Seekers of Tomorrow (33 page)

One of the most original productions ever to appear on the theme of extrasensory powers,
More Than
Human
won the International Fantasy Award for 1954, beating out even
The Demolished Man
by Alfred Bester. The International Fantasy Awards during the period they were given, 1951 to 1957, were without question the most distinguished and coveted honors in the fantasy world.
More Than Human
found itself in the company of such distinguished winners as
Earth Abides
by George Stewart,
Fancies and
Goodnights
by John Collier,
City
by Clifford D. Simak, and
Lord of the Rings
by J. R. R. Tolkien. It would be nice to be able to say that
More Than Human
marked an economic as well as a critical milestone in the career of Theodore Sturgeon, but that would be to ignore the facts. If ever an author epitomized the skittishness and sensi-tivity attributed to the "artist," it is Theodore Sturgeon. While he appreciated the need for money, his primary motivation was not the dollar. Despite the knowledge that he could sell
anything
of a fantastic nature he cared to write and with full awareness of a backlog of commitments (for some of which he had received an advance), it was typical of him to take a couple of months off to write a three-act play
free
for a small-town theater, with the review in a local weekly his sole reward.

Sturgeon was at the forefront of the taboo-breakers on themes involving sex, including homosexuality. Every time he wrote one of these stories he cut down the potential market. A most dramatic example was
Venus Plus X,
a full-length novel published first in a paperback by Pyramid in Septem-ber, 1960, which reads like a leisurely tour of Utopia until it is discovered that the inhabitants of this idyllic civilization are all male and reproduce with the aid of grafted uteruses and surgery. The result of his writing on so off-beat a theme was that there were no first American serial rights, no original magazine appearance which might well have brought as much as or more than the amount he received for the paperback. He also toyed with "disgusting" stories, prime examples of which were
The Girl Had Guts
(venture science fiction, January 1957), in which earthmen are infected by an alien virus that makes it possible for them during a moment of stress to disgorge their intestines, which attack a "danger" with digestive acids, and
Some of Your Blood
(Ballantine Books, 1961), a Freudian case history of a man who has a compul-sion to drink blood (preferably from a newly inflicted wound) but in one special relationship in a socially revolting fashion. These have helped foster a sad school of exploration of which Brian Aldiss'
The
Dark-Light Years
(worlds of tomorrow, April 1964), of a race that glorifies its feces is an example. Sturgeon is eternally involved in something. One of his more fascinating projects was executed for the popular radio satirist Jean Shepherd, who for some years conducted a late program of berserk philosophical commentary on our civili-zation aimed at "The Night People." His audience has been usurped by Long John Nebel, The Amazing Randy, and other talk shows, but Shepherd first cultivated the all-night audience. In the course of his half-sage, half-zany observations, he frequently referred to and quoted from an imaginary book about the racy, colorful eighteenth-century Captain Lance Courtenay by one Frederick R. Ewing. The book, he stated, was the rage of England and the Continent.

Attempts by listeners to find this titillating volume resulted in frustration and angrily unkind implications that Shepherd and the truth were not on the best of terms. Shepherd arranged with Sturgeon to give birth to this imaginary book and it was published as having been written by Frederick R. Ewing by Ballantine in 1956, as
I
,
Libertine
(with a picture of Shepherd on the back posing as Ewing together with a fanciful biographical sketch of the "author").

When
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,
a motion picture by 20th Century-Fox, was ready for release, Sturgeon was induced by Pyramid Books to write a novel based on the original screenplay by Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett. The book was released as a paperback in June, 1961, to coincide with the general showing of the picture. When a weekly hour-long television series based on the title was produced (1964), the book was reissued.

Sturgeon is fast becoming a living legend in the science-fiction world. He is likely to turn up any place at any time for the most whimsical reasons. The least likely place he was expected was as science-fiction book reviewer for the "con-servative" national review. He first appeared in their pages with the September 23, 1961, issue and has continued to contribute regularly. Since national review is the only weekly that employs a specialist to review science-fiction books on a regular basis, it would appear that the genre is scarcely viewed any longer as radical in its notions.

Even more startling were the twelve pages that the Decem-ber 21, 1964, issue of sports illustrated devoted to Theo-dore Sturgeon's fictionalized exposition
How to Forget Baseball,
describing the national pastime of the far future (after the atomic war) called
quoit.
His success at incorporating be-lievable slang and idiom of the far future and combining all these essentials of the game into a readable story rank second only to the remarkable circumstances of sports illustrated running it at all, even as a special feature of the issue called
The Future of Sport.

As a tribute to his uniqueness, the magazine of fantasy and science fiction published a special Theodore Sturgeon issue in September, 1962, with a painting of the author by Ed Emsh on the cover, appreciations of him by Judith Merril and James Blish, and a biography of his works. They had an ulterior motive, a new Sturgeon novelette,
When You Care, When You Love,
really the first part of a projected novel in which a wealthy young woman sets out to incubate a replica of her dying husband from the cells of his own body. Her motivation is overpowering, unreasoning, complete love. The concept of love in all its meanings was to become Sturgeon's obsession.

As guest of honor at the 20th World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago, the point of his address of September 2, 1962, was love of self, self-esteem. "People who love have to love themselves first," he said. The key to Sturgeon's philoso-phy of love as well as the most complete expression of the growth and ramification of his faith appears to be contained in the development of
More Than Human.
Admittedly, with a writer as superbly gifted as Sturgeon, who strives in
every
story to be as differently and bizarrely off-trail as he is able, whose adroitness at altering the rhythm of his writing to conform to the subject gives him as many styles as stories (an artistic facility that has cost him the accruing audience that familiarity brings), it is necessary to poise near to presumption in relating the subject matter of
More Than
Human
to the personality of its author. Yet, the Gerard hero of
More Than Human
bears strong resemblance to his creator. The feeling in the story that individuals in the Gestalt relationship may be replaced without destroying the entity fits the pattern of Sturgeon's early marital changes; just as does the final decision of Gerard to keep the unity intact, supplementing his abilities with responsibility. All the children who make up the symbiotic power rela-tionship in
More Than Human
have been sorely abused in their formative years, particularly the hero, who serves as the "ganglion" of the talented group. Though their lives are frequently far from comfortable, they gain courage from their mutuality. The dramatic finale arrives when, with the passing of years, the nerve center of the group learns the meaning of morality and the desirability of channeling his powers into constructive channels. The literary production of Sturgeon ever since the appear-ance of
More Than Human,
with his obvious striving for achievement, lends strong credibility to the theory that, with his third wife and four children, Sturgeon finally has estab-lished a "Gestalt" arrangement that is emotionally harmoni-ous without sacrificing that naive inquiry, best expressed in his poem
Look About You!,
which makes his literary creativ-ity possible:

We each live in a wonderland;

A blue to you is a red to me,

A shade is seen, and we call it green—

I wonder what you see?

It has been said that the most difficult element to incorpo-rate into science fiction—without destroying the integrity of both—is the deductive formula of the detective story. Acknowledgment that this literary feat has been accomplished on a number of occasions appears in the scholarly and very readable work,
The
Development of the Detective Novel
by A. E. Murch, M.A. (Peter Owen, London, 1958), which states:

"Two writers . . . have succeeded admirably in merg-ing 'science fiction' with detective themes, Frederic Brown and Isaac Asimov, whose work has attracted attention on both sides of the Atlantic, and who may inspire a vogue for this specialized variation of the
genre.
Nothing of the same quality has yet appeared in England, though it is by no means improbable that the attempt will be made, and that English writers will continue to borrow or adapt American patterns in the future, as they have in the past." It is no discredit to Frederic Brown, a master of the detective story in his own right and a gifted science-fiction writer, to state that when it comes to blending the two Isaac Asimov reigns supreme. By every standard,
The Caves of Steel
and its sequel
The Naked Sun
are incontestably science fiction, yet they also fit every definition of the detective story, even if the "Dr. Watson" is a robot and "Inspector Lestrade" turns out to be the murderer.
The Caves of Steel
and
The Naked Sun
are the outstanding masterpieces in the delicate art of honestly solv-ing a plausible crime within the framework of science fiction without succumbing to the temptation of permitting the killer to enter the locked room through the fourth dimension. Yet the techniques of this achievement represent but one of three major contributions Isaac Asimov has made to the develop-ment of science fiction in the past two decades. That Isaac Asimov was permitted to make his contribution to science fiction at all is entirely due to an accident of heredity. He was born in the town of Petrovich, a suburb of the Russian city of Smolensk, in 1920. The name Asimov, in Russian, means "winter wheat grower," and his grandfather did own a mill under the czar, while his father worked at the mill as an accountant.

In their inhumanity toward Jews, the Russian government and people ranked only below Hitler's Germany and the Spanish Inquisition. Asimov's family was of the Jewish faith. Upon the establishment of the Communist regime after World War I traditional antisemitism was reinforced by Karl Marx's dogma,

"Thus we recognize in Judaism generally an antiso-cial element" in league with the capitalists, since many Jews were owners of small shops. The great Russian famine of 1923 found the government more lenient toward emigration, and the Asimovs, with Isaac as a toddler and sister Marcia in arms, seized the opportunity to come to the United States.

Unable to obtain a position as an accountant because of the language barrier, Asimov's father bought the first of what was to be a series of candy stores in Brooklyn. Grammar school education at P.S. 182 and P.S. 202 in Brooklyn helped Isaac get his citizenship papers in 1928, but 1929 was to be more memorable for him on two counts. First, a brother Stanley was born, offering long-range relief from the after-school chores at his father's candy store. Secondly, it was the year he read his first science-fiction magazine. Though his father maintained strict censorship on his read-ing matter, the picture of two men being hypnotized by a ball of fire suspended over a test tube on the August, 1929, cover of amazing stories looked educational enough to pass muster. The story illustrated was
Barton's Island
by Harl Vincent, a tale of a young inventor exiled from a tyrannical United States, who returns to free his nation from bondage. Young Asimov was enthralled and decided to supplement his education with amazing stories from then on. An astonishing recall of facts, verging on "photographic" memory, aided Isaac in completing grammar school at the age of 11 1/2. At the age of 151/2 he was out of high school. This facility for learning immensely pleased his parents but the boy had other characteristics that didn't please them as much. He was the despair of his sister Marcia, his verbal agility with barbed phrase, humorous aside, and left-handed compliment driving her nearly to distraction. On the street he was always preoccupied, brushing past people he knew with no sign of recognition. This upset his mother, whose ability to worry considerably transcended her four-foot-ten-inch height, and she had reason to worry since among the people whom Isaac so blithely snubbed were customers of her husband's candy store.

Isaac didn't care what anyone thought. He was, during those early years, extremely self-centered, introverted; the world revolved about him. His brother Stanley was a mixed blessing, for while he did assume the brunt of the work at the candy store, his early morning paper delivery service had to be taken over by Isaac every time he got sick. Unlike most young boys, Isaac had an aversion to any physical activity, particularly sports, which were second only to labor.

His entire youth spent in the city, Isaac grew to love the masses of concrete and steel vibrant with the eternal hum of traffic. He felt no particular affinity to nature, the closest thing to it being a fondness for cats, nor did he have any desire to travel outside the metropolis.

His first ambition and his family's desire was that he become a physician, but he had been unable to gain accep-tance at any medical school. It proved a good thing, because Isaac had a tendency to grow faint at the sight of blood. Instead he settled on chemistry and his father scraped up the means to send him to Columbia University, which made Isaac happy because the school was within city limits. While still at Columbia, Isaac took a flyer at writing science fiction and during that same period made the friendship of aspiring science-fiction writers and editors. Asimov partici-pated in the formation of The Futurian Science Literary Society of New York on September 18, 1938, in Brooklyn, a group pledged to aid one another in climbing the ladder to literary success. Other charter members of the organization were Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, Cyril Kornbluth, Walter Kubilius, and Robert W. Lowndes, each of them destined to become well known in the professional science-fiction world. Six weeks after that, on October 30, 1938, Orson Welles scared the United States out of a night's sleep with his adapta-tion of H. G. Wells'
War of the Worlds
on radio and The Futurian Society seized the opportunity to hold a debate on "Whether the Earth Should Voluntarily Give Up to a Superi-or Civilization or Whether They Should Put Up a Fight." Donald A. Wollheim debated for the Martians and Isaac Asimov, advocating terrestrial supremacy, took issue with him. November 13, 1938, was the science-fiction world's first exposure to the devastating barrage of extemporaneous shot-gun humor, delivered with the expression of a stricken mar-tyr in the tearful lament that was to become Asimov's trade-mark at open and closed meetings for the next twenty years.