecutive hours of inspira-tion, on their honeymoon, Sturgeon wrote the nightmarish masterpiece that created his first reputation,
It.

He was now a fully accepted member of Campbell's "stable" of writers. As such he was sometimes given a chance at a special assignment. A crippled old man named James H. Beard had submitted several stories to Campbell which were strongly plotted but inadequately written. Beard's uncle was the Dan Beard who had founded the Boy Scouts of America, then 94 years old but still plying his profession as an illustra-tor. Old Dan Beard's claim to fame in the science-fiction world was a set of illustrations he had done for the best-selling interplanetary novel,
A Journey in Other Worlds,
by none other than John Jacob Astor, published in 1894. Camp-bell asked Sturgeon if he would take Beard's plots and make them into stories. These appeared as
Hag Seleen,
a superbly written story of a Cajun girl child who turns a witch's magic against her (unknown world, December, 1942) and
The Bones,
a fantasy about a machine that permits the viewer to experience the last events that happened to fragments of matter placed in it (unknown worlds, August 1943). Both stories were written before June, 1940.