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The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon #5
The Perfect Host
The fifth of ten volumes that will reprint all Sturgeon's short fiction covers his prolific output volume contains 15 classics and two previously unpublished stories, including "Quietly." The Perfect Host provides enough of a representative sampling of Sturgeon's "greatest hits" to give the uninitiated a good sense of what all the fuss was about way back when. At the same time it offers a generous selection of alternate takes and rarities, notably several of Sturgeon's best forays into other forms of genre writing, plus previously unreleased cuts and liner notes.
409 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1998
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279 people want to read
About the author
Theodore Sturgeon
719 books767 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
May 22, 2020
A striking feature of Sturgeon's writing that I haven't mentioned so far is its generous disregard for the principle "one basic idea per short story." He'd usually throw in two, three, at times even more; and all of them would sound thoroughly researched. The freshest example in my mind is "Farewell to Eden." There, we have:
- What would a piece of apparatus for restructuring the human body look like?
- How do you help people regain their memories?
- Why do intelligent beings discriminate against those who differ?
- And the ending, which I won't spoil for you.
After consuming such idea feasts for a while, ordinary short stories, with their meager single foci, become rather unpalatable. ;)
Here are my other impressions.
- What would a piece of apparatus for restructuring the human body look like?
- How do you help people regain their memories?
- Why do intelligent beings discriminate against those who differ?
- And the ending, which I won't spoil for you.
After consuming such idea feasts for a while, ordinary short stories, with their meager single foci, become rather unpalatable. ;)
Here are my other impressions.
September 14, 2022
"Don't you know that a perfect necklace has to have an ugliest diamond in it somewhere?
----Theodore Sturgeon, "The Education of Drusilla Strange"
The series The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon is a beautiful necklace, but some of the stories - and even some of the collections - are less than splendid. The Perfect Host, Volume V in that series, is, in my opinion, far from flawless.
As I have stated in other reviews on Goodreads, Theodore Sturgeon was once my favorite author. I still have great respect and affection for much of his work. But there are only a handful of stories in this book that I love and would include in my (imaginary) collection of Absolutely Essential Works of Theodore Sturgeon.
There are seventeen stories in this book, all from approximately 1947-1949. Eleven of them are, like most of Sturgeon's work, science fiction or fantasy; six are not. Some - but not all - of the stories that are not fantasy or science fiction are among the best entries in the book.
"Till Death Do Us Join" tells of a young woman and the two men in her life, Paul and Golly, who are said to be twin brothers. Paul is the soul of gentle kindness; Golly is bad-tempered and destructive. The men despise each other, which, folks in the story claim, is perfectly natural: "Most brothers - and sisters too - feel that they are a little incomplete as long as the other exists," Paul says. Later someone else says, "You've heard about the psychosis that sometimes affects twins, haven't you? The thing that makes one feel incomplete as long as the other exists?" But things are even more complicated than they first appear. A very routine story with a not very surprising surprise ending.
According to the story notes for "The Dark Goddess," this was written specifically for a contest in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Cosmopolitan wrote to Sturgeon that his story was not one of the twelve winners, but they did consider it one of the top hundred 0ut of almost six thousand submissions. Evidently the contest was to write a story about a "dark goddess figurine." Its appearance in this book was the first publication of the story.
A dying woman has lived with a man, a now-successful author, for over twenty years. The man's sister comes to the dying woman and asks her - almost begs her - to marry her brother before she dies. The sister is the most conventional of women and is appalled by the fact that her brother and this woman have lived together unmarried for all those years. This also has a surprise ending, one that Sturgeon was to use in a later, much better story, "A Crime for Llewellyn," published in 1957.
"Quietly" is another entry that was never published before it appeared in this book. It was intended to be the first chapter of a novel; evidently this was never completed. This would have been Sturgeon's first novel.
"Quietly" is the name of the central character, a young woman who has been raised in a house in the woods. Her mother died in Quietly's birth. She has been raised solely by her father, with no other human contact. She does know other people exist; she has even seen them from a distance. She has been taught to live in the woods. Her father's credo, which is to feature prominently in later Sturgeon fiction, is, "What is basic is simple. Complicated things are not basic, and are not important."
Quietly's father has told her that at some point she must leave their home for a year. One day when she is eighteen, she is outside the house naked; she returns to find every entrance locked. She realizes that this is to be the start of her year away.
She is perfectly capable of living in the woods, but she believes that her father wants her to live among other people. She comes across a small group of schoolgirls, one of whom is drowning. Quietly saves her life. And that is the end of the unfinished book.
The end-notes for this story are lengthy. Paul Williams, editor of the book, compares this fragment to a portion of Sturgeon's later novel, More Than Human. I do understand his point, but I believe that Quietly could never have turned into Miss Kew from the novel.
It is impossible to judge this fairly. There is just not enough to say what the completed book might have been like.
"The Music" is a very brief (two pages) non-supernatural horror story. The narrator is a man in a hospital, who shares some characteristics of a cat there. This is unpleasantly effective.
"Scars" is a Western tale. Two cowhands, working alone, discuss what a "gentleman" is. One says that he is one, and he tells a story explaining that. He had once come across a woman bathing naked in a creek. She was startled and fell, injuring her head. She had been living alone since her husband's death, and the cowboy took care of her, never once trying to have a sexual relationship with her. She tells him that he is a gentleman. This is another story with an unexpected ending, but a fine and fairly-prepared-for one.
Larry McCaffery, who wrote the Foreward for this book, says that his two favorite stories here are two of those which are not science fiction or fantasy. One is "Scars": the other is the very different "Die, Maestro, Die!" (Those are two of my own four favorite stories in this book.)
"Die, Maestro, Die!" is a story about a jazz ensemble, Lutch Crawford and his Gone Geese. The narrator is Fluke, "the guy who waited for ten bars of theme, and then coming in with the beat, holding the microphone just off my cheek like a whisper-singer, saying, 'Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone.' Lutch used to say old Fluke had a voice like an alto-horn with a split reed. He called it a dirty voice. It was a compliment." Fluke was considered an important part of the band. As it happens, he was also an extraordinarily ugly guy, who determined to kill Lutch Crawford.
Fluke, like many of the members of the band, is in love with Fawn, the singer with the band. But Fawn loves Lutch. Fluke states, "There shouldn't be guys like Lutch Crawford, guys that never have to wonder or worry. Them as has, gits, they say. There can't be any honest competition with a guy like that." And that, thinks Fluke, means that Lutch must die. But that proves to be much harder than Fluke ever imagined, and continues to be a problem long after the point where it should have been resolved.
Williams's end-notes discuss Sturgeon's love for music at some length. The story itself makes that obvious. This is a fine story.
Some of the science fiction and fantasy stories are quite good; some are not. "Messenger" is very bad. A slimy public relations guy plans to marry a woman he does not love, because the girl is the only child of a wealthy scientist. But the scientist is planning to change his will and leave most of his fortune to a foundation. The public relations man thinks that the scientist must die before he can arrange that. This story relies on some unlikely scientific trickery.
"Minority Report" is better but not by much. The first interstellar spaceship that left the Earth never returned; no one knew what happened to it. This is the story of the second attempt, in which a three man crew finds out what happened to their predecessor and what this means for the future of Man in Space. This, the story states, accounts for the peaceful and prosperous Earth of the twenty-eighth century, when this story is told. I am not sure that I would consider this a happy ending.
"Unite and Conquer" is a much better story. Earth is threatened by ships from Space. Two brothers, one a brilliant scientist, the other a military officer, help spearhead the effort for defense. The problem with reading this story now is that the major plot twist, has been used in other stories that I have read and has become something of a cliché. Sturgeon's story antedates two of those, of course, and it must have seemed quite effective when it was published in 1948.
I remember liking "Prodigy" a lot when I first read it. Now I think it relies too heavily on its trick ending. In a future in which mankind has fought to establish a norm for our species following the Fourth War, they must keep the human race as "a mammal which could predictably breed true - or face a future of battles between mutations which, singly and in groups, would fight holy wars on the basis of 'What I am is normal.'" But now they are experimenting with letting some Irregulars live, in hopes that they might somehow benefit humanity. Little Andi is one such Irregular, with some differences from the Norm that are causing problems.
"The Love of Heaven" is a sad and simple tale. A man going through the woods with his dog encounters something that looks like a ghostly naked man. "It wore an expression of indescribable grief. It's face spoke of loss too great to bear, of the incontrovertible end of some great, sustaining hope." The dog goes to attack the naked man; it dies. The man who had been with the dog tries to shoot the other man, who disappears.
The ghostly figure struggles to communicate. He appears to be searching for words. He explains that he did not kill the dog on purpose. He tells the Earthman that his people also came from Earth, fifteen hundred generations earlier. They had gone to another planet. His race had changed, and now they have become deadly to all life on Earth. They want to return - they need to return - but now they know that doing so will kill everything on the planet. They know that they must die instead. This is a relatively short, quite moving story.
"Farewell to Eden" is similarly bleak. This is a science fiction horror story, with the terrible decline of more than one civilization. The story is disgusting, purposively, I believe.
But the prose in the first pages of this story is wonderfully expressive, possibly with the intent of making the end of the story that much more depressing. In the following, a man is coming out of an eons-long sleep:
The light dimmed. The spot of red-blackness reappeared and grew, spreading fast - much faster than it had left him. Now it was his horizon - now its edges were an oval before him - now they had enclosed the housing above his head. With the growth of the darkness a pressure that became a pain grew into a searing agony, unbearable. All the pain and all the fear that had ever been, since the beginning of time, sat on his chest.
To move it, to get away from it, to stop that deadly agony, he breathed.
When he drew in the first breath, the darkness stopped growing. When he breathed again the oval of light widened and the pain lessened. With yet another breath, the oval widened again and stopped, and the pain became even less.
In "What Dead Men Tell," Hulon, a motion picture protectionist, had written an article, "Where is Security?," for a magazine. Afterwards, on three occasions he sees actors that he knows to be dead in the theater audience. He speaks to the first two of them, and they assure him that they can not be those actors as they are definitely dead. The third appears to be Jean Harlow, and she speaks to him at length.
At her request, Hulon expounds his life's philosophy:
"What is basic is important.
"What is basic is simple.
"So what is complicated isn't important. It might be interesting or exciting- it might even be necessary to something else that's complicated - but it isn't important. "
The woman is impressed and makes Hulon a remarkable offer. He can be given a test. If he passes it, he will receive immortality. If he fails, he will be put to death. He accepts.
Much of the story is about the test, which is very complex, as is the solution. Somehow Sturgeon does not see this as invalidating that expressed philosophy. To me, this makes the story nonsensical, even though it is "interesting and exciting."
The last paragraphs of the story seem to me to border on being offensively sexist.
"One Foot and the Grave" is one of the two stories in the book that are fantasies. The first words of the story are, "I was out in Fulgey Wood," which I believe must be meant as a reference to Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," in which
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
Thad, the narrator, is in the woods trying to find out what has turned one of his feet into a goat-like fetlock. Also in the wood is Claire, who is enamored of Thad, and has also suffered this same change. Later they will come across Dr. Ponder, the physician who is supposed to be trying to fix Claire's foot, and his assistant Luana, whom Thad finds enchanting. Somewhere out there, a local legend says, is the Camel's Grave, in which an undying creature is chained, reportedly for millennia. Add in a small creature with supernatural speed and an intellectually challenged man who sets up traps. Some of this is fun; some, including the ending, is just silly.*
One story intended to be purely comic is "The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast." This has been reprinted in English over a dozen times. A hurkle is a smallish creature living on the planet Lirht, which is "either in a different universal plane or in another island galaxy" from that of Earth. Through a series of accidents, one hurkle - "a truly beautiful blue," with six legs and a round head - is transported to Earth, where it appears in a classroom. The students and the teacher all begin to itch. The teacher reasons that creatures with six legs are insects, and one way to get rid of insects is to spray them with DDT. However, the hurkle is not an insect, and the DDT has unexpected effects. This is a good story but not, I think, as good as the many reprintings would indicate.
Another comic tale, and one of my favorite stories in this collection, is "The Martian and the Moron." I recognize the fact that this story mocks a not very bright woman. I doubt that anyone as unintelligent as she is portrayed in much of the story could have developed (or even remembered) the extraordinary coping skills with which she goes through life.
The narrator is a young man who meets a lovely woman at a party. He is immediately enthralled. She is a wonderful listener and her responses are always perfect; she agrees with the narrator about everything. The young man's father, whose wife has died, questions whether the girl is quite as perfect as his son thinks. The father himself, years before, had gone through a period in which he tried to contact life on Mars by radio, and now says that people should put their mistakes behind them and move on. But is the young woman really not as wonderful as the son believes? I find the end of this story truly funny. (An explanatory note: at one point, a character is saying something in a made-up foreign language. He says, "Nov shmoz ka smörgasbord." "Smörgåsbord" is a type of Swedish buffet and is not, I think, especially obscure. "Nov shmoz ka pop?" is a catch-phrase repeatedly used by a non-English speaking little man in Gene Ahern's 1936-1947 comic strip, The Squirrel Cage.)
I first read the story "The Perfect Host" in a Judith Merril anthology when I was a child. I loved it. I always remembered it, even though I did not recall who wrote it. I still think that this is a remarkable story. It originally appeared in Weird Tales in 1948. I have no idea what reaction the story got then. Paul Williams states, "'The Perfect Host' is a narrative told powerfully and effectively from eight different points of view, in eight very different voices - in many ways that would have enormous impact on almost every writer of science fiction and fantasy during the next five decades."
This is the longest, and by far the most complex, story in this collection. One of the "voices" is that of Theodore Sturgeon, fantasy author, who is contacted by a bodiless being that somehow uses his typewriter. The Sturgeon in the story assures the reader that the humans who had access to his typewriter either could not or would not have written the final section of this story, the part narrated by "a Thing which lives in fantasy, where true fantasy lives in the minds of men."
Before that narrator takes over, the story is told by characters in the story: a fourteen year old boy, his father, a nurse originally from England, a telephone operator, a printer whose wife committed suicide, a police officer, and Theodore Sturgeon. The creature that narrates the end of the story feeds on the thoughts and emotions of the humans in whose minds it dwells. Some minds offer wonderful vistas; others do not.
The part I remembered most clearly for years was the printer's thoughts about his life with his wife, the best host that the disembodied creature had ever had. Two portions that I had recalled (dimly, I admit) were:
He had a yellow woolen muffler tied around his waist, and the simple strip of material made all the difference between "clothes" and "costume."
and a description of food on a coffee table:
There were canapés and dainty round and rolled and triangular sandwiches; a frosty bluish beverage twinkling with effervescence in its slender pitcher; there were stars and flowers of tiny pickles, pastes and dressings, a lovely coral potato chip dip, and covered dishes full of delicate mysteries. There were also two small and vivid bowls of cut blooms, beautifully arranged.
The creature's comments about Theodore Sturgeon toward the end of the story are too cute - one of the few flaws I find here.
Two related observations:
Sturgeon's final novel, Godbody, unfinished at his death, also used multiple voices very effectively.
Anthony Boucher's 1952 story "Gandolphus" is also about a disembodied being that enters minds, but his creature experiments with far more than different dips and pickles.
I seem to have run out of room, so I will continue this is the "Comments" section.
----Theodore Sturgeon, "The Education of Drusilla Strange"
The series The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon is a beautiful necklace, but some of the stories - and even some of the collections - are less than splendid. The Perfect Host, Volume V in that series, is, in my opinion, far from flawless.
As I have stated in other reviews on Goodreads, Theodore Sturgeon was once my favorite author. I still have great respect and affection for much of his work. But there are only a handful of stories in this book that I love and would include in my (imaginary) collection of Absolutely Essential Works of Theodore Sturgeon.
There are seventeen stories in this book, all from approximately 1947-1949. Eleven of them are, like most of Sturgeon's work, science fiction or fantasy; six are not. Some - but not all - of the stories that are not fantasy or science fiction are among the best entries in the book.
"Till Death Do Us Join" tells of a young woman and the two men in her life, Paul and Golly, who are said to be twin brothers. Paul is the soul of gentle kindness; Golly is bad-tempered and destructive. The men despise each other, which, folks in the story claim, is perfectly natural: "Most brothers - and sisters too - feel that they are a little incomplete as long as the other exists," Paul says. Later someone else says, "You've heard about the psychosis that sometimes affects twins, haven't you? The thing that makes one feel incomplete as long as the other exists?" But things are even more complicated than they first appear. A very routine story with a not very surprising surprise ending.
According to the story notes for "The Dark Goddess," this was written specifically for a contest in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Cosmopolitan wrote to Sturgeon that his story was not one of the twelve winners, but they did consider it one of the top hundred 0ut of almost six thousand submissions. Evidently the contest was to write a story about a "dark goddess figurine." Its appearance in this book was the first publication of the story.
A dying woman has lived with a man, a now-successful author, for over twenty years. The man's sister comes to the dying woman and asks her - almost begs her - to marry her brother before she dies. The sister is the most conventional of women and is appalled by the fact that her brother and this woman have lived together unmarried for all those years. This also has a surprise ending, one that Sturgeon was to use in a later, much better story, "A Crime for Llewellyn," published in 1957.
"Quietly" is another entry that was never published before it appeared in this book. It was intended to be the first chapter of a novel; evidently this was never completed. This would have been Sturgeon's first novel.
"Quietly" is the name of the central character, a young woman who has been raised in a house in the woods. Her mother died in Quietly's birth. She has been raised solely by her father, with no other human contact. She does know other people exist; she has even seen them from a distance. She has been taught to live in the woods. Her father's credo, which is to feature prominently in later Sturgeon fiction, is, "What is basic is simple. Complicated things are not basic, and are not important."
Quietly's father has told her that at some point she must leave their home for a year. One day when she is eighteen, she is outside the house naked; she returns to find every entrance locked. She realizes that this is to be the start of her year away.
She is perfectly capable of living in the woods, but she believes that her father wants her to live among other people. She comes across a small group of schoolgirls, one of whom is drowning. Quietly saves her life. And that is the end of the unfinished book.
The end-notes for this story are lengthy. Paul Williams, editor of the book, compares this fragment to a portion of Sturgeon's later novel, More Than Human. I do understand his point, but I believe that Quietly could never have turned into Miss Kew from the novel.
It is impossible to judge this fairly. There is just not enough to say what the completed book might have been like.
"The Music" is a very brief (two pages) non-supernatural horror story. The narrator is a man in a hospital, who shares some characteristics of a cat there. This is unpleasantly effective.
"Scars" is a Western tale. Two cowhands, working alone, discuss what a "gentleman" is. One says that he is one, and he tells a story explaining that. He had once come across a woman bathing naked in a creek. She was startled and fell, injuring her head. She had been living alone since her husband's death, and the cowboy took care of her, never once trying to have a sexual relationship with her. She tells him that he is a gentleman. This is another story with an unexpected ending, but a fine and fairly-prepared-for one.
Larry McCaffery, who wrote the Foreward for this book, says that his two favorite stories here are two of those which are not science fiction or fantasy. One is "Scars": the other is the very different "Die, Maestro, Die!" (Those are two of my own four favorite stories in this book.)
"Die, Maestro, Die!" is a story about a jazz ensemble, Lutch Crawford and his Gone Geese. The narrator is Fluke, "the guy who waited for ten bars of theme, and then coming in with the beat, holding the microphone just off my cheek like a whisper-singer, saying, 'Lutch is here, Lutch is gone, man, gone.' Lutch used to say old Fluke had a voice like an alto-horn with a split reed. He called it a dirty voice. It was a compliment." Fluke was considered an important part of the band. As it happens, he was also an extraordinarily ugly guy, who determined to kill Lutch Crawford.
Fluke, like many of the members of the band, is in love with Fawn, the singer with the band. But Fawn loves Lutch. Fluke states, "There shouldn't be guys like Lutch Crawford, guys that never have to wonder or worry. Them as has, gits, they say. There can't be any honest competition with a guy like that." And that, thinks Fluke, means that Lutch must die. But that proves to be much harder than Fluke ever imagined, and continues to be a problem long after the point where it should have been resolved.
Williams's end-notes discuss Sturgeon's love for music at some length. The story itself makes that obvious. This is a fine story.
Some of the science fiction and fantasy stories are quite good; some are not. "Messenger" is very bad. A slimy public relations guy plans to marry a woman he does not love, because the girl is the only child of a wealthy scientist. But the scientist is planning to change his will and leave most of his fortune to a foundation. The public relations man thinks that the scientist must die before he can arrange that. This story relies on some unlikely scientific trickery.
"Minority Report" is better but not by much. The first interstellar spaceship that left the Earth never returned; no one knew what happened to it. This is the story of the second attempt, in which a three man crew finds out what happened to their predecessor and what this means for the future of Man in Space. This, the story states, accounts for the peaceful and prosperous Earth of the twenty-eighth century, when this story is told. I am not sure that I would consider this a happy ending.
"Unite and Conquer" is a much better story. Earth is threatened by ships from Space. Two brothers, one a brilliant scientist, the other a military officer, help spearhead the effort for defense. The problem with reading this story now is that the major plot twist, has been used in other stories that I have read and has become something of a cliché. Sturgeon's story antedates two of those, of course, and it must have seemed quite effective when it was published in 1948.
I remember liking "Prodigy" a lot when I first read it. Now I think it relies too heavily on its trick ending. In a future in which mankind has fought to establish a norm for our species following the Fourth War, they must keep the human race as "a mammal which could predictably breed true - or face a future of battles between mutations which, singly and in groups, would fight holy wars on the basis of 'What I am is normal.'" But now they are experimenting with letting some Irregulars live, in hopes that they might somehow benefit humanity. Little Andi is one such Irregular, with some differences from the Norm that are causing problems.
"The Love of Heaven" is a sad and simple tale. A man going through the woods with his dog encounters something that looks like a ghostly naked man. "It wore an expression of indescribable grief. It's face spoke of loss too great to bear, of the incontrovertible end of some great, sustaining hope." The dog goes to attack the naked man; it dies. The man who had been with the dog tries to shoot the other man, who disappears.
The ghostly figure struggles to communicate. He appears to be searching for words. He explains that he did not kill the dog on purpose. He tells the Earthman that his people also came from Earth, fifteen hundred generations earlier. They had gone to another planet. His race had changed, and now they have become deadly to all life on Earth. They want to return - they need to return - but now they know that doing so will kill everything on the planet. They know that they must die instead. This is a relatively short, quite moving story.
"Farewell to Eden" is similarly bleak. This is a science fiction horror story, with the terrible decline of more than one civilization. The story is disgusting, purposively, I believe.
But the prose in the first pages of this story is wonderfully expressive, possibly with the intent of making the end of the story that much more depressing. In the following, a man is coming out of an eons-long sleep:
The light dimmed. The spot of red-blackness reappeared and grew, spreading fast - much faster than it had left him. Now it was his horizon - now its edges were an oval before him - now they had enclosed the housing above his head. With the growth of the darkness a pressure that became a pain grew into a searing agony, unbearable. All the pain and all the fear that had ever been, since the beginning of time, sat on his chest.
To move it, to get away from it, to stop that deadly agony, he breathed.
When he drew in the first breath, the darkness stopped growing. When he breathed again the oval of light widened and the pain lessened. With yet another breath, the oval widened again and stopped, and the pain became even less.
In "What Dead Men Tell," Hulon, a motion picture protectionist, had written an article, "Where is Security?," for a magazine. Afterwards, on three occasions he sees actors that he knows to be dead in the theater audience. He speaks to the first two of them, and they assure him that they can not be those actors as they are definitely dead. The third appears to be Jean Harlow, and she speaks to him at length.
At her request, Hulon expounds his life's philosophy:
"What is basic is important.
"What is basic is simple.
"So what is complicated isn't important. It might be interesting or exciting- it might even be necessary to something else that's complicated - but it isn't important. "
The woman is impressed and makes Hulon a remarkable offer. He can be given a test. If he passes it, he will receive immortality. If he fails, he will be put to death. He accepts.
Much of the story is about the test, which is very complex, as is the solution. Somehow Sturgeon does not see this as invalidating that expressed philosophy. To me, this makes the story nonsensical, even though it is "interesting and exciting."
The last paragraphs of the story seem to me to border on being offensively sexist.
"One Foot and the Grave" is one of the two stories in the book that are fantasies. The first words of the story are, "I was out in Fulgey Wood," which I believe must be meant as a reference to Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," in which
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
Thad, the narrator, is in the woods trying to find out what has turned one of his feet into a goat-like fetlock. Also in the wood is Claire, who is enamored of Thad, and has also suffered this same change. Later they will come across Dr. Ponder, the physician who is supposed to be trying to fix Claire's foot, and his assistant Luana, whom Thad finds enchanting. Somewhere out there, a local legend says, is the Camel's Grave, in which an undying creature is chained, reportedly for millennia. Add in a small creature with supernatural speed and an intellectually challenged man who sets up traps. Some of this is fun; some, including the ending, is just silly.*
One story intended to be purely comic is "The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast." This has been reprinted in English over a dozen times. A hurkle is a smallish creature living on the planet Lirht, which is "either in a different universal plane or in another island galaxy" from that of Earth. Through a series of accidents, one hurkle - "a truly beautiful blue," with six legs and a round head - is transported to Earth, where it appears in a classroom. The students and the teacher all begin to itch. The teacher reasons that creatures with six legs are insects, and one way to get rid of insects is to spray them with DDT. However, the hurkle is not an insect, and the DDT has unexpected effects. This is a good story but not, I think, as good as the many reprintings would indicate.
Another comic tale, and one of my favorite stories in this collection, is "The Martian and the Moron." I recognize the fact that this story mocks a not very bright woman. I doubt that anyone as unintelligent as she is portrayed in much of the story could have developed (or even remembered) the extraordinary coping skills with which she goes through life.
The narrator is a young man who meets a lovely woman at a party. He is immediately enthralled. She is a wonderful listener and her responses are always perfect; she agrees with the narrator about everything. The young man's father, whose wife has died, questions whether the girl is quite as perfect as his son thinks. The father himself, years before, had gone through a period in which he tried to contact life on Mars by radio, and now says that people should put their mistakes behind them and move on. But is the young woman really not as wonderful as the son believes? I find the end of this story truly funny. (An explanatory note: at one point, a character is saying something in a made-up foreign language. He says, "Nov shmoz ka smörgasbord." "Smörgåsbord" is a type of Swedish buffet and is not, I think, especially obscure. "Nov shmoz ka pop?" is a catch-phrase repeatedly used by a non-English speaking little man in Gene Ahern's 1936-1947 comic strip, The Squirrel Cage.)
I first read the story "The Perfect Host" in a Judith Merril anthology when I was a child. I loved it. I always remembered it, even though I did not recall who wrote it. I still think that this is a remarkable story. It originally appeared in Weird Tales in 1948. I have no idea what reaction the story got then. Paul Williams states, "'The Perfect Host' is a narrative told powerfully and effectively from eight different points of view, in eight very different voices - in many ways that would have enormous impact on almost every writer of science fiction and fantasy during the next five decades."
This is the longest, and by far the most complex, story in this collection. One of the "voices" is that of Theodore Sturgeon, fantasy author, who is contacted by a bodiless being that somehow uses his typewriter. The Sturgeon in the story assures the reader that the humans who had access to his typewriter either could not or would not have written the final section of this story, the part narrated by "a Thing which lives in fantasy, where true fantasy lives in the minds of men."
Before that narrator takes over, the story is told by characters in the story: a fourteen year old boy, his father, a nurse originally from England, a telephone operator, a printer whose wife committed suicide, a police officer, and Theodore Sturgeon. The creature that narrates the end of the story feeds on the thoughts and emotions of the humans in whose minds it dwells. Some minds offer wonderful vistas; others do not.
The part I remembered most clearly for years was the printer's thoughts about his life with his wife, the best host that the disembodied creature had ever had. Two portions that I had recalled (dimly, I admit) were:
He had a yellow woolen muffler tied around his waist, and the simple strip of material made all the difference between "clothes" and "costume."
and a description of food on a coffee table:
There were canapés and dainty round and rolled and triangular sandwiches; a frosty bluish beverage twinkling with effervescence in its slender pitcher; there were stars and flowers of tiny pickles, pastes and dressings, a lovely coral potato chip dip, and covered dishes full of delicate mysteries. There were also two small and vivid bowls of cut blooms, beautifully arranged.
The creature's comments about Theodore Sturgeon toward the end of the story are too cute - one of the few flaws I find here.
Two related observations:
Sturgeon's final novel, Godbody, unfinished at his death, also used multiple voices very effectively.
Anthony Boucher's 1952 story "Gandolphus" is also about a disembodied being that enters minds, but his creature experiments with far more than different dips and pickles.
I seem to have run out of room, so I will continue this is the "Comments" section.
March 9, 2018
Volume five of ‘The Complete Stories’ series covers 1947-1949, before Sturgeon took a break from writing short stories to concentrate on his job at Time Inc. and work on television scripts.
In this volume we have:
Quietly
A young girl, raised in isolation by her recluse father, is sent out into the world to test her self-reliance and character.
This previously unpublished and unfinished story is thought to be the start of an uncompleted novel. Some of the plot points and themes are reflected in Sturgeon’s later novel ‘More Than Human’.
The Music
A hospitalised musician watches a cat kill a rat and muses on his music whilst taking a smoking break. It is unclear if the man is a normal hospital patient, a dangerous mental patient, or possibly even a vampire — the ending is ambiguous.
A very short, unsold story aimed at the literary magazines. Later included in Sturgeon's collection ‘E Pluribus Unicorn’.
Unite And Conquer
A cold war world on the brink of conflict must unite to fight a common enemy when three unknown spacecraft appear and threaten Earth. But does the scientist tasked with producing weapons to fight the threat know more of the enemy than he is letting on?
The Love of Heaven
A man meets a strange, ethereal alien in the woods. The alien explains that his race evolved on Earth before humans and left for another planet, but the plant life on the new planet is slowly poisoning them. They hope to return to Earth, but it appears that they are now poisonous to all Earth life.
Till Death Do Us Join
A woman falls in love with two brothers who look strangely alike, but have two utterly different personalities.
The Perfect Host
A tale of suicide, murder and disappearing bodies told from multiple viewpoints, including that of an incorporeal energy being and Sturgeon himself. Even the reader is addressed directly at the end of the story. First published in Weird Tales, this story illustrates how Sturgeon showed that more complex and interesting ways of storytelling were possible in the pulp magazines.
The Martian And The Moron
A radio ham tries to pick up signals from Mars. Years later, his son’s rather vacuous girlfriend has her mind hijacked by Martians, trying to make telepathic contact.
Die, Maestro, Die!
A member of a jazz band murders the bandleader, but he is tormented by the the idea that his victim still lives on through the band’s musical style. He becomes obsessed with finding out which other musician is giving the band the leader’s style and removing his influence forever.
The Dark Goddess
A dying woman tells why she never married her partner, despite everyone believing they were married, before revealing a secret held by a statuette of The Dark Goddess.
An unpublished story which Sturgeon submitted to a competition in Cosmopolitan magazine (he didn’t win).
Scars
A western story, in which a pair of taciturn cowboys discuss how one of them saved the life of a lone female homesteader, and why he didn’t take advantage of her loneliness, but remained a gentleman.
Messenger
A man plots to murder his prospective father-in-law, by a convoluted method involving mercury vapour in a power station, when he learns that he is giving away his fortune to charity.
Minority Report
A narrator from a far future Earth, where humans have evolved into a peaceful, non-technological, enlightened society, tells the story of humanity’s first two interstellar journeys, and why they abandoned space travel thereafter.
Prodigy
Following the Fourth War, children are raised in state crèches, where any deviations from The Norm, due to mutations, are killed, unless the mutation is beneficial. One four-year-old’s mental effect on those around him becomes too much to bear for his mother and his carers.
Farewell To Eden
Following an apocalyptic war on Earth, a plan to reboot humanity on a new planet does not go well, when the new Adam and Eve emerge from their spaceship to find a horde of savage, mutant blue aliens with tails charging at them. The aliens look suspiciously like mutated versions of a blue, humanoid couple with tails that the humans observed just before they left Earth, stepping out of a metallic structure, only to be ripped to pieces by a horde of savage, mutant humans.
One Foot And The Grave
A young couple both find that one of their feet has been transformed into a cloven hoof. They search a wood for Forbidden Valley, where stories tell of a buried supernatural being who may be able to help them.
What Dead Men Tell
A cinema projectionist undergoes an initiation test to determine if he is fit to join a group who have discovered a treatment which confers immortality on its users.
The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast
A creature from another dimension falls through a portal into our universe and proceeds to cause chaos on Earth. In its own universe, the creature becomes invisible when frightened and emits a pleasurable feeling emanation when happy. Unfortunately, in our universe the opposite occurs — when it is happy, it is invisible and its emanation causes humans to itch uncontrollably. The creature proceeds to multiply by parthenogenesis and forces mankind to flee from Earth.
Volume five gives us another set of eminently readable stories. The standouts are ‘A Perfect Host’, with its unusual technique; ‘Quietly’, which does not read like an unfinished story and seems to me to be eminently saleable; ‘Prodigy’, with a neat, twist ending, and ‘One Foot And The Grave’, which improved as it went along, despite a tad too much “As you know, Bob…” exposition near the beginning. The rest of the stories are a mixture of typical pulp magazine tales, a quite decent western, an unsuccessful literary story and the humorous and much-anthologised Hurkle tale.
Not the best volume in the series so far, but still recommended as a decent Sturgeon collection.
In this volume we have:
Quietly
A young girl, raised in isolation by her recluse father, is sent out into the world to test her self-reliance and character.
This previously unpublished and unfinished story is thought to be the start of an uncompleted novel. Some of the plot points and themes are reflected in Sturgeon’s later novel ‘More Than Human’.
The Music
A hospitalised musician watches a cat kill a rat and muses on his music whilst taking a smoking break. It is unclear if the man is a normal hospital patient, a dangerous mental patient, or possibly even a vampire — the ending is ambiguous.
A very short, unsold story aimed at the literary magazines. Later included in Sturgeon's collection ‘E Pluribus Unicorn’.
Unite And Conquer
A cold war world on the brink of conflict must unite to fight a common enemy when three unknown spacecraft appear and threaten Earth. But does the scientist tasked with producing weapons to fight the threat know more of the enemy than he is letting on?
The Love of Heaven
A man meets a strange, ethereal alien in the woods. The alien explains that his race evolved on Earth before humans and left for another planet, but the plant life on the new planet is slowly poisoning them. They hope to return to Earth, but it appears that they are now poisonous to all Earth life.
Till Death Do Us Join
A woman falls in love with two brothers who look strangely alike, but have two utterly different personalities.
The Perfect Host
A tale of suicide, murder and disappearing bodies told from multiple viewpoints, including that of an incorporeal energy being and Sturgeon himself. Even the reader is addressed directly at the end of the story. First published in Weird Tales, this story illustrates how Sturgeon showed that more complex and interesting ways of storytelling were possible in the pulp magazines.
The Martian And The Moron
A radio ham tries to pick up signals from Mars. Years later, his son’s rather vacuous girlfriend has her mind hijacked by Martians, trying to make telepathic contact.
Die, Maestro, Die!
A member of a jazz band murders the bandleader, but he is tormented by the the idea that his victim still lives on through the band’s musical style. He becomes obsessed with finding out which other musician is giving the band the leader’s style and removing his influence forever.
The Dark Goddess
A dying woman tells why she never married her partner, despite everyone believing they were married, before revealing a secret held by a statuette of The Dark Goddess.
An unpublished story which Sturgeon submitted to a competition in Cosmopolitan magazine (he didn’t win).
Scars
A western story, in which a pair of taciturn cowboys discuss how one of them saved the life of a lone female homesteader, and why he didn’t take advantage of her loneliness, but remained a gentleman.
Messenger
A man plots to murder his prospective father-in-law, by a convoluted method involving mercury vapour in a power station, when he learns that he is giving away his fortune to charity.
Minority Report
A narrator from a far future Earth, where humans have evolved into a peaceful, non-technological, enlightened society, tells the story of humanity’s first two interstellar journeys, and why they abandoned space travel thereafter.
Prodigy
Following the Fourth War, children are raised in state crèches, where any deviations from The Norm, due to mutations, are killed, unless the mutation is beneficial. One four-year-old’s mental effect on those around him becomes too much to bear for his mother and his carers.
Farewell To Eden
Following an apocalyptic war on Earth, a plan to reboot humanity on a new planet does not go well, when the new Adam and Eve emerge from their spaceship to find a horde of savage, mutant blue aliens with tails charging at them. The aliens look suspiciously like mutated versions of a blue, humanoid couple with tails that the humans observed just before they left Earth, stepping out of a metallic structure, only to be ripped to pieces by a horde of savage, mutant humans.
One Foot And The Grave
A young couple both find that one of their feet has been transformed into a cloven hoof. They search a wood for Forbidden Valley, where stories tell of a buried supernatural being who may be able to help them.
What Dead Men Tell
A cinema projectionist undergoes an initiation test to determine if he is fit to join a group who have discovered a treatment which confers immortality on its users.
The Hurkle Is A Happy Beast
A creature from another dimension falls through a portal into our universe and proceeds to cause chaos on Earth. In its own universe, the creature becomes invisible when frightened and emits a pleasurable feeling emanation when happy. Unfortunately, in our universe the opposite occurs — when it is happy, it is invisible and its emanation causes humans to itch uncontrollably. The creature proceeds to multiply by parthenogenesis and forces mankind to flee from Earth.
Volume five gives us another set of eminently readable stories. The standouts are ‘A Perfect Host’, with its unusual technique; ‘Quietly’, which does not read like an unfinished story and seems to me to be eminently saleable; ‘Prodigy’, with a neat, twist ending, and ‘One Foot And The Grave’, which improved as it went along, despite a tad too much “As you know, Bob…” exposition near the beginning. The rest of the stories are a mixture of typical pulp magazine tales, a quite decent western, an unsuccessful literary story and the humorous and much-anthologised Hurkle tale.
Not the best volume in the series so far, but still recommended as a decent Sturgeon collection.
October 20, 2007
theodore sturgeon is one of the best short story writers in science fiction ever, howver, his frank discussions of sexual taboos have helped keep him fairly obscure, even to science fiction fans. vonnegeuts kilgore trout was loosely based upon sturgeon, except sturgeon could actually write.
February 16, 2011
Quite the fine writer, this Mr. Sturgeon was. I enjoyed the patient unfolding of the story and the twist at the end. It had me asking, "Can he do this?"
Yes he did.
And that's a fine way to discover a tale well told.
Yes he did.
And that's a fine way to discover a tale well told.
November 4, 2007
Five stars for these stories: 'The Martian and the Moron'; 'Unite and Conquer'; 'One Foot and the Grave'; and 'Die, Maestro, Die!'
December 14, 2022
Sturgeon mi je super oduvijek, u ovoj zbirci su mi odlične:
Quietly (nažalost nije dovršena, rj trebao je biti roman)
Perfect Host (odlična ppriča o događaju prepričanom iz gledišta nekoliko likova)
Love of Heaven
Martian and Moron (odlično)
Dark Godess
Music
Die Maestro
Quietly (nažalost nije dovršena, rj trebao je biti roman)
Perfect Host (odlična ppriča o događaju prepričanom iz gledišta nekoliko likova)
Love of Heaven
Martian and Moron (odlično)
Dark Godess
Music
Die Maestro
May 15, 2024
I wouldn't say all of the stories are winners and amazing, but there's something I truly love about his use of the English language, and the versatility of the voices he can give to his narrators and characters, without forgetting how imaginative some of these stories can be. What's more, one of the short stories I enjoyed the least while reading it keeps sticking with me, and I just keep thinking about it and the themes it tackles. I believe I will have to read more of TS' works.
April 10, 2013
Note: As with
Thunder and Roses
, the previous volume, the artwork on my hardcover copy doesn't match the artwork given here.
Amazon will be releasing the Kindle edition on 2013-04-16. I can hardly wait! (The hardcover is wonderful, but at this stage in my life, I find ebooks far more convenient and readable.)
Amazon will be releasing the Kindle edition on 2013-04-16. I can hardly wait! (The hardcover is wonderful, but at this stage in my life, I find ebooks far more convenient and readable.)
August 13, 2016
Read this book on my Kindle fire. I think I checked it out from library or bought it from amazon.com. Weird but good. Many thanks to author Cliff McNish for turning me on to Sturgeon. Looking forward to reading "More than Human" by Sturgeon, as soon as I can find it.
January 8, 2021
Sturgeon’s humor comes alive in short story “The Hurkle is a Happy Beast”.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews