Venus Plus X

by Theodore Sturgeon

Because as long as he kept remembering, he knew he was Charlie Johns; and although he might be in a new place without knowing what time it was, he wasn’t lost, no one is ever lost, as long as he knows who he is.

‘Our kind of people, there is no boss in the house any more.’ ‘Yeah, I did think things were gettin’ out of hand.’ ‘That’s not what I mean, bonehead!’ ‘So what do you mean, headbone?’ Smitty asks. ‘It’s a team, that’s what I mean. There’s a lot of yammering going on about the women taking over. They’re not taking over. They’re moving in.’

There were a lot of people living in his time who never did latch on to the idea that the curve of technological progress was not a flat slanting line like a diving board, but a geometrical curve like a ski-jump. These wistful and mixed-up souls were always suffering from attacks of belated conservatism, clutching suddenly at this dying thing and that, trying to keep it or bring it back.

Unable to get the big picture, they welcomed the conveniences, the miniaturization of this and the speed of that, and then were angrily confused when their support of these things changed their world.

‘The only thing I like about a copywriter that’s better than a best-seller writer,’ Herb interrupts, ‘is that though they’re both wordsmiths, a copywriter makes it his business to never let his words get between the customer and the product. That’s what Wylie did with that chapter in that book. Nobody who needs it ever gets to read it.’

the brand of ignorance known as common sense

Your literature is full of hallucinatory images of the sort – pigs with wings, human freedom, fire-breathing dragons, the wisdom of the majority, the basilisk, the golem, and equality of the sexes.’

That is how you progress from any place to any other place – by beginning, over and over again, to fall.’ ‘And then it turns out they’re propped up on invisible crutches.’ Philos twinkled, ‘All symbols are, Charlie.’

Nobody, he thinks, ever wrote anything about father-love. Mother-love is supposed to be a magic expression of the hand of God or something, or maybe the activity of certain ductless glands; it depends on who’s talking. But father-love … an awful funny thing, father-love.

Why wouldn’t it ever occur to anyone to say humanity was full of sons of bitches because it issued from the filthiest part of a man? It wouldn’t, you know; not ever.

There is literally no subject ever encountered in the history of mankind so unsusceptible to objective study as that of sex.

Given a man who, among his fellows, has no real superiority, you are faced with a bedevilled madman who, if superiority is denied him, and he cannot learn one or earn one, will turn on something weaker than himself and make it inferior. The obvious, logical, handiest subject for this inexcusable indignity is his woman. He could not do this to anyone he loved.

The only conceivable way to use the immense power of innate religiosity – the need to worship – for the acquisition of human power, is to place between worshipper and Divinity a guilt mechanism. The only way to achieve that is to organize and systematize worship, and the obvious way to bring this about is to monitor that other great striving of life – sex.