Seekers of Tomorrow (32 page)

His wife pregnant, Sturgeon wrote steadily to support himself.
Butyl and the Breather
(astounding science-fic-tion, October, 1940) was a light-hearted farce, a sequel to
The Ether Breather; Cargo
(unknown, November, 1940) told of all the brownies, fairies, and various other "little people" shipping out of Europe during World War II;
Shottle Bop
(unknown, February, 1941) proved to be very popu-lar, a fantasy about the gnomelike owner of a shop who sold "bottles with things in them"; by this time Sturgeon was so prolific that
Ultimate Egoist
in the same issue appeared under the pen name of E. Hunter Waldo. While it made no special impact at the time of publication,
Poker Face
(astounding science-fiction, March, 1941) is historically important as one of the earliest science-fiction stories based on the notion that otherworldly aliens are living and working among us and at any moment may open the lid on that third eye or pull their extra hands from beneath their waistcoats.

Readers may not have grasped the significance of
Poker face,
but
Microcosmic God
in the April, 1941, astounding science-fiction had all the reaction of a bomb with a fast fuse. It was not that the idea was new; the concept of intelligent creatures in a microscopic world producing in-ventions at an accelerated rate relative to their own time span had been used in
Out of the Sub Universe
by R. F
.
Starzl (amazing stories quarterly, summer, 1928), had been defined in complete detail by Edmond Hamilton in
Fessenden's World
(weird tales, April, 1937), and had been recognized as a poignant classic in Calvin Peregoy's
Short-Wave
Castle
(astounding stories, February, 1934)— but Sturgeon did it best. The modest fame as master of fantasy which Sturgeon had attained with
It
was far transcended by the acclaim brought to him by
Microcosmic God.
Far from being pleased, Sturgeon was first annoyed and then infuriated. The kindest thing he could say for
Microcosmic God
was that it was "fast paced." He deplored the fact that it did not have the "literary cadence" of many of his other less complimented works and he deeply resented the fact that readers didn't even seem to get the point: that a superman need not be a powerful, commanding person.

He failed to understand that he had struck the universal chord. Stories like
Shottle Bop,
where you got what you wanted by "wishing," were good fun but nobody in this modern technological age believed them. On the contrary, a story like
Microcosmic God,
where a man could get anything he wanted by logical scientific means, made possible the complete suspension of disbelief and utter absorption of the reader by the story. That was the story's appeal.

The Sturgeon name increasingly became a focus for read-ership, but one remarkably well-done story,
Nightmare Is-land,
under the pseudonym E. Waldo Hunter in the June, 1941, astounding science-fiction, failed to achieve any special notice. Derived from a reference in a 1910 edition of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica,
concerning the "tube worm," it dealt with a kingdom of worms in which a castaway alcoholic was worshipped as a god.

Financial opportunity seemed to beckon in the form of an offer to run a luxury resort hotel in the British West Indies. This sounded like a heavenly way to make a living and seemed to provide a great deal more security than writing, so Sturgeon packed up his belongings, his wife, and his six-month-old baby girl, Patricia, and left the United States. He had barely settled himself comfortably in the hotel when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the United States entered the war. There went the tourist trade and the hotel job, so Sturgeon's wife took a secretarial job at Fort Symington and Sturgeon took to selling hosiery door to door. He finally got to run three mess halls and seventeen barracks buildings for the Army, then worked into operating a gas station and tractor lubrication center.

The powerful tractors, bulldozers, and cranes fascinated him, so he learned to operate them. He accepted a job in Puerto Rico as a Class-A bulldozer and just loved it, moving his wife and child to that island.

In 1944, with the European phase of the war drawing to a close, the base and the job folded and now there was a second child, Cynthia. He rented a house in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and desperately tried to make ends meet. There had been no writing in two-and-one-half years. Camp-bell wasn't too helpful or encouraging, but spurred by neces-sity, Sturgeon applied himself and wrote
Killdozer,
a 37,-000-word novelette, in just nine days. That story, about a primeval electronic intelligence that takes over a bulldozer clearing an airfield on a Pacific island, embodied the vivid impressions of a sensitive artist of the power, sound, smell, and mortal danger of those mechanical behemoths.

Campbell loved it and it became the cover story of the November, 1944, issue of astounding science-fiction. The check that Sturgeon received, $545, was the largest single amount he had ever earned for his writing.

But the check didn't last long and Sturgeon went into a writing slump that he was unable to snap. He took advantage of a clause in his government contract which would pay for his plane fare back to the United States. He was to fly to a friend in Chicago, then go to New York, procure a literary agent, and make arrangements to get his family back to the States. The entire trip was to take but ten days. Things didn't work out. He couldn't find an agent. He was unable to write. The ten days stretched into eight months. During certain periods his main source of sustenance was the three meals a week he ate at the home of his half-sister.

Finally a letter arrived from his wife. She wanted a di-vorce. For two months he couldn't make up his mind what to do, but finally a job he obtained as a copy editor for an advertising agency at $75 a week made it possible for him to raise enough money to return to St. Croix. He discussed the matter with his wife, but her confidence was shattered and they were divorced in a civil court in St. Thomas. In 1945 she married a mutual friend, retaining custody of the children.

Sturgeon returned to New York in 1946, moving into the bachelor apartment of L. Jerome Stanton, then assistant editor of astounding science-fiction. As far as finances were concerned, Sturgeon was able to contribute little. He was in a daze for months. Campbell befriended him, inviting him as a house guest for periods as prolonged as two weeks at a stretch.

Gradually, Campbell coaxed him out of his depression, until one day, in the basement of the editor's home, Sturgeon sat down at a typewriter and wrote the story
The Chromium Helmet.
Campbell read the first draft straight from the typewriter and accepted the story, which appeared in as-tounding science-fiction for June, 1946. More like a television script than science fiction, this novelette of a hair dryer that fished one's most wished-for desires from the subcon-scious and made them appear to have happened only superfi-cially disguised its artifices, yet it seemed to go over well with the readers.
Mewhu's Jet,
a long novelette which appeared later that year in the November astounding science-fiction, was a much better story. Engrossingly, and with a style as clear as crystal, Sturgeon told of the landing of an alien in a spaceship, the attempts to communicate with it, and the final wry realization that the outsider was a lost child with a super toy who didn't know where he came from, let alone the workings of his mechanism.

During 1946, something else happened, Sturgeon had ped-dled dozens of products door to door in the past in an effort to make a living; now he decided to try his hand as a literary agent. In addition to handling his own efforts, he worked up a prominent group of clients, including A. Bertram Chandler, William Tenn, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, and Robert W. Lowndes. This profession lasted from January to December of 1946 and for years after that Sturgeon would not have an agent because "I wouldn't put my affairs in the hands of anyone in so much trouble."

Agenting was the open sesame to a new world. Up to now, Sturgeon had but a single market: John W. Campbell's maga-zines. Now, he found his old rejects from unknown and astounding science-fiction welcome by editor Lamont Buchanan at weird tales. Within the next few years he would resurrect
Cellmate, Deadly Ratio, The Professor's Ted-dy Bear, Abreaction, The Perfect Host,
and
The Martian
and the Moron
from the trunk and enjoy an enthusiastic recep-tion and a new reputation at weird tales. Thrilling wonder stories, which for years had followed a juvenile policy, went adult in 1947 and they took Stur-geon's
The Sky Was Full of Ships,
a tale of a warning of interplanetary invasion told from so unusual an angle as to earn it a place on television and radio.

Through the years, Sturgeon had tried to sell the nightmar-ish
Bianca's Hands,
which he had written compulsively when he was 21. Agents, editors, friends were horrified by the concept. An editor told him he would never buy from an author whose mind could conceive notions like that. An agent told him he didn't want to be associated with an author whose bent carried him in such directions. Every magazine it was submitted to rejected it.

Impelled by his recent good fortune in selling to new markets, Sturgeon mailed the story to the British argosy through which a prize of $1,000 was being offered for the best short story submitted before a certain date.

It won the prize—Graham Greene took second place—and was published in argosy for May, 1947. More than just money was involved here. The various ups and downs of his literary career had severely shaken Sturgeon's estimate of himself. One of the most accomplished stylists in the field, he still doubted whether he could actually write well enough to be a sustained success at writing. The bull's-eye scored by this story, written at a very early stage in his career, convinced him that he had always possessed the qualifications to be a good writer. His work immediately began to reflect his new confidence. Campbell had anticipated the advent of atomic power. Now he chronically egged on his writers to explore the ramifications of this discovery. Sturgeon was scarcely immune from this insistence, but his first story of atomic doom,
Memorial
(astounding science-fiction, April, 1946) was anything but memorable. Therefore, his second such story,
Thunder and Roses,
in the November, 1947, astounding science-fiction, routinely blurbed as an atomic energy story suggested noth-ing special. It wasn't until anthologist August Derleth picked it up for
Strange Ports of Call
in 1948 that it had a de-layed-action effect on the science-fiction world. Sturgeon had taken the tritest of themes in science fiction, a United States nearly destroyed by an enemy nuclear attack debating the ethics of striking back, because the explosion of its retaliatory weapons would raise the radiation level in the atmosphere to the point where every higher organism would be eradicated, thus eliminating any hope for another creature to rise to a state of civilization. Yet he pulled it off magnificently, even including a poem in the story which was set to music and which Sturgeon played on a guitar, accompany-ing Mary Mair, a lovely showgirl with a pleasant voice, who sang it at the Fifth World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, August 31, 1947. Sturgeon was now ready for his first hard-cover anthology,
Without Sorcery,
published by Prime Press in 1948, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury. That author was already gathering steam, building toward his present considerable reputation. He wrote: "Perhaps the best way I can tell you what I think of a Theodore Sturgeon story is to explain with what diligent interest, in the year 1940, I split every Sturgeon tale down the middle and fetched out its innards to see what made it function. At that time I had not sold one story, I was 20, I was feverish for the vast secrets of successful writers. I looked upon Sturgeon with a secret and gnawing jealousy."

Without Sorcery
was dedicated to Mary Mair: "Who in spite of the envy of the angels will live forever." However, the 1949 marriage that resulted from their friendship did not last forever and dissolved in 1951. Accused of "lack of maturity," Sturgeon had previously defended his outlook in a story titled aptly enough,
Maturity,
originally published in astounding science-fiction for February, 1947, but rewrit-ten for
Without
Sorcery.
Robin English, hero of the story (Robin is the name of one of Sturgeon's sons), is an engaging but childlike man, whose sweetheart, an M.D., arranges to have him mentally raised to maturity by a series of chemical injections. Robin English becomes a literary superman with a series of phenomenally successful plays, novels, and poems. The literary efforts eventually stop as the process of artificial maturity continues and Sturgeon pointedly offers the sugges-tion that the childlike outlook is necessary to the production of works of art. A completely mature man does not engage in that sort of occupation. What is maturity? The closing lines of Sturgeon's story, when his "supermatureman" has willed himself to die, reveals it: "Enough is maturity."

Personal problems no longer brought Sturgeon to a stand-still. Throughout his short and ill-fated marriage with Mary Mair, his production was regular, displaying constantly higher standards of originality and technique.

Through his friend L. Jerome Stanton he met his third wife, Marion, a young girl with widely varied interests, rang-ing from dancing to literature. They were married in 1951 and 16 years and four children later, through a kaleidoscopic series of ups and downs, are still married; Sturgeon seems to have found a woman temperamentally suited to the inconsistencies of a full-time writer's life. There appeared to be a change in Sturgeon's social outlook that contributed to stability. It all began when the October, 1952, issue of galaxy carried a novelette by Sturgeon titled
Baby Is Three
about a 15-year-old youth who visits a psychi-atrist to find out why he murdered a woman who befriended him and four other strange children, all gifted with one or more of the powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleporta-tion. Sturgeon, basing his story on the Gestalt philosophy that "The whole is more than the sum of its parts," admirably made his point when he wrote a 30,000-word preface,
The Fabulous Idiot,
and a 30,000-word epilogue,
Morality.
The three appeared as
More Than Human
in simultaneous hard-cover and paperback editions in 1953.