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The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon #7
A Saucer of Loneliness
Kurt Vonnegut cites Theodore Sturgeon as the inspiration for his character Kilgore Trout. This volume includes 12 stories from 1953, considered Sturgeon's golden era. Among them are such favorites as the title story, "The Silken-Swift," "A Way of Thinking," "The Dark Room," "The Clinic," and "The World Well Lost," a story very ahead of its time in advocating gay rights.
400 pages, ebook
First published September 5, 2000
45 people are currently reading
360 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Sturgeon
725 books773 followersTheodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) is considered one of the godfathers of contemporary science fiction and dark fantasy. The author of numerous acclaimed short stories and novels, among them the classics More Than Human, Venus Plus X, and To Marry Medusa, Sturgeon also wrote for television and holds among his credits two episodes of the original 1960s Star Trek series, for which he created the Vulcan mating ritual and the expression "Live long and prosper." He is also credited as the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut's recurring fictional character Kilgore Trout.
Sturgeon is the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the International Fantasy Award. In 2000, he was posthumously honored with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
Sturgeon is the recipient of the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the International Fantasy Award. In 2000, he was posthumously honored with a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
May 28, 2020
I liked this collection less than the previous one.
I've also realized that there's a misleading aspect of my ratings of these thirteen Sturgeon volumes. In terms of writing--the use of language, its enrichment and expansion--they're stellar, worthy of 5+ stars on this or any other scale. (Just listen to that alien voice in "The Clinic.") What I instead rate in them is their capacity to a) tell me something new (and renewing); b) move me. In that, I compare them against everything else I've ever read. It's a very high benchmark: the kind of high that an artist like Theodore Sturgeon deserves. (And it gets even higher in these hotter, hungrier months when nothing seems filling enough. :/)
So if I gave 4 stars to Ryan North's To Be or Not to Be and only 3 to this collection, which one did I like better? This is a question best left unanswered (what do we gain from such comparisons anyway?), but if you insist: I liked Saucer better. It's just that Sturgeon is competing against himself (and the rest of the world). Also, for the sake of fairness, I may eventually up-rate the collections.
Two examples of why I didn't find the stories here filling enough:
"Mr. Costello, Hero," for all the praise heaped on it over the years, left me underwhelmed with its main point boiling down to "Beware of men who apply Divide and Conquer." Isn't that too simplistic? How many of today's dangers does it alert us to? (I'm ready to accept that it was very relevant to the McCarthy era ... but what does this tell us about the people who believed McCarthy?)
"The Education of Drusilla Strange" contains a line about women helping "their men to realize themselves," which, if I look at it in a particular way, makes me wonder if Sturgeon had an issue with women. (Perhaps the problem is that I don't see a line about men helping their women to realize themselves, or perhaps it's the idea of "their"-ness; never mind men and women, mine and yours--why don't we just help one another?) Then again, if I look at myself in a particular way, I wonder if I have an issue with my reading of this story: perhaps the author was being playful, toying with a concrete fancy, not trying to generalize; perhaps he'd mentioned men and exploded the ridiculousness of intimate ownership in sufficiently many other stories so he didn't want to clutter this one too .... Time will tell.
On to my other impressions as I read:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
I've also realized that there's a misleading aspect of my ratings of these thirteen Sturgeon volumes. In terms of writing--the use of language, its enrichment and expansion--they're stellar, worthy of 5+ stars on this or any other scale. (Just listen to that alien voice in "The Clinic.") What I instead rate in them is their capacity to a) tell me something new (and renewing); b) move me. In that, I compare them against everything else I've ever read. It's a very high benchmark: the kind of high that an artist like Theodore Sturgeon deserves. (And it gets even higher in these hotter, hungrier months when nothing seems filling enough. :/)
So if I gave 4 stars to Ryan North's To Be or Not to Be and only 3 to this collection, which one did I like better? This is a question best left unanswered (what do we gain from such comparisons anyway?), but if you insist: I liked Saucer better. It's just that Sturgeon is competing against himself (and the rest of the world). Also, for the sake of fairness, I may eventually up-rate the collections.
Two examples of why I didn't find the stories here filling enough:
"Mr. Costello, Hero," for all the praise heaped on it over the years, left me underwhelmed with its main point boiling down to "Beware of men who apply Divide and Conquer." Isn't that too simplistic? How many of today's dangers does it alert us to? (I'm ready to accept that it was very relevant to the McCarthy era ... but what does this tell us about the people who believed McCarthy?)
"The Education of Drusilla Strange" contains a line about women helping "their men to realize themselves," which, if I look at it in a particular way, makes me wonder if Sturgeon had an issue with women. (Perhaps the problem is that I don't see a line about men helping their women to realize themselves, or perhaps it's the idea of "their"-ness; never mind men and women, mine and yours--why don't we just help one another?) Then again, if I look at myself in a particular way, I wonder if I have an issue with my reading of this story: perhaps the author was being playful, toying with a concrete fancy, not trying to generalize; perhaps he'd mentioned men and exploded the ridiculousness of intimate ownership in sufficiently many other stories so he didn't want to clutter this one too .... Time will tell.
On to my other impressions as I read:
https://choveshkata.net/forum/viewtop...
August 14, 2022
CONTENTS
◾Foreward by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
◾Fiction:
▪️"A Saucer of Loneliness"
▪️"The Touch of Your Hand"
▪️"The World Well Lost"
▪️"...And My Fear Is Great..."
▪️"The Wages of Synergy"
▪️"The Dark Room"
▪️"Talent"
▪️"A Way of Thinking"
▪️"The Silken-Swift"
▪️"The Clinic"
▪️"Mr. Costello, Hero"
▪️"The Education of Drusilla Strange"
◾Story Notes by Paul Williams
For much of my childhood and adolescence, Theodore Sturgeon was my favorite author. I still think that he was a marvel, a magician who knew the inside of the human heart as few other genre writers ever have, and a poet whose prose continues to sparkle. The thirteen volume collection The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon is a treasure trove of fiction, some of which is not even good but with a surprisingly high percentage of stories that are much better than just "good."
A Saucer of Loneliness is Volume VII in this series, featuring works written in 1952 and 1953. Sturgeon was a man whose reach often exceeded his grasp. Of the twelve stories in this book, some are so seriously flawed that it is astonishing that Sturgeon could not see those flaws himself, and, perhaps even more astonishing, that editors did not help Sturgeon turn good stories into great ones. But some of these stories are quite wonderful.
I am going to start with a discussion of the last story in the book, "The Education of Drusilla Strange." This is the only story here that I can actually recall reading for the first time. I came across the March, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction in which this story originally appeared in a second-hand bookstore when I was around fourteen. The magazine had a lovely cover by Ed Emshwiller which had nothing to do with this story, but they have always remained wedded in my mind. I read the story that evening and loved it.
And now, I see this as a tale so misogynistic that I can scarcely believe that even in 1954, this was regarded as acceptable. In the story notes for "Drusilla," Sturgeon is quoted as follows:
This is one of my very favorite stories, for a number of reasons...
My dream for Drusilla is to see her education as a major motion picture, and then to spin off as a television series dealing with the educated Drusilla Strange. It isn't the glory (of which my readers have given me fulsomely) or the money (because I have found out that the line between owning money and being honestly broke is the line between owning money and being owned by it) but because it's a prime opportunity for a strong dramatic role to be given to a woman. I discount imitation bionic men and imitation male police officers, and of course sitcom pie-in-the-face, perennial teases, and Daddy-is-an-oaf so-called comedies. Drusilla is a super-woman, with super-enpathy, super-compassion, super-libido (if you like), but also super-responsibility, so that, because she knows she will live for a thousand years, she knows that with ethical responsibility, she must always move on. The educated Drusilla Strange has a prime drive: her deeply convinced and passionate love for humanity, and her desire, with all her powers, to solve human problems.
And if readers are thinking that sounds fine, keep in mind that these are comments about the story, not the story itself. Drusilla isn't a superwoman; she isn't an Earth woman at all. She is an alien, from a planet in which all females are virtually enslaved. Disobedient females are sent to Earth, the punishment planet, where they are tortured with memories of their home world. (The wonderful home world in which they were constantly abused!) She meets another female exile from her planet and finds that on Earth they can take part in a higher destiny - they can make men greater. Not mankind - men! Earth females just aren't up to the job.
"Nine women out of ten who truly help their men to realize themselves are what you've been calling criminals [from their planet]."
So females' greatest calling is to be supportive of men, not to accomplish anything of their own. And that's alien females; Earth women aren't even good enough to serve men well.
I must add that the story notes don't mention any of this.
I am beginning with "Drusilla" to get it out of the way. This is one of the few stories by Sturgeon that I find truly offensive. However, it is also nicely written and not uninteresting.
There is another story here that also has an important aspect that is offensive. "The Silken-Swift" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November, 1953) is one of Sturgeon's most famous and highly-regarded stories. It is essentially a fairy tale, a fantasy involving a unicorn, "the Silken-swift,
- the gloriously Fair!" There are three main human characters as well, two women and one man, the hero of the story (not the protagonist, the hero). The hero brutally rapes one of the women. It appears that the man and the woman he raped will probably live happily ever after.
"The Silken-Swift" has been anthologized repeatedly. A unicorn appears on the cover of this book, as a tribute to this story. I would agree that there are some fine, memorable parts of the story.
And a rape.
There are two other stories in this volume that I feel are simply not very involving.
"The Touch of Your Hand" is also from Galaxy Science Fiction, the October, 1952 issue. Paul Williams' notes for this story mentions that the story deals with the concept of "a limited telepathic linkage that allows each person's skills to become everyman's." Osser is a man apart from the linkage, who wants to "dig deep to build high, and we are going to build high." He anticipates having enemies, in a world where none exist.
(The name "Osser" reminds me of the phrase "to pile Pelion upon Ossa." The website Britannica.com says:
In Greek mythology, two giants piled Mount Pelion on Ossa (Kíssavos or Óssa), another mountain in Thessaly, in order to scale Olympus (Ólympos), but Apollo killed the giants before they could make the attempt.
I have never seen this mentioned in relation with this story so I am probably just imagining a connection where none was intended. Still, if one wanted a name for an immensely powerful character who wants to make a tower that will astonish the world, Ossa/Osser might be quite appropriate. )
In "The Wages of Synergy" (Startling Stories, August, 1953), the story begins with a man dying during the act of sex. That sounds like it must be the start of an exciting story, but I don't find it so. (In case people don't get the pun in the title, it is a twist on the saying "The wages of sin is death." And if the reader is looking for a definition of synergy, one of the characters in the story explains: "Chemistry is a strange country where sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, if you put the right parts on top. When one reaction finishes with blue, and another reaction finishes with hot, and you put the end products together and the result is bluer and hotter than the blue one and the hot one before, that's synergy." [Totally off topic, in the 1967 Peter Cook and Dudley Moore movie Bedazzled, directed by Stanley Donen, the Devil complains, "What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages."])
One more story that I feel is deeply flawed is "The Dark Room" (Fantastic, July-August, 1953). I have mentioned in other reviews that almost every time Sturgeon had a story recounted by an unpleasant narrator, I found it unconvincing. Other such stories include "The Heart," "The Ultimate Egoist," "Shottle Bop," and "The Pod in the Barrier." (Sturgeon's "When You're Smiling" is a notable exception; that narrator is both evil and believable.)
Tom, the narrator of "The Dark Room" is a man without a conscience. He is capable of doing "anything at all" without recriminations. He encounters an alien creature that feeds on regret. The narrator regrets nothing that he does and so the creature can not feed on his psychic energy.
I also question the very end of the story. Tom knows that he never regrets his actions and this does not bother him at all
Sturgeon is quoted in the story notes as saying that he (correctly) dislikes the inappropriate title stuck on this story by the editor. He goes on to say that, "I called it 'Alien Bee,' which is possibly not the best possible title for it either, but a better one, I think, than the one the editor chose." Sorry, Mr. Sturgeon, you're mistaken; both titles are bad, but "Alien Bee" is the poorer of the two.
All my reservations aside, there is much that is good in this story. The examples of other people who the alien attacked are particularly fine and, in some cases, really funny.
I once thought that the title story, "A Saucer of Loneliness" (Galaxy Science Fiction, February, 1953), was a genuinely great work. I now think that it is good, but I have strong reservations, especially about the last line (which the story notes say Sturgeon was persuaded to add by the editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold). The last sentence of the story is:
But...another thing that the story notes say is a quote from the noted science fiction author Spider Robinson : "His story 'A Saucer of Loneliness' kept me from suiciding when I was 16." If a lie can keep someone alive, is it a bad thing?
I also no longer have the same deep affection for the story "...And My Fear Is Great..." (originally published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, July, 1953) that I once had. I am not sure why. This is the tale of a boy on the verge of manhood and the two women in his life - a much older woman who has developed certain mental powers, which she is willing to teach and share under some circumstances, and a girl his own age, with whom he falls in love. Can he maintain both relationships?
There are some particularly fine examples of Sturgeon's writing here. There is a moving, perfect last paragraph. There is also a quite effective interlude of horror and disgust involving a dead rat.
Having mentioned several stories that I no longer like as much as I used to, I turn to a story that I now like better than I used to, "Mr. Costello, Hero" (Galaxy Science Fiction, December, 1953). I suspect that when I first read this, I had no idea of the real-world politics to which this story refers.
(Michael Battaglia has a fine review of this book and, most especially, this story, here on Goodreads. The review contains a terrific joke:
"Mr. Costello, Hero" is not about about Declan McManus' adventures as a lifeguard but a somewhat veiled dissection of the dangers of Cold War era McCarthyism, with the titular fellow charmingly convincing everyone to go against everyone else.
What the reader needs to know is that "Declan McManus" is the real name of musician Elvis Costello. So Declan McManus saving folks as a lifeguard would be "Mr. Costello, Hero.")
I believe that Senator Joseph McCarthy is still sufficiently known that people reading "Costello" even now will understand the relevance of the story to the specter that McCarthy cast over the United States in the early 1950's when the story was originally published. McCarthy/Costello was a masterful manipulator of public opinion. His political demise is usually attributed to a combination of newsman Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welch, McCarthy's chief opposing counsel at the Army-McCarthy hearings. Some credit is surely due to people like Walt Kelly, the cartoonist who drew Pogo, which had a continuing caricature of Senator McCarthy, and to Theodore Sturgeon, people who stepped up to try to slay the dragon at a time when it seemed that the dragon might easily slay them.
"The World Well Lost" (Universe Science Fiction, July, 1953) is, I believe, an even braver story, even though it has an unpleasant sort of post-script.
In the notes for this story, Paul Williams quotes from the introduction to a book titled Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest, edited by Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson: " 'The World Well Lost' was ground-breaking when it was published in 1953 - the first science fiction story to sympathetically portray homosexuality." And then Williams goes on to quote from Sturgeon himself: "I wrote an empathetic sort of tale about some homosexuals and my mailbox filled up with cards drenched with scent and letters written in purple ink with green capitals." So Sturgeon wrote the "first science fiction story to sympathetically portray homosexuality," "an empathetic sort of tale," about people that he then goes on to make fun of. Good, courageous story, vile comments, making sure that everyone knows that he isn't one of them.
"Talent" (Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September, 1953) is the only primarily comic story in the book. More precisely, this is a comic horror story. A young boy is gifted, with gifts that are not lovable.
1953 was also the year that Jerome Bixby's famous story "It's a Good Life" first appeared, with a differently monstrous boy. I'm sure that they could have had fun playing together - briefly.
The two remaining stories seem to me to be just about flawless. "The Clinic" (Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2) tells of a man who seems to have no memory - not just of his personal life, but of things like the use of buttons and, amazingly, eating. But he learns rapidly, more rapidly than would seem possible. Actually, it is not his memory that he has lost, but something just as basic. The brief portraits of the people he meets while being cared for are astonishing, conveying lifetimes of feelings in a few sentences.
"A Way of Thinking" (Amazing Stories, October-November, 1953) is one of my favorite Sturgeon stories. Actually, it is one of my favorite stories of any kind by any author.
There is a strong horror element in "A Way of Thinking." The narrator runs into an old friend, whose brother is dying horribly for reasons physicians can not understand. The friend has an unusual, cock-eyed way of looking at things. They begin to suspect that the brother is being tortured by someone using a voodoo doll.
Kurt Vonnegut's foreward seems to me rather pointless, especially since Vonnegut's somewhat snarky comment about Sturgeon's failed attempt to do a standing back flip doesn't mention Sturgeon's one-time intention to be a professional acrobat, until rheumatic fever changed his life forever.
The story notes throughout this series are fascinating and irritating. They almost always state if the original published version of a story is different from later versions; is it possible that Paul Williams never read the original version of "A Way of Thinking?"
And while the purpose of the notes is clearly not to give Williams' personal opinions of individual stories, I do think that some such comments would have been welcome. Also, there definitely should be more biographical details about Sturgeon.
It is worthy of note that for each of the two stories "The Wages of Synergy" and "Talent," the notes are only two sentences long.
I would like to do similar commentaries about each of the thirteen books in The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, but this single review has taken me hours to write. Maybe I will try again sometime.
◾Foreward by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
◾Fiction:
▪️"A Saucer of Loneliness"
▪️"The Touch of Your Hand"
▪️"The World Well Lost"
▪️"...And My Fear Is Great..."
▪️"The Wages of Synergy"
▪️"The Dark Room"
▪️"Talent"
▪️"A Way of Thinking"
▪️"The Silken-Swift"
▪️"The Clinic"
▪️"Mr. Costello, Hero"
▪️"The Education of Drusilla Strange"
◾Story Notes by Paul Williams
For much of my childhood and adolescence, Theodore Sturgeon was my favorite author. I still think that he was a marvel, a magician who knew the inside of the human heart as few other genre writers ever have, and a poet whose prose continues to sparkle. The thirteen volume collection The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon is a treasure trove of fiction, some of which is not even good but with a surprisingly high percentage of stories that are much better than just "good."
A Saucer of Loneliness is Volume VII in this series, featuring works written in 1952 and 1953. Sturgeon was a man whose reach often exceeded his grasp. Of the twelve stories in this book, some are so seriously flawed that it is astonishing that Sturgeon could not see those flaws himself, and, perhaps even more astonishing, that editors did not help Sturgeon turn good stories into great ones. But some of these stories are quite wonderful.
I am going to start with a discussion of the last story in the book, "The Education of Drusilla Strange." This is the only story here that I can actually recall reading for the first time. I came across the March, 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction in which this story originally appeared in a second-hand bookstore when I was around fourteen. The magazine had a lovely cover by Ed Emshwiller which had nothing to do with this story, but they have always remained wedded in my mind. I read the story that evening and loved it.
And now, I see this as a tale so misogynistic that I can scarcely believe that even in 1954, this was regarded as acceptable. In the story notes for "Drusilla," Sturgeon is quoted as follows:
This is one of my very favorite stories, for a number of reasons...
My dream for Drusilla is to see her education as a major motion picture, and then to spin off as a television series dealing with the educated Drusilla Strange. It isn't the glory (of which my readers have given me fulsomely) or the money (because I have found out that the line between owning money and being honestly broke is the line between owning money and being owned by it) but because it's a prime opportunity for a strong dramatic role to be given to a woman. I discount imitation bionic men and imitation male police officers, and of course sitcom pie-in-the-face, perennial teases, and Daddy-is-an-oaf so-called comedies. Drusilla is a super-woman, with super-enpathy, super-compassion, super-libido (if you like), but also super-responsibility, so that, because she knows she will live for a thousand years, she knows that with ethical responsibility, she must always move on. The educated Drusilla Strange has a prime drive: her deeply convinced and passionate love for humanity, and her desire, with all her powers, to solve human problems.
And if readers are thinking that sounds fine, keep in mind that these are comments about the story, not the story itself. Drusilla isn't a superwoman; she isn't an Earth woman at all. She is an alien, from a planet in which all females are virtually enslaved. Disobedient females are sent to Earth, the punishment planet, where they are tortured with memories of their home world. (The wonderful home world in which they were constantly abused!) She meets another female exile from her planet and finds that on Earth they can take part in a higher destiny - they can make men greater. Not mankind - men! Earth females just aren't up to the job.
"Nine women out of ten who truly help their men to realize themselves are what you've been calling criminals [from their planet]."
So females' greatest calling is to be supportive of men, not to accomplish anything of their own. And that's alien females; Earth women aren't even good enough to serve men well.
I must add that the story notes don't mention any of this.
I am beginning with "Drusilla" to get it out of the way. This is one of the few stories by Sturgeon that I find truly offensive. However, it is also nicely written and not uninteresting.
There is another story here that also has an important aspect that is offensive. "The Silken-Swift" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November, 1953) is one of Sturgeon's most famous and highly-regarded stories. It is essentially a fairy tale, a fantasy involving a unicorn, "the Silken-swift,
- the gloriously Fair!" There are three main human characters as well, two women and one man, the hero of the story (not the protagonist, the hero). The hero brutally rapes one of the women. It appears that the man and the woman he raped will probably live happily ever after.
"The Silken-Swift" has been anthologized repeatedly. A unicorn appears on the cover of this book, as a tribute to this story. I would agree that there are some fine, memorable parts of the story.
And a rape.
There are two other stories in this volume that I feel are simply not very involving.
"The Touch of Your Hand" is also from Galaxy Science Fiction, the October, 1952 issue. Paul Williams' notes for this story mentions that the story deals with the concept of "a limited telepathic linkage that allows each person's skills to become everyman's." Osser is a man apart from the linkage, who wants to "dig deep to build high, and we are going to build high." He anticipates having enemies, in a world where none exist.
(The name "Osser" reminds me of the phrase "to pile Pelion upon Ossa." The website Britannica.com says:
In Greek mythology, two giants piled Mount Pelion on Ossa (Kíssavos or Óssa), another mountain in Thessaly, in order to scale Olympus (Ólympos), but Apollo killed the giants before they could make the attempt.
I have never seen this mentioned in relation with this story so I am probably just imagining a connection where none was intended. Still, if one wanted a name for an immensely powerful character who wants to make a tower that will astonish the world, Ossa/Osser might be quite appropriate. )
In "The Wages of Synergy" (Startling Stories, August, 1953), the story begins with a man dying during the act of sex. That sounds like it must be the start of an exciting story, but I don't find it so. (In case people don't get the pun in the title, it is a twist on the saying "The wages of sin is death." And if the reader is looking for a definition of synergy, one of the characters in the story explains: "Chemistry is a strange country where sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, if you put the right parts on top. When one reaction finishes with blue, and another reaction finishes with hot, and you put the end products together and the result is bluer and hotter than the blue one and the hot one before, that's synergy." [Totally off topic, in the 1967 Peter Cook and Dudley Moore movie Bedazzled, directed by Stanley Donen, the Devil complains, "What terrible sins I have working for me. I suppose it's the wages."])
One more story that I feel is deeply flawed is "The Dark Room" (Fantastic, July-August, 1953). I have mentioned in other reviews that almost every time Sturgeon had a story recounted by an unpleasant narrator, I found it unconvincing. Other such stories include "The Heart," "The Ultimate Egoist," "Shottle Bop," and "The Pod in the Barrier." (Sturgeon's "When You're Smiling" is a notable exception; that narrator is both evil and believable.)
Tom, the narrator of "The Dark Room" is a man without a conscience. He is capable of doing "anything at all" without recriminations. He encounters an alien creature that feeds on regret. The narrator regrets nothing that he does and so the creature can not feed on his psychic energy.
I also question the very end of the story. Tom knows that he never regrets his actions and this does not bother him at all
Sturgeon is quoted in the story notes as saying that he (correctly) dislikes the inappropriate title stuck on this story by the editor. He goes on to say that, "I called it 'Alien Bee,' which is possibly not the best possible title for it either, but a better one, I think, than the one the editor chose." Sorry, Mr. Sturgeon, you're mistaken; both titles are bad, but "Alien Bee" is the poorer of the two.
All my reservations aside, there is much that is good in this story. The examples of other people who the alien attacked are particularly fine and, in some cases, really funny.
I once thought that the title story, "A Saucer of Loneliness" (Galaxy Science Fiction, February, 1953), was a genuinely great work. I now think that it is good, but I have strong reservations, especially about the last line (which the story notes say Sturgeon was persuaded to add by the editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold). The last sentence of the story is:
But...another thing that the story notes say is a quote from the noted science fiction author Spider Robinson : "His story 'A Saucer of Loneliness' kept me from suiciding when I was 16." If a lie can keep someone alive, is it a bad thing?
I also no longer have the same deep affection for the story "...And My Fear Is Great..." (originally published in Beyond Fantasy Fiction, July, 1953) that I once had. I am not sure why. This is the tale of a boy on the verge of manhood and the two women in his life - a much older woman who has developed certain mental powers, which she is willing to teach and share under some circumstances, and a girl his own age, with whom he falls in love. Can he maintain both relationships?
There are some particularly fine examples of Sturgeon's writing here. There is a moving, perfect last paragraph. There is also a quite effective interlude of horror and disgust involving a dead rat.
Having mentioned several stories that I no longer like as much as I used to, I turn to a story that I now like better than I used to, "Mr. Costello, Hero" (Galaxy Science Fiction, December, 1953). I suspect that when I first read this, I had no idea of the real-world politics to which this story refers.
(Michael Battaglia has a fine review of this book and, most especially, this story, here on Goodreads. The review contains a terrific joke:
"Mr. Costello, Hero" is not about about Declan McManus' adventures as a lifeguard but a somewhat veiled dissection of the dangers of Cold War era McCarthyism, with the titular fellow charmingly convincing everyone to go against everyone else.
What the reader needs to know is that "Declan McManus" is the real name of musician Elvis Costello. So Declan McManus saving folks as a lifeguard would be "Mr. Costello, Hero.")
I believe that Senator Joseph McCarthy is still sufficiently known that people reading "Costello" even now will understand the relevance of the story to the specter that McCarthy cast over the United States in the early 1950's when the story was originally published. McCarthy/Costello was a masterful manipulator of public opinion. His political demise is usually attributed to a combination of newsman Edward R. Murrow and Joseph Welch, McCarthy's chief opposing counsel at the Army-McCarthy hearings. Some credit is surely due to people like Walt Kelly, the cartoonist who drew Pogo, which had a continuing caricature of Senator McCarthy, and to Theodore Sturgeon, people who stepped up to try to slay the dragon at a time when it seemed that the dragon might easily slay them.
"The World Well Lost" (Universe Science Fiction, July, 1953) is, I believe, an even braver story, even though it has an unpleasant sort of post-script.
In the notes for this story, Paul Williams quotes from the introduction to a book titled Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest, edited by Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson: " 'The World Well Lost' was ground-breaking when it was published in 1953 - the first science fiction story to sympathetically portray homosexuality." And then Williams goes on to quote from Sturgeon himself: "I wrote an empathetic sort of tale about some homosexuals and my mailbox filled up with cards drenched with scent and letters written in purple ink with green capitals." So Sturgeon wrote the "first science fiction story to sympathetically portray homosexuality," "an empathetic sort of tale," about people that he then goes on to make fun of. Good, courageous story, vile comments, making sure that everyone knows that he isn't one of them.
"Talent" (Beyond Fantasy Fiction, September, 1953) is the only primarily comic story in the book. More precisely, this is a comic horror story. A young boy is gifted, with gifts that are not lovable.
1953 was also the year that Jerome Bixby's famous story "It's a Good Life" first appeared, with a differently monstrous boy. I'm sure that they could have had fun playing together - briefly.
The two remaining stories seem to me to be just about flawless. "The Clinic" (Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2) tells of a man who seems to have no memory - not just of his personal life, but of things like the use of buttons and, amazingly, eating. But he learns rapidly, more rapidly than would seem possible. Actually, it is not his memory that he has lost, but something just as basic. The brief portraits of the people he meets while being cared for are astonishing, conveying lifetimes of feelings in a few sentences.
"A Way of Thinking" (Amazing Stories, October-November, 1953) is one of my favorite Sturgeon stories. Actually, it is one of my favorite stories of any kind by any author.
There is a strong horror element in "A Way of Thinking." The narrator runs into an old friend, whose brother is dying horribly for reasons physicians can not understand. The friend has an unusual, cock-eyed way of looking at things. They begin to suspect that the brother is being tortured by someone using a voodoo doll.
Kurt Vonnegut's foreward seems to me rather pointless, especially since Vonnegut's somewhat snarky comment about Sturgeon's failed attempt to do a standing back flip doesn't mention Sturgeon's one-time intention to be a professional acrobat, until rheumatic fever changed his life forever.
The story notes throughout this series are fascinating and irritating. They almost always state if the original published version of a story is different from later versions; is it possible that Paul Williams never read the original version of "A Way of Thinking?"
And while the purpose of the notes is clearly not to give Williams' personal opinions of individual stories, I do think that some such comments would have been welcome. Also, there definitely should be more biographical details about Sturgeon.
It is worthy of note that for each of the two stories "The Wages of Synergy" and "Talent," the notes are only two sentences long.
I would like to do similar commentaries about each of the thirteen books in The Collected Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, but this single review has taken me hours to write. Maybe I will try again sometime.
May 27, 2016
With the 50s chugging along, Sturgeon appears to have entered a fairly fertile period for short stories ("More Than Human" was also finished around this time) with all twelve stories here having been written within the period of a year. Unlike "Baby is Three", which was dominated by the title story and all the stories that were doing their level to point their way to that story, the most famous story here really doesn't set the tone for the rest of the collection. However, like the last volume (and most of the volumes, come to think of it) the best and most well known story here is the title tale.
In some ways its even more emotionally compelling than "Baby is Three" while existing is about a third of the space, telling the story of a woman who is visited by a flying saucer and given a message that she won't tell anyone, despite everyone insisting she spill. The resolution of it is a thing of beauty, an expression of ache that is universal and intensely personal as well, with the hope that by expressing that ache we can bring ourselves to terms with it and perhaps understand each other better. It takes what could be a silly concept and makes it a punch in the gut. There are few other stories like it.
While that would seem to suggest that it's all downhill after the first fifteen pages, Sturgeon at this point was moving from strength to strength and quite a few of the stories display his varied strengths as a writer, almost like he was in a "try anything" mode. So you can get lyrical expressions of the perils of hubris ("The Touch of Your Hand" which starts out sounding like its going to go for Silverberg's "Tower of Glass" territory before it heads somewhere utterly different), poignant expressions of homosexuality in a genre that had rarely addressed the subject, at a time in the country's history where people pretended it wasn't a normal thing ("The World Well Lost"), a rather epic exploration of the evolution of the fight between good and evil ("And My Fear is Great", which dips back into the thematic territory of merged love that marked the last collection), mysteries that exist in the grey space between SF and horror ("The Wages of Synergy" and "The Dark Room" . . . both of which seem to be excuses for Sturgeon to get his characters together to chat from different angles about stuff he was interested in), a fairly dark horror tale ("A Way of Thinking" . . . which I think has the best ending in the collection, not one that gave me warm fuzzy feelings mind you but the one that made me stop for a second and think about what I just read and really let it sink in), a fantasy tale involving a unicorn ("The Silken-Swift", which Sturgeon seemed to like quite a bit himself, for me it trips along a bit too gushingly until you get to the ending, which is quite decent), and one of my favorites in the collection, "The Clinic", which makes a very good stab at writing a story from an alien's point of view with a fair amount of his trademark compassion, reminding you that sometimes people are crippled in ways you can't see or understand. And that's not even going into "The Education of Drusilla Strange", which furthers his themes of loneliness and isolation and overcoming both those fears through both letting go and finding love.
But just as the collection begins with the most famous tale, it leaves the hardest hitting for near the end. "Mr Costello, Hero" is not about about Declan McManus' adventures as a lifeguard but a somewhat veiled dissection of the dangers of Cold War era McCarthyism, with the titular fellow charmingly convincing everyone to go against everyone else. Told from the perspective of someone who is a bit thick, its a chilling portrayal of everyone letting themselves getting manipulated into doing acts that go against their natures, that they're not even sure they want to do but since they've been told its reasonable and makes sense, why not? After all, everyone wants to fit in and Mr Costello really seems to know what he's talking about. It also has about the least hopeful happy ending of any of the stories, with the final line suggesting that good can prevail, but it sure may not learn its lesson in the process. As both story and satire, its fantastic and less blunt than a similar storyline with "Simple J Malarkey" from Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strip (although the sense of menace in the latter was slightly more effective for being so left-field).
Most collections of short stories cherry pick the writer's best works to give you the very peak of what they can do but when you consider that this is all the stories he wrote in a twelve month period, the quality is staggering. Some may be more minor than others but there's not a bad one in the bunch and the fact that many of these, as good as they are, wouldn't even make a Top Ten Best Of list for him only proves why they even bothered to publish a thirteen volume series of his stories. Simply put, he was that good.
In some ways its even more emotionally compelling than "Baby is Three" while existing is about a third of the space, telling the story of a woman who is visited by a flying saucer and given a message that she won't tell anyone, despite everyone insisting she spill. The resolution of it is a thing of beauty, an expression of ache that is universal and intensely personal as well, with the hope that by expressing that ache we can bring ourselves to terms with it and perhaps understand each other better. It takes what could be a silly concept and makes it a punch in the gut. There are few other stories like it.
While that would seem to suggest that it's all downhill after the first fifteen pages, Sturgeon at this point was moving from strength to strength and quite a few of the stories display his varied strengths as a writer, almost like he was in a "try anything" mode. So you can get lyrical expressions of the perils of hubris ("The Touch of Your Hand" which starts out sounding like its going to go for Silverberg's "Tower of Glass" territory before it heads somewhere utterly different), poignant expressions of homosexuality in a genre that had rarely addressed the subject, at a time in the country's history where people pretended it wasn't a normal thing ("The World Well Lost"), a rather epic exploration of the evolution of the fight between good and evil ("And My Fear is Great", which dips back into the thematic territory of merged love that marked the last collection), mysteries that exist in the grey space between SF and horror ("The Wages of Synergy" and "The Dark Room" . . . both of which seem to be excuses for Sturgeon to get his characters together to chat from different angles about stuff he was interested in), a fairly dark horror tale ("A Way of Thinking" . . . which I think has the best ending in the collection, not one that gave me warm fuzzy feelings mind you but the one that made me stop for a second and think about what I just read and really let it sink in), a fantasy tale involving a unicorn ("The Silken-Swift", which Sturgeon seemed to like quite a bit himself, for me it trips along a bit too gushingly until you get to the ending, which is quite decent), and one of my favorites in the collection, "The Clinic", which makes a very good stab at writing a story from an alien's point of view with a fair amount of his trademark compassion, reminding you that sometimes people are crippled in ways you can't see or understand. And that's not even going into "The Education of Drusilla Strange", which furthers his themes of loneliness and isolation and overcoming both those fears through both letting go and finding love.
But just as the collection begins with the most famous tale, it leaves the hardest hitting for near the end. "Mr Costello, Hero" is not about about Declan McManus' adventures as a lifeguard but a somewhat veiled dissection of the dangers of Cold War era McCarthyism, with the titular fellow charmingly convincing everyone to go against everyone else. Told from the perspective of someone who is a bit thick, its a chilling portrayal of everyone letting themselves getting manipulated into doing acts that go against their natures, that they're not even sure they want to do but since they've been told its reasonable and makes sense, why not? After all, everyone wants to fit in and Mr Costello really seems to know what he's talking about. It also has about the least hopeful happy ending of any of the stories, with the final line suggesting that good can prevail, but it sure may not learn its lesson in the process. As both story and satire, its fantastic and less blunt than a similar storyline with "Simple J Malarkey" from Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strip (although the sense of menace in the latter was slightly more effective for being so left-field).
Most collections of short stories cherry pick the writer's best works to give you the very peak of what they can do but when you consider that this is all the stories he wrote in a twelve month period, the quality is staggering. Some may be more minor than others but there's not a bad one in the bunch and the fact that many of these, as good as they are, wouldn't even make a Top Ten Best Of list for him only proves why they even bothered to publish a thirteen volume series of his stories. Simply put, he was that good.
March 6, 2009
Some of the best sci-fi you'll ever find is golden age short stories. Sturgeon knows how to write; he coined the phrase "90% of everything is crud." If that's not enough, here's a paragraph from the first story in the collection:
"It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in the tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical."
Scifi is easily criticized in that it's easy to obscure the humanity in its stories, but Sturgeon uses writing to illuminate us.
"It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in the tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical."
Scifi is easily criticized in that it's easy to obscure the humanity in its stories, but Sturgeon uses writing to illuminate us.
February 7, 2022
Tags: Fiction / Scifi / Historical / part of the canon
Short story about a pair of aliens who find themselves on earth, hoping to be welcomed, and instead are sent home. According to wikipedia - this was one of the first scifi stories published that was positive or open minded about homosexuality. Thought provoking read.
I would recommend to others, keeping in mind this is not a romance and does not have a HEA.
Short story about a pair of aliens who find themselves on earth, hoping to be welcomed, and instead are sent home. According to wikipedia - this was one of the first scifi stories published that was positive or open minded about homosexuality. Thought provoking read.
I would recommend to others, keeping in mind this is not a romance and does not have a HEA.
Read
May 30, 2016I didn't read this entire collection of short stories by Theodore Sturgeon. I read the short story A Saucer of Loneliness that was included in the anthology Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century.
I didn't care for the story. I'm not going to rate the book based on one story, but I'd rate this short story 2 stars at best.
It was about a young woman who
I guess I just didn't get the point of this story. I also didn't find the characters very interesting. And what happens to the woman just seems ludicrous.
I didn't care for the story. I'm not going to rate the book based on one story, but I'd rate this short story 2 stars at best.
It was about a young woman who
I guess I just didn't get the point of this story. I also didn't find the characters very interesting. And what happens to the woman just seems ludicrous.
March 6, 2014
'The Silken Swift'
A unicorn holds the key to happiness. Theodore Sturgeon's fantasy of true love and complex desire. Read by Mark Bonnar.
Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 7, 12:30am Sunday 30th May 2010
Duration:
30 minutes
Available until:
1:02am Sunday 6th June 2010
Categories:
Drama, Horror & Supernatural
A unicorn holds the key to happiness. Theodore Sturgeon's fantasy of true love and complex desire. Read by Mark Bonnar.
Broadcast on:
BBC Radio 7, 12:30am Sunday 30th May 2010
Duration:
30 minutes
Available until:
1:02am Sunday 6th June 2010
Categories:
Drama, Horror & Supernatural
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 16, 2016
I just started reading this. The title story "a saucer of loneliness", was an episode of the late 1980's early 1990s remake of The Twilight Zone TV show. the episode starred Shelley Duvall, and I always remembered it as it was very poignant and touching.
July 27, 2013
I don't have this book, really but I just read the short story "A Saucer of Loneliness" and now I'm really interested in this author.
January 30, 2018
Even decades later, Sturgeon's stories are relevant, and have things to teach us.
March 22, 2018
The Saucer of Lonliness <3
April 28, 2018
Reviewing just the Saucer of Loneliness short, which was not listed separately. Very good classic with emotional depth.
October 2, 2023
Another excellent collection of Sturgeon stories.
April 28, 2025
The saucer of loneliness itself is one of my favourite short stories, but the rest I really struggled with.
February 22, 2021
Titular and first story sums up Sturgeon - first contact, with small saucer, leaves person comatose. They recover with knowledge aliens wanted to say Hi!. Sturgeon is E.M. Forster of science fiction - connecting with others is priority, even if from another galaxy.
Want to read
August 14, 2011I need my own copy of "The World Well Lost" NOW.
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