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The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon #12
Slow Sculpture
Theodore Sturgeon was a model for his friend Kurt Vonnegut’s legendary character Kilgore Trout, and his work was an acknowledged influence on important younger writers from Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg to Stephen King and Octavia Butler. His work has long been deeply appreciated for its sardonic sensibility, dazzling wordplay, conceptual brilliance, memorable characters, and unsparing treatment of social issues such as sex, war, and marginalized members of society. Sturgeon also authored several episodes of the original Star Trek TV series and originated the Vulcan phrase “Live long and prosper.”
This twelfth volume of North Atlantic’s ambitious series reprinting his complete short stories includes classic works such as the award-winning title story, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1971, as well as “Case and the Dreamer,” a well-crafted tale of an encounter with a trans-spatial being that is also a meditation on love, and “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff,” a creative exploration of the human ability to achieve self-realization in response to crisis. The book includes a new Foreword, an illuminating section of Story Notes, and a comprehensive index for the entire series.
This twelfth volume of North Atlantic’s ambitious series reprinting his complete short stories includes classic works such as the award-winning title story, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1971, as well as “Case and the Dreamer,” a well-crafted tale of an encounter with a trans-spatial being that is also a meditation on love, and “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff,” a creative exploration of the human ability to achieve self-realization in response to crisis. The book includes a new Foreword, an illuminating section of Story Notes, and a comprehensive index for the entire series.
313 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 20, 2009
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267 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 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 6, 2020
The strongest collection in the entire 13-volume series, if you can trust my tour of its highlights:
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June 27, 2016
Reading this one was kind of strange, if only for reasons that are highly specific to me and probably won't resonate with anyone else. When I started reading this series years and years ago (in the late nineties as the early volumes were coming out, before I wound up taking an unintended fifteen year hiatus) the one story the biographical blurbs kept referring to was "Slow Sculpture" since it had won the Hugo and Nebula the year it was published. I was at a stage where winning both awards to me meant the very pinnacle of SF reading and so very much looked forward to reading what in my mind had to be the best Sturgeon story ever written because two entirely separate groups of people who also really liked SF thought to give it their highest award at the same time.
Thing was, the blurbs never said what year the story was published and I didn't realize until much later that it came very late in his career. But every time a new volume would come out I would buy it (even when I was filing it to not be read right away) and flip through the table of contents to see if "Slow Sculpture" was there. And invariably as the volumes edged into the double digits, it was never there. When it did finally make an appearance in the penultimate volume of this series, one that bore its name (of course) I felt some kind of strange relief. Like, oh, there is it finally. We must be nearly done. When I finally reached the point where I was plunging through the volumes I had sort of forgotten which volume it was and so as I pulled each one off the stack, I would look at the one below (there were stacked in a way that I couldn't read the spines, which would have made this vastly easier) and not see it and wonder when I was getting to it.
And when I was getting ready to finally read it, after all these years, I felt a weird anticipation, wondering if it could possibly be as good as story as worth waiting all this time to read. After all, he'd written plenty of other stories that were masterpieces or had verged on them. Maybe this time the voters got it wrong, or were merely rewarding him for his past, peak efforts.
Well, you'll have to decide for yourselves but for me it was pretty much what I expected, probably his best late period story and maybe his last excellent story. In it, a woman who believes she's dying of cancer goes to a man that isn't a doctor but thinks maybe he can cure her. But that isn't the story, really, not when you come down to it. To me, the best of Sturgeon's stories maintain a subtle lyricism that sets them apart from the ones that are merely running through a keen idea, there's an emphatic passion to it, a sense of humanity as he sets two people who are isolated and may not want to be against each other and steps back to let the scenario play out while connecting it to a higher sense that we're all in this together and if the planet goes, we go too. A lot of his later stories have this slight element of preachiness to it, as if he'd grown tired of coaching his concerns in metaphor and was more focused on speaking directly to the reader through characters that would seek to lecture us about the perils the world is facing. Here, he puts the characters first and lets their human dramas and concerns take center stage as they air their damages and reveal their desires to be better, tying it into the metaphor put forth by the title. Its not his most bravura set of writing ("The Man Who Lost the Sea" probably takes the cake for that) but its got pretty much what people who describe what to look for in a great Sturgeon story would find, that broader sense that we can better than what we are writ both large and small, that caring about each other makes us better and in turn improves the world. That he's able to do it without being sickly sweet or cloying is a tribute to how real he makes it all feel (there's barely any SF). It's a problem anyone can have, but this is specifically how these particular people would solve it given the tools they have, and no one else.
It's a bittersweet feeling to have, to finally reach the story after a decade and a half knowing it was ahead the whole time (apparently I'm very methodical in my reading habits, before you ask) and while I can still read it again any time I'd like, I can never read it for the first time again.
Compared to that masterpiece, the rest are . . . decent. If not for "Slow Sculpture" we might have been in the same situation as the last story, where there were no real standout stories, just decent ones. Fortunately we have the old "The [Widget], the [Wadget] and Boff" published out of order because it wouldn't have fit anywhere else but a welcome surge of the Sturgeon of old, as he details a series of emotionally damaged people living in a boarding house, taking them in a Dos Passos style cross-section and setting aliens among them to push and prod them into maybe not being as damaged even as he makes it clear that in the end they need to be there for each other. And again, its a striking example of how he could write passionately and humanly without getting weepily sentimental.
There's one more near masterpiece to contend with "The Girl Who Knew What They Meant", one of the "Wina Stories" from around this period of his life, a brief exploration into what we do to each other when we're not completely honest with others and mostly ourselves, and what happens when someone can tell the difference. Brief as it is, it feels like Sturgeon fully engaged in attempting to convey a truth to us in a way that turns the situation around entirely from what we expect.
Meanwhile, the rest are . . . cute, for lack of a better term. A lot of them are short and mostly conventional (the one outlier "The Verity Files" told in a series of memos didn't quite work for me despite my normal predilection for authors who actively try to do something different), either lacking Sturgeon's tendency at his best to hit you straight in the gut at the very end or that aching honest lyricism that set him apart from others and even his more pedestrian efforts. A lot of them seem like set ups for a punchline ("Uncle Fremmis", "Crate" "Suicide", "Necessary and Sufficient") with very little else to latch onto, although generally the setup is competently done (although I will admit to a chuckle at the scatological slant to "Pruzy's Pot"). The rest tend to lapse into the hey-kids-lets-all-save-the-world lecturing that sometimes overcomes his stories at this stage of the game, where he's more interested in conveying an idea than giving us a story with people. None of them are bad but after the last couple volumes its clear that once we were past his fifties peak, the "wow-okay" ratio was definitely skewed more toward the latter.
Still, when he could do stuff like "Slow Sculpture", who cares, since a lot of writers can go their whole lives without writing one story that fantastic. All of these are at the very least entertaining and for us to demand more from a man who has squeezed himself dry for years churning out masterpieces seems both cruel and selfish. I'd love more masterpieces from Sturgeon but I would have loved there to be more stories from Sturgeon from then until today, period. The crime isn't that he wasn't as inspired a writer toward the tailend of his life, the crime isn't that he wasn't allowed more life to gift us with whatever brilliant fragments he wanted to give.
Thing was, the blurbs never said what year the story was published and I didn't realize until much later that it came very late in his career. But every time a new volume would come out I would buy it (even when I was filing it to not be read right away) and flip through the table of contents to see if "Slow Sculpture" was there. And invariably as the volumes edged into the double digits, it was never there. When it did finally make an appearance in the penultimate volume of this series, one that bore its name (of course) I felt some kind of strange relief. Like, oh, there is it finally. We must be nearly done. When I finally reached the point where I was plunging through the volumes I had sort of forgotten which volume it was and so as I pulled each one off the stack, I would look at the one below (there were stacked in a way that I couldn't read the spines, which would have made this vastly easier) and not see it and wonder when I was getting to it.
And when I was getting ready to finally read it, after all these years, I felt a weird anticipation, wondering if it could possibly be as good as story as worth waiting all this time to read. After all, he'd written plenty of other stories that were masterpieces or had verged on them. Maybe this time the voters got it wrong, or were merely rewarding him for his past, peak efforts.
Well, you'll have to decide for yourselves but for me it was pretty much what I expected, probably his best late period story and maybe his last excellent story. In it, a woman who believes she's dying of cancer goes to a man that isn't a doctor but thinks maybe he can cure her. But that isn't the story, really, not when you come down to it. To me, the best of Sturgeon's stories maintain a subtle lyricism that sets them apart from the ones that are merely running through a keen idea, there's an emphatic passion to it, a sense of humanity as he sets two people who are isolated and may not want to be against each other and steps back to let the scenario play out while connecting it to a higher sense that we're all in this together and if the planet goes, we go too. A lot of his later stories have this slight element of preachiness to it, as if he'd grown tired of coaching his concerns in metaphor and was more focused on speaking directly to the reader through characters that would seek to lecture us about the perils the world is facing. Here, he puts the characters first and lets their human dramas and concerns take center stage as they air their damages and reveal their desires to be better, tying it into the metaphor put forth by the title. Its not his most bravura set of writing ("The Man Who Lost the Sea" probably takes the cake for that) but its got pretty much what people who describe what to look for in a great Sturgeon story would find, that broader sense that we can better than what we are writ both large and small, that caring about each other makes us better and in turn improves the world. That he's able to do it without being sickly sweet or cloying is a tribute to how real he makes it all feel (there's barely any SF). It's a problem anyone can have, but this is specifically how these particular people would solve it given the tools they have, and no one else.
It's a bittersweet feeling to have, to finally reach the story after a decade and a half knowing it was ahead the whole time (apparently I'm very methodical in my reading habits, before you ask) and while I can still read it again any time I'd like, I can never read it for the first time again.
Compared to that masterpiece, the rest are . . . decent. If not for "Slow Sculpture" we might have been in the same situation as the last story, where there were no real standout stories, just decent ones. Fortunately we have the old "The [Widget], the [Wadget] and Boff" published out of order because it wouldn't have fit anywhere else but a welcome surge of the Sturgeon of old, as he details a series of emotionally damaged people living in a boarding house, taking them in a Dos Passos style cross-section and setting aliens among them to push and prod them into maybe not being as damaged even as he makes it clear that in the end they need to be there for each other. And again, its a striking example of how he could write passionately and humanly without getting weepily sentimental.
There's one more near masterpiece to contend with "The Girl Who Knew What They Meant", one of the "Wina Stories" from around this period of his life, a brief exploration into what we do to each other when we're not completely honest with others and mostly ourselves, and what happens when someone can tell the difference. Brief as it is, it feels like Sturgeon fully engaged in attempting to convey a truth to us in a way that turns the situation around entirely from what we expect.
Meanwhile, the rest are . . . cute, for lack of a better term. A lot of them are short and mostly conventional (the one outlier "The Verity Files" told in a series of memos didn't quite work for me despite my normal predilection for authors who actively try to do something different), either lacking Sturgeon's tendency at his best to hit you straight in the gut at the very end or that aching honest lyricism that set him apart from others and even his more pedestrian efforts. A lot of them seem like set ups for a punchline ("Uncle Fremmis", "Crate" "Suicide", "Necessary and Sufficient") with very little else to latch onto, although generally the setup is competently done (although I will admit to a chuckle at the scatological slant to "Pruzy's Pot"). The rest tend to lapse into the hey-kids-lets-all-save-the-world lecturing that sometimes overcomes his stories at this stage of the game, where he's more interested in conveying an idea than giving us a story with people. None of them are bad but after the last couple volumes its clear that once we were past his fifties peak, the "wow-okay" ratio was definitely skewed more toward the latter.
Still, when he could do stuff like "Slow Sculpture", who cares, since a lot of writers can go their whole lives without writing one story that fantastic. All of these are at the very least entertaining and for us to demand more from a man who has squeezed himself dry for years churning out masterpieces seems both cruel and selfish. I'd love more masterpieces from Sturgeon but I would have loved there to be more stories from Sturgeon from then until today, period. The crime isn't that he wasn't as inspired a writer toward the tailend of his life, the crime isn't that he wasn't allowed more life to gift us with whatever brilliant fragments he wanted to give.
February 3, 2010
I rarely give a book the "it was amazing" five stars. Theodore Sturgeon manages to mix stories that cause serious thought with humor. Theodore Sturgeon was a fan of critical thinking, challenging assumptions, and a romantic at heart with the stories in this collection an expression of this.
Aliens study Earth and its humans in The [Widget:], the [Wadget:], and Boff. The goal is to figure out if humans have Synapse Beta sub Sixteen. It seems like it's present but maybe they don't use it?
The Beholders is hard to describe. Take a pair of strange eyeglasses, some pills, and you can see a little different. The eyeglass wearer and pill taker believes this is important.
While most of the stories have a science fiction or fantasy feel It’s You! is an exception. People dream about the type of person they want a relationship with. Here’s a story of what happens when two such people find each other.
I love the concepts, and story in Slow Sculpture. I’d never thought much about bonsai before but this story changes that. The primary story though is what happens when people are not ready for one or more of those giant leaps for mankind.
The title The Girl Who Knew What They Meant says it all. What happens when a girl, and later young woman, simply knows what you mean? Can she be happy?
The Patterns of Dorne is a psychological drama.
Crate reminds me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. A spaceship crashes in the wilderness while attempting to land. There are one adult and several young teen survivors. The adult gives them instructions regarding a special crate and then succumbs to her injuries from the crash.
In Suicide someone takes the final jump of his life which starts a struggle for survival.
Uncle Fremmis can fix anything, or anyone, by giving the thing or person a whack. The item remains fixed for hours to months.
A master troubleshooter is called in to deal with a particularly delicate problem in Necessary and Sufficient. The solution is based on a through knowledge of human behavior.
The Verity File is told as a series of inter-departmental memos. Corporations have a soul too.
Occam's Scalpel shows a way to persuade someone without them realizing it happened.
Dazed takes a look at the nature of the relationship between God and Satan.
Pruzy's Pot is hilarious and the Afterword by Spider Robinson is outrageous. It’s the type of story we wish we could write but never dared to. The star of this story is a toilet.
Aliens study Earth and its humans in The [Widget:], the [Wadget:], and Boff. The goal is to figure out if humans have Synapse Beta sub Sixteen. It seems like it's present but maybe they don't use it?
The Beholders is hard to describe. Take a pair of strange eyeglasses, some pills, and you can see a little different. The eyeglass wearer and pill taker believes this is important.
While most of the stories have a science fiction or fantasy feel It’s You! is an exception. People dream about the type of person they want a relationship with. Here’s a story of what happens when two such people find each other.
I love the concepts, and story in Slow Sculpture. I’d never thought much about bonsai before but this story changes that. The primary story though is what happens when people are not ready for one or more of those giant leaps for mankind.
The title The Girl Who Knew What They Meant says it all. What happens when a girl, and later young woman, simply knows what you mean? Can she be happy?
The Patterns of Dorne is a psychological drama.
Crate reminds me of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. A spaceship crashes in the wilderness while attempting to land. There are one adult and several young teen survivors. The adult gives them instructions regarding a special crate and then succumbs to her injuries from the crash.
In Suicide someone takes the final jump of his life which starts a struggle for survival.
Uncle Fremmis can fix anything, or anyone, by giving the thing or person a whack. The item remains fixed for hours to months.
A master troubleshooter is called in to deal with a particularly delicate problem in Necessary and Sufficient. The solution is based on a through knowledge of human behavior.
The Verity File is told as a series of inter-departmental memos. Corporations have a soul too.
Occam's Scalpel shows a way to persuade someone without them realizing it happened.
Dazed takes a look at the nature of the relationship between God and Satan.
Pruzy's Pot is hilarious and the Afterword by Spider Robinson is outrageous. It’s the type of story we wish we could write but never dared to. The star of this story is a toilet.
December 5, 2010
OK, I didn't read this collection, but it does include stories I have read including "Why Dolphins Don't Bite" which I encountered in a found (and carefully hidden) Playboy magazine when I was about 12. I remembered this story vividly and I still find it quite profound.
August 9, 2021
RTC when I'm back home.
Currently reading
December 15, 2009I actually blogged about this:
http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2009/1...
1 December 2009
Sturgeon is Neither Alive nor Well
Just in time for Christmas, I received Slow Sculpture, Volume XII of the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon (hardcover, North Atlantic Press, $35, 299 p.)
There are a number of interesting sidelights about it: this is the first of two volumes (Vol. XIII will be the final volume in 2010) to be edited by his daughter Noël Sturgeon (who has suffered a lifetime of umlaut displacement, generally as ö), because Paul Williams, legendary ’60s journalist and founder of the first rock magazine, Crawdaddy, “confidant of John Lennon, biographer of Bob Dylan and traveling companion to the Grateful Dead,” who had edited the previous eleven volumes of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, beginning in 1991, and to whom this volume is dedicated: “He started this project in 1991 and stayed with it until Alzheimer’s from a brain injury made it impossible for him to continue.”
Paul Williams single-handedly put Philip K. Dick on the pop-culture map.... [more @ hisvorpalsword.com/2009/12/01/sturgeo... :]
http://hisvorpal.wordpress.com/2009/1...
1 December 2009
Sturgeon is Neither Alive nor Well
Just in time for Christmas, I received Slow Sculpture, Volume XII of the complete stories of Theodore Sturgeon (hardcover, North Atlantic Press, $35, 299 p.)
There are a number of interesting sidelights about it: this is the first of two volumes (Vol. XIII will be the final volume in 2010) to be edited by his daughter Noël Sturgeon (who has suffered a lifetime of umlaut displacement, generally as ö), because Paul Williams, legendary ’60s journalist and founder of the first rock magazine, Crawdaddy, “confidant of John Lennon, biographer of Bob Dylan and traveling companion to the Grateful Dead,” who had edited the previous eleven volumes of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, beginning in 1991, and to whom this volume is dedicated: “He started this project in 1991 and stayed with it until Alzheimer’s from a brain injury made it impossible for him to continue.”
Paul Williams single-handedly put Philip K. Dick on the pop-culture map.... [more @ hisvorpalsword.com/2009/12/01/sturgeo... :]
June 21, 2015
first time reading Sturgeon. His characters feel incredibly human. Some of the stores it felt difficult to capture both my attention and interest... but when he was able to it was really satisfying.
Individual ratings of the stories:
2 - The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff - had a very difficult time getting into it and decided not to finish it which is rare for me
3 - The Beholders
5 - It's You!
5 - Slow Sculpture - bonsai trees, interesting
5 - The Girl Who Knew What They Meant
3 - The Patterns of Dorne
2 - Crate - don't like having endings explained
3 - Suicide - predictable
5 - Uncle Fremmis - had a chuckle at the end
4 - Necessary and Sufficient
3 - The Verity File
4 - Occam's Scalpel
3 - Dazed
5 - Pruzy's Pot
Individual ratings of the stories:
2 - The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff - had a very difficult time getting into it and decided not to finish it which is rare for me
3 - The Beholders
5 - It's You!
5 - Slow Sculpture - bonsai trees, interesting
5 - The Girl Who Knew What They Meant
3 - The Patterns of Dorne
2 - Crate - don't like having endings explained
3 - Suicide - predictable
5 - Uncle Fremmis - had a chuckle at the end
4 - Necessary and Sufficient
3 - The Verity File
4 - Occam's Scalpel
3 - Dazed
5 - Pruzy's Pot
June 22, 2010
Sturgeon is a master of the psychological. Reading his stories, delving into what makes his characters tick... you'll recall thoughts and feelings you haven't remembered for years or decades. Sturgeion handles every nuance of human experience with equal facility. If he didn't have so much fun writing he could certainly have taken a position as a professor, but I suspect he would have been bored to death.
July 15, 2015
This is an excellent set of short stories that belies Sturgeon's pronouncement that 99 percent of all genre fiction is crap and executes brilliantly his other dictum--that good writing and good thinking require us always to "ask the next question." It always amazes me how many of my friends who read science fiction regularly don't remember his work. He should be, and in my mind is, one of science fiction's pantheon along with Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, and Bradbury.
Read
December 20, 2015One of my all-time favourite tear-jerkers.
September 26, 2015
Read Slow Sculture.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews