Thunder and Roses (2 page)

On the strength of that success, flimsy as it was, I quit my job and returned to freelance writing. It seems rash now but times, and needs, were simpler then. I made a trip to New York to meet editors, and I arranged to meet Ted (I was calling him Ted now). Ted’s work had been appearing regularly in
Galaxy
(and in
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, as well), including the classic “Baby Is Three” in the October 1952 issue, which appeared just a couple of months before we met. I should have been in awe—though only five years older, he was a dozen years more experienced in writing and getting published—but Ted wouldn’t let me. He was living in a house a former ship’s captain had built on a hill overlooking the Hudson River, and he prepared lunch, and told me about his life and his writing, and
the unusual relationships among the movers and shakers in New York science fiction.

Ted had a way of focusing his attention on people, of caring about them, that made them love him.
The St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers
called him “the best loved of all SF writers.” By the time I left that evening for a party at Horace Gold’s apartment—Ted drove me to the Manhattan side of the George Washington Bridge—I felt as if Ted was a contemporary and maybe even a friend.

I followed Ted’s career from a distance. We met one other time in the 1950s, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in 1953, when he gave a talk in which he announced what later came to be known as “Sturgeon’s Law”: “Ninety per cent of science fiction is crud, but then ninety per cent of everything is crud.”
More Than Human
, the novel built around “Baby Is Three,” was published in 1953,
The Cosmic Rape
in 1958, and
Venus Plus X
in 1960. That, except for a novelization of
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
and the posthumous
Godbody
(1986), made up his entire science-fiction novel production. He wrote five other non-SF novels, including the rakish
I, Libertine
and the sensitive psychological case study of vampirism
Some of Your Blood
.

But Ted published twenty-six collections of short stories, beginning in 1948 with
Without Sorcery
and continuing through such classics as
E Pluribus Unicorn
(1953),
Caviar
(1955),
A Touch of Strange
(1958),
Sturgeon in Orbit
(1964),
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
 … (1971),
The Golden Helix
(1979). In 1994, North Atlantic Books began publishing a ten-volume set of his complete short fiction. Ted also published a collection of the Western stories he had written, three in collaboration with Don Ward,
Sturgeon’s West
(1973).

After a glorious flow of creativity in the 1950s, Ted faded from the science-fiction scene. Partly it was writer’s block; in one famous instance, Robert Heinlein sent him a letter filled with story ideas and Ted turned at least two of them into stories. He also talked about the novel he had been working on for years; it may have been
Godbody
. Partly he was busy writing other things, including radio adaptations of his own stories in the 1950s and 1960s, and television
scripts based on his work and that of others. All that came to a focus, it would seem, in the two scripts he wrote for
Star Trek
, the classics “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time.” He also adapted “Killdozer!” as a television movie, but a revision by Ed MacKillop left him dissatisfied with the result. During the 1960s and 1970s Ted also reviewed books for the
New York Times
and wrote a column for the
National Review
.

His leave of absence from science fiction, broken by the publication of “Slow Sculpture” in 1970 and its Nebula and Hugo awards, was the reason his 1971 collection was titled
Sturgeon Is Alive and Well …
He also won the 1954 International Fantasy Award for
More Than Human
, was Guest of Honor at the 1962 World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, and received the 1985 World Fantasy Convention Life Achievement Award the year he died.

He had hopes, periodically raised, regularly dashed, that his greatest novel,
More Than Human
, would become a feature film.

I created the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction in 1974, as a response to the teachers who had written me during my term as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America saying, “I’ve just been asked to teach a science-fiction course. What do I teach?” The Institute became a regular summer offering in 1978, and I invited three writers to be guests for a week each: Gordon R. Dickson, with his enthusiasm for story structure and theme; Fred Pohl, with his broad range of experience as writer, editor, and agent; and Ted Sturgeon, with his charm and empathy and concern for style. All three accepted, and all three joined us every summer until Ted’s death.

Those were the days when I really got to know Ted. He and his wife Jayne looked forward to a quiet week in Lawrence, I believe, and Ted liked the endless variety of students, from those of college age to the elderly, and from more than half a dozen foreign countries. They all loved Ted. That was Ted’s greatest talent, and that was what he wrote about, the varieties of love, particularly the love of outcasts or the handicapped or the repressed. Love would save the world, he thought, if it ever got the chance. Ted’s stories, John Clute wrote in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
, “constituted a
set of codes or maps capable of leading maimed adolescents out of alienation and into the light.”

All three visiting writers had their special areas of interest. Ted’s was craft and style, titles and opening sentences. He talked about “metric prose” and brought along an English translation of a book published in French, which told the same pointless story in dozens of different styles. He was good at titles; his favorite was “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” And he recalled a contest with Don Ward (who by coincidence was my mentor as an editor in Racine, and attended the second Institute session) to invent the best opening sentence. Ted’s was “At last they sat a dance out.” [See “
The Blue Letter
,” unpublished until this volume of
The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
.] But he thought Don’s was better: “They banged through the cabin door and squared off in the snow outside.” My favorite was Ted’s opening sentence for
The Dreaming Jewels
, “They caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium.” It turned out he was eating ants because he had a formic acid deficiency.

One of the projects that got started here at the University of Kansas after Ted’s death, a decade ago, was a Writers Workshop in Science Fiction, and one of the early participants was a university student named John Ordover. A year later he told me he was going to return to his native New York to become an editor. He got his wish, first at Tor Books, then at Pocket Books, where he became editor of the
Star Trek
series. But he returned to the Workshop every summer as a guest editor and a vocal participant in the Campbell Conference, at which we sit around a table and discuss a single topic. In the summer of 1995 John brought something special along with him, the outline for a
Star Trek
episode that Ted Sturgeon had proposed back in the 1960s but that had never been produced. It was called “The Joy Machine,” and he asked me if I would be interested in turning it into a novel.

I took a look at Ted’s outline—his original outline, typos and all—and liked the idea. “The Joy Machine,” after all, was a variation on the theme of 1962 novel,
The Joy Makers
, and I was still fascinated by the interplay between happiness and aspiration, between
pleasure and struggle. In his outline, Ted saw pleasure, easily obtained and totally satisfying, as a threat to human existence, and I saw ways of building on Ted’s situation to say some other things about happiness and the human condition. I agreed to write the novel. The result [
Star Trek, The Joy Machine
, a novel by James Gunn, based on the story by Theodore Sturgeon] was published in 1996.

My first contact with Ted Sturgeon came when Ted was asked to shorten my story. My last came when I was asked to lengthen his story. There must be a meaning in there somewhere.

James Gunn        
Lawrence, Kansas

D
R
. M
ARGARETTA
W
ENZELL
, she of the smooth face and wise eyes and flowing dark hair, and the raft of letters after her name in the medical “Who’s Who,” allowed herself to be called “Peg” only by her equals, of whom there were few. Her superiors did not, and her inferiors dared not. And yet Dr. Wenzell was not a forbidding person in any way. She had fourteen months to go to get to her thirtieth birthday; her figure hadn’t changed since she was seventeen; her face, while hardly suited to a magazine cover, was designed rather for a salon study. She maintained her careful distance from most people for two reasons. One was that, as an endocrinologist, she had to make a fetish of objectivity; and the other was the fact that only by a consistent attitude of impersonality could she keep her personal charm from being a drawback to her work. Her work meant more to her than anything else in life, and she saw to it that her life stayed that way.

And yet the boy striding beside her called her “Peg.” He had since he met her. He was neither her superior nor her inferior, and he was certainly not her equal. These subconscious divisions of Dr. Wenzell’s had nothing to do with age or social position. Her standards were her own, and since Robin English could not be judged by any of them—or by anyone else’s standards, for that matter—she had made no protest beyond a lift of the eyebrow. It couldn’t be important.

He held her arm as they crossed the rainy street. He always did that, and he was one of the half-dozen men she had met in her life who did it unconsciously and invariably.

“There’s a taxi!” she said.

He grinned. “So it is. Let’s take the subway.”

“Oh, Robin!”

“It’s only temporary. Why, I’ve almost finished that operetta, and any day now I’ll get the patent on that power brake of mine, and—”
He smiled down at her. His face was round and ruddy, and it hadn’t quite enough chin, and Peg thought it was a delightful face. She wondered if it knew how to look angry or—purposeful.

“I know,” she said. “I know. And you’ll suddenly have bushels of money, and you won’t have to worry about taxis—”

“I don’t worry about ’em anyhow. Maybe such things’ll bother me when your boy friend gets through with me.”

“They will, and don’t call him my boy friend.”

“Sorry,” he said casually.

They went down the steps at the subway terminal. Sorry. Robin could always dismiss things with that laconic expression. And he
could
. Whether he was sorry or not, wasn’t important, somehow; it was the way he said it. It reduced the thing he was sorry for to so little value that it wasn’t worth being sorry about.

Peg stood watching him as he swung up to the change booth. He walked easily, with an incredible grace. As graceful as a cat, but not at all like a cat. It was like the way he thought—as well as a human being, but not like a human being. She watched the way the light fell on his strange, planeless, open face, and his tousled head of sandy horsehair. He annoyed her ever so much, and she thought that it was probably because she liked him.

He stood aside to let her through the turnstile, smiling at her and whistling a snatch of a Bach fugue through his teeth. That was another thing. Robin played competent piano and absolutely knocked-out trumpet; but he never played the classics. He never whistled anything else.

There was no train in. They strolled up the platform slowly. Peg couldn’t keep her eyes off Robin’s face. His sensitive nostrils dilated, and she had the odd idea that he was smelling a sound—the echoing shuffle of feet and machinery in the quiet where there should be no quiet. As they passed the massive beam-and-coil-spring bumper at the end of the track, Robin paused, his eyes flickering over it, gauging its strength, judging its materials. It had never occurred to her to look at such a thing before. “What does that matter to you, Robin?”

He pointed. “First it knocks the trains pigeontoed. Then she’ll
nose into the beam there and the springs behind it will take up the shock. Now why do they use coils?”

“Why not?”

“Leaf springs would absorb the collision energy between the leaves, in friction. Coil springs store the energy and throw it right back … oh! I see. They took for granted when they designed it that the brakes would be set. Big as those springs are, they’re not going to shove the whole train back. And then, the play between the car couplings would—”

“But Robin—what does it matter? To you, I mean. No,” she said quickly as a thick little furrow appeared and disappeared between his eyes. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested. I’m just wondering exactly what it is about such devices that fascinates you so.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “The … the integration, I suppose. The thought that went into it. The importance of the crash barrier to Mrs. Scholtz’s stew and Sadie’s date, and which ferry Tony catches, and all the other happenings that can happen to the cattle and the gods who use the subways.”

Peg laughed delightedly. “And do you think about all of the meanings to all of the people of all of the things you see?”

“I don’t have to think of them. They’re there, right in front of me. Surely you can see homemade borscht and a goodnight kiss and thousands of other little, important things, all wrapped up in those big helical springs?”

“I have to think about it. But I do see them.” She laughed again. “What do you think about when you listen to Bach?”

He looked at her quickly. “Did I say I listened to Bach?”

“My gremlins told me.” She looked at him with puzzlement. He wasn’t smiling. “ ‘You whistle it,” she explained.

“Do I? Well, all right then. What do I think of? Architecture, I think. And the complete polish of it. The way old J. S. burnished every note, and the careful matching of all those harmonic voices. And … and—”