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4

Sturgeon

The most disreputable thing about science fiction is not its nuts and bolts side—its test tube and transistor aspect—nor even its much decried “bad writing” or “impoverished characterization.” They can always be dealt with as demands to regard the text at one degree of resolution rather than another. But what disconcerts a modern critic, leaves this one mumbling and that one mute, is science fiction’s unabashed mysticism. Ready to deal with the ordered (at whatever level of order we have been able to ascertain) utterances of an artist, suddenly we hear clanging from the rocks the brazen tones of the prophet. By having their feet more firmly planted in an understanding of modern science and technology than, say, the run of college English teachers, SF writers are forever using their understanding as a springboard into areas quite outside speculation on future scientific developments (where, despite the spate of college SF courses, most English teachers still expect them to go), into those arational areas about which, so critical philosophy suggests and positivist philosophy insists, nothing can be known—or at least talked about with any clarity.

The preface to the first edition of Leon Brillouin’s Science and Information Theory is dated January 1956. A recent game theory bibliography includes both popular and technical works from 1953 and 1955. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was first published in 1948 (and Wiener’s own popularization of it, The Human Use of Human Beings, in 1954). And although the ingenious dance code by which one bee communicates the location of a pollen source to its fellows had not yet been discovered, the pages of Scientific American were frequently devoted to articles on various hive insects; wonder at their amazing organizational powers echoed from every paragraph, and even the most staid observer, back then, was willing to admit that insects seemed to possess something much like telepathy—whatever something like telepathy that wasn’t might have been. Technologically, this is what was in the air in those pre-Little Rock, pre-Sputnik days of the middle ’50s, just before Theodore Sturgeon’s “To Marry Medusa,” and, a year later, its expanded version, The Cosmic Rape, were written. Indeed, both the white demonstrators against integration at the Arkansas high school and the Russian launching of the first satellite were to be announced in a single radio newscast one September afternoon in 1957, almost a year to the day before I stretched out on my bed with the slender Dell paperback of The Cosmic Rape, reading of Africa, Rome, and that unnamed though oddly Midwestern sounding city, home of Gurlick and Al and Charlotte and Dimity and Paul and Dr. Langley.

And what we find on the surface of The Cosmic Rape (and its earlier novelette version, “To Marry Medusa”)¹ is an image of that early ’50s concept of information (one paragraph, the last on page 114 of the novel and the last on page 193 of the novelette version, adumbrates the newer concept of information—information definable solely by means of difference—that has gradually swamped the earlier concept over the last twenty years), information composed of discrete data, quantifiable, locable, maximizable, each with its own value content, some of which values and locations, to achieve a given end, may even have to be sacrificed (exactly the term a strategist in a two-person, zero-sum game would use)—as vivid, as intense an image of a mechanistic, optimally ideal information field as any to be found in the range of ’50s fiction, science or mundane. (That image is almost the exact inverse of the one presented 130 years before in the cataclysmic final third of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, in which the various participants, in an equally complex pattern, are working at cross-purposes so absolute that almost any communication between any two parties would have avoided enormous amounts of death, destruction, and misery.) Yet as we are contemplating this beautiful, ordered, artfully designed image of the perfect carrying out of the perfect plan, of information maximized to an unimaginable efficacy against an unimaginably powerful menace, something happens: the brazen accents sound. Suddenly the subject is revealed to be what many of us must have suspected all along. This is not a story about information. It is a fable about knowing—about knowing the Self, about knowing the Other; it is as impassioned and precise a panegyric as any by Gurdjieff or Castaneda—and, given its dithyrambic moments, markedly more literate than either. Yet despite the passion, the literacy, the precision, a critic presented with the text is put in an uncomfortable position. Although we begin with the analysis of a novel, suddenly we veer dangerously close to the interpretation of scripture. But with all this as prologue, we must fix a starting point for our exploration of Sturgeon’s science fiction. That point, I feel, is best made as an assertion:

The corpus of science fiction produced by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date.

Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absorbed into the particular practice of SF writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically. (I use the terms in the same sense that, on a trip to Norway, allowed the young Ludwig Wittgenstein to jot in his notebook, for the 24th of July, 1916, a remark that was to become part of proposition 6.421 of his Tractatus: “Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same”—the very sense, I presume, that allowed the young Georg Lukács to write, only a year before in his Theory of the Novel, that fiction is “the only art form in which the artist’s ethical position is the aesthetic problem.”)

And if Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956) is regarded by many as the single greatest SF novel and therefore minimally outshines Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), it is because Bester’s book is a novel, whereas Sturgeon’s is three connected novellas, two of which are superb and the third of which is merely fascinating.

Indeed, to talk about science fiction with any sophistication, especially that science fiction which flowered in the ’40s and ’50s, we must locate co-equal forms. One, near-future science fiction, posits a familiar landscape, familiar social patterns, and familiar social surfaces. Into it the author intrudes one or a limited number of marvels: the game is to explore the resultant alterations in behavior. (In The Cosmic Rape the intruding marvel is a tiny spore—“It looked like a boiled raisin, or worse” [pp. 8–9 (152)].) And before the game is over, the alteration is complete. The other form, far-future science fiction, begins the game with a landscape where behavior patterns, social texture, and societal workings are already highly altered. Here the point is to recognize, as the text proceeds, which patterns of behavior—or, in the more sophisticated versions of this form, which abstracts of these behavior patterns—remain constant despite reorganization. In this form of science fiction the question is this: What is the human aspect of the structure of behavior—no matter how much the behavioral content or context alters?

The newcomer to science fiction (often a newcomer to science as well) is usually more at home with the near-future sort. The long-time reader, especially one at home with the technical underpinnings that support the multiple distortions of landscape in the far-future variety, often finds the second type the greater intellectual challenge. But intellect is only one element of fiction.

When near-future science fiction fails, we usually dismiss the failure as “a gimmick story.” When far-future science fiction fails, we usually call its degenerate form “space opera.” But if we accept the division and acknowledge the fine and faulty examples on both sides, then we can go on to say that Sturgeon is the master of near-future science fiction, whereas Bester’s The Stars My Destination is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the far-future variety.

Let us compare the science fiction of these two writers before we turn to an analysis of The Cosmic Rape.

Bester was never very prolific—at least not by the commercial expectations that prompted the work of many, if not most, of his SF contemporaries. Till recently, his work in the genre consisted of two novels and two story collections. In 1975, after a hiatus of nearly two decades, a third novel joined the corpus, along with another half-dozen stories. The most recent reprint of his (almost) complete short fiction (Starlight) is notorious for rewriting. His most influential novel, The Stars My Destination, is just as mystical as any by Sturgeon (or Heinlein). The dramatic climax of the book, the famous synesthesia episode, is a dramatization of the Rimbaldean dérèglement de tout les sens—a mystical process if there ever was one. And the actual conclusion of the book, a chapter later, is mystical to the point of incoherence.

Like Sturgeon’s, almost all Bester’s work achieves a perfection of one kind or another. The worst one can say of Bester is that sometimes the perfection striven for is not—for a given reader at a given time—a very interesting one. In those cases the effect is rather as if the perfect pattern, whether in the elegant antithesis of a sentence or the turn and recovery of a plot, has been etched too precisely, too clearly, so that there is simply very little resonance. The single term for the effect is probably brittle. Yet when a Bester piece does work it is somehow all passion, fire, flamboyance, and endlessly recomplicated invention. And exactly how one becomes the other is a mystery, for the long-time reader and rereader of Bester will finally have to admit: a disturbing proportion of Bester’s short fictions, although they may seem a little dull on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, clearly seem among his best on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.