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Utopia nails sf9/6/2023 ![]() The central titles are Without Sorcery (coll 1948 cut vt Not Without Sorcery 1961), E Pluribus Unicorn (coll 1953), A Way Home (coll 1955 with two stories cut 1956 with three stories cut, vt Thunder and Roses 1957), Caviar (coll 1955), A Touch of Strange (coll 1958 with two stories cut 1959), Aliens 4 (coll 1959), Beyond (coll 1960), Sturgeon in Orbit (coll 1964), The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (coll 1972), The Stars Are the Styx (coll 1979) and The Golden Helix (coll 1979). In the late 1940s and the 1950s Sturgeon came into his full stride, and almost all his collections sort and resort this material. Along with A E van Vogt, Robert A Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Sturgeon was a central contributor to and shaper of John W Campbell Jr's so-called Golden Age of SF, though less comfortably than his colleagues, as even in those early years, while obeying the generic commands governing the creation of Campbellian technological or Hard SF, he was also writing sexually threatening, explorative tales, which he found difficult to publish domestically an adult tale like "Bianca's Hands" (May 1947 Argosy), for instance, never appeared in an American magazine. ![]() In those first three years, however, he produced more than twenty-five stories, all in Astounding and Unknown, using the pseudonyms E Waldo Hunter or E Hunter Waldo on occasions when he had two stories in an issue several of the twenty-five remain among his best known, including It (August 1940 Unknown 1948 chap) and "Microcosmic God" (April 1941 Astounding). Sturgeon was, in fact, initially less comfortable with Astounding Science-Fiction than with Unknown, whose remit was moderately less restrictive, and that magazine's demise may have had something to do with his first departure from the field. Of his approximately 200 stories, a very high proportion are as successful as he was allowed to be in a field not well designed, during his active years, to accommodate sf tales told with raw passion. He had, in other words, a binary career: either he was writing at a high pitch or he was writing nothing. Certainly there can be no denying the green force that shoots through even the silliest Pulp-magazine conceits to which he put his mind, or the sense of achieved and joyful tour de force generated by his best work. Given that all of Sturgeon's best work somehow or other moves from alienation to some form of Transcendent community, it might – crassly – be suggested that, in his own life, it was story-writing itself which represented that blissful movement towards acceptance and resolution which makes so many of his tales so emotionally fulfilling, and that silence for him was a form of exile. Then, for the last twenty-five years of his life, except for two or three short periods of renewed flow, he was relatively silent. The next fifteen years saw him produce, in an almost constant flood, virtually all the remaining stories and novels for which he is remembered. After beginning to publish sf with "Ether Breather" (September 1939 Astounding) he remained active as a member of the small band of Genre SF writers for only a few years before he abruptly stopped producing he then spent half a decade abroad, variously employed, before returning to his primary career in 1946. ![]() ![]() ![]() Certainly Sturgeon early suffered or entered into several exiles: illness cut him off from any chance he might become a gymnast when still a teenager he went to sea, where he spent three years during which he made his first fiction sales – beginning in 1937 – to McClure's syndicate for newspaper publication. (1918-1985) Working name of US author born Edward Hamilton Waldo in New York City, later adopting his stepfather's surname and taking on a new first name Argyll ( 1993 chap) prints a long anguished letter Sturgeon wrote to his stepfather, plus an autobiographical essay from 1965, both of which more than confirm the hints of emotional turmoil implied by these name changes partner of Jayne Tannehill 1976-1985. ![]()
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