Distinguished by an elfin quality that defies analysis and imitation, the stories of Theodore Sturgeon have, over the past decade, made an important and irreplaceable contribution to modern fantasy. Whether writing an outstanding science-fiction tale such as "Microcosmic God" or spine-chilling fantasy as in "It", Sturgeon's tales breathe with this atmosphere that only he can create. Some years ago, when a few stories appeared under the names of E. Waldo Hunter and E. Hunter Waldo, readers made haste to write to the editor, identifying them as Sturgeon's work.
Ted Sturgeon's tales have been widely anthologized and his story, "Bianca's Hands", won the Amalgamated Press Literary Prize in England after appearing in the British ARGOSY.
Unlisted in the bibliography are about forty stories sold to the Mc Clure Newspaper syndicate in 1938 and 1939.
Ted is currently living in New York, where he is employed by TIME, INC. And now, we'll let Ted Sturgeon take over himself.
I stand about so high and am not fat yet, but better watch it because my wife cooks like crazy. My rib-cage contacts the top of my hip-bone when I stand up straight, I discovered on paying $190 to Arthur Murray to learn the rhumba. I have written stories under my own name and those of E. Hunter Waldo and E. Waldo Hunter, the latter two for the same reason that Geo Smith's sequel, "Trouble Times Two" preceded his original story, "Trouble". They say I make puns, which I deny; it's only that typos creep in and I have an aural word sense. I'll demonstrate that later; it means that what I read and what I write, I hear. And anyway, I come by puns honestly. My grandfather was driving along a Canadian highway once and saw a sign, "GINGER BEAR SOLD HERE". "Ah," breathed Granddad, "Must be their own bruin." And I have yet to top my mother's classic description of the immortal Josephine Baker's zany, sexy performance as an "Afro-dizzy-act"....
I was born on Staten Island, which is populated mostly by the dead and people from Brooklyn. (So help me, to this day you can get lost in the woods over there, tho it's inside New York City limits.) This birth occurred on 2/26/18, according to the records. I went for years to a veddy social Staten Island private school, two weeks to a public school, thence to Philadelphia where I was two weeks in the fifth grade and got shoved into the sixth. This one I completed, and then went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania where in a year I learned how to smoke, drink, gamble, swear and swim. After six weeks in the eighth grade in summer school, I was dumped into an enormous education factory in Philadelphia at the age of twelve. I weighed 95 pounds and was utterly bewildered, but anyway, I was a high school student. I was a High school student for six solid years. I never took a subject I didn't flunk at one time or another. Like someone named Robin English, I was released. That was in '36.
Met a girl there and said I'd marry her. In 1940 I did. Unmarried her again in '45. Good people. Married again last September -- Marry Mair. She's good people too. Very patient. Sings like all god's angels.
I don't seem to be able to recall the process of living my life in a particularly consecutive order. Things happened at various times. I put in six months as a cadet on a training ship. She had been with Dewey at Manila. She was 135 feet at the waterline and had 160' masts. She had steel sides and a wooden bottom, and a loosefooted rig because her sails were so near the deck that booms would have swept off the deck housing. We tacked her by taking in all sail and dragging it across the deck by hand while we turned her with the engines. She was painted all white and burned coal. I didn't like her much. There were 173 people aboard. After that I cut loose and went to sea on my own account -- coastwise freighters, then tankers.
I worked in a glass factory once, taking silver off mirrors with fuming acid. Drove a tractor-trailer truck between Philadelphia and Albany. Worked in an oil refinery, hoeing grass between tanks in a storage farm. Had a job once with a crew who came north by train and bought Model A Fords all the way back to Greensboro. Pulled rope with a circus -- the Al G. Barnes show in Canada. Ran a luxury resort in Jamaica. It was wonderful. We had 17 servants, and except for weekends we had them mostly to ourselves. During the war I operated 17 quarters and barracks, three messhalls and a food warehouse for the Army, which qualified me to run the specialized lubrication disbursement, from which I naturally began to operate heavy equipment. For that I got flown to Puerto Rico to run bulldozer and power shovel for the Navy. I loved it, tho ten hours a day, seven days a week for nearly three years makes you sort of lose track of things. But if you know anyone with an inferiority complex you can cure him by perching him in the saddle of a Caterpillar D-8 for a few months. When the day arrives that behind all that Diesel and racket, you suddenly are aware that your nerve-endings are up there on the blind side of your blade, you gain something that you'll never lose. It does to you what marriage does, in that respect. It doesn't matter whether you ever pull another steering clutch. It's a thing that's built.
Meant to mention that I had a rugged bout with acute rheumatic fever when I was 15. It left me with a 16% enlargement. My heart used to push out between my ribs when it beat, which for a while it did reluctantly. It got better year after year until now only a specialist can detect the slight squish in the beat if I lie in a certain position after heavy exercize. But it kept me out of the Army during the war. Cardiac cripple. They wouldn't let me man a typewriter, let alone an armchair. But 70 hours a week under that sun was fine. Yours not to reason why .....
I played guitar with a square-dance orchestra once, in the Poconos. They had a 35-foot platform at that resort. I used to do 2 ½ somersaults off it. Once someone put an overflow board in the dam during the night and the lake rose 18 inches and I didn't know it. I hit the water face first and flattened my eyeballs. Couldn't see a thing for a whole day.
I lived in Brooklyn for a while with an Englishman who was writing confessions. He prided himself on being a word-rate writer who didn't give a damn for art. I did, at the time. But I meant no insult at all when I said casually that he was a hack. He got no end insulted. So to settle the argument we looked it up in his dictionary which was an English publication. In it I found one of the most pathetic lines I have ever read. It said, "HACK, n. A literary drudge; as one who compiles dictionaries."
That volume was the one which supplied me with a really delightful definition. "HEMIONUS," it said, "The south African wild donkey, or half-ass." I've wondered ever since whether a hemionus uses a demijohn.
I shipped out one time with a guy called Kelley. He's around in some of my copy. He was one of the most amazing people I have ever met. He's in Atlanta now, I think, but he was like one of those creatures JWC's always trying to goad us into writing about, which thinks as well as a man, but not like a man. I was sitting in a honkytonk in Port Arthur, Texas one night. There was a girl called Bernice who had taken quite a shine to Kelley and they'd been pretty thick at the south end of our trips. Bernice had just gotten wind of the fact that Kelley was sporting a girl down the street at Pete's Place, and she didn't like it at all. So when Kelley walked in, Bernice reached behind her and pulled an electric fan off the shelf and threw it at his head with the same motion. It was a big electric fan and it didn't have any guard on it. Kelley ducked it, seeming to move much moreslowly than he actually did. He didn't move his feet, but sort of bent his head aside and turned his shoulders and let the fan go by. It hit the wall and chewed up the partition. Nobody said anything. Now anyone else in the world who believed in do-as-you-would-be-done-by would have thrown the fan back at the girl. Not Kelley. He walked over and picked her up over his head and threw her at the fan. She slid on out the door and down the stairs. Kelley went out after her, taking his time, stepped around her where she lay halfway down the flight, and went on back to Pete's place.
I was profoundly impressed -- not by what he'd done, but by the way he thought. I've used that kind of reversal in plot treatments many times. It's one thing to turn front to back. It's something else again, just as logical but much more rare, to make a mirror image.
I'd rather be a writer than a human being. Wrote a story for WEIRD once and put a lot into it. It was a real katharsis and it did me good. A few days after it was published I got a letter from South Africa. There was a girl in the story who died, and this letter contained a poem which was epitaph for her. As poetry it was so-so. But I had to reread it a half-dozen times to find out why it struck me as vaguely familiar. Then I got it. It was composed entirely of lines picked up here and there thru the story, with only an occasional slight alteration to fit the form.
Thoughts are cloud-shapes, formless, without any size or any particular hue. But code them -- make words of them -- and they take on some fraction of what they mean to you. Recode these words into typescript; they're read, printed, proofed, distributed. Suppose, then another mind a half a world away decodes that type into words and those words into thoughts and from that multiple fractionation finds it in him not only to create, but to recreate some of the particular pulse-pound and gland-squirt that went into it .... that makes me humble. I'm ashamed of that story. I wish I'd polished it until it was worth having that effect on someone. You can kid around about the writing racket from now till then, but you can't get away from the fact that if writing can do a thing like that, a writer undertakes a truly awesome responsibility.
I mentioned writing as an art. For myself, at least, I've settled the question of art vs. commerce to my own satisfaction. It's quite simple. Great art is judged by the things which we call classics. (Sometimes the judgement is by harmony and sometimes by contrast, but the scale of values is the same in either case.) But a classic is by definition something which has achieved wide public recognition for its innate excellence. Therefore a classic is a good commercial property. (The fact that it may become so after the death of the artist is utterly immaterial.) So -- good art is good commercial, and the artist need have no quarrel with himself for setting a word rate (or picture-price, or symphonic commision.)
But anyone who quotes me as saying that good commercial is automatically good art wasn't paying attention, and besides has a hole in his head.
I said at the start that my puns and perhaps a suspicion of what's called a style have their source in the fact that I hear what I read. I hear what I write, and I don't think it hurts what comes out. There are times when the mood of narration dictates a more conscious approach to the words that you use and their order. It's easy to prove that the treatment's unseen, but it yields an incredible smoothness of flow to your work.
There probably wouldn't be one reader in a hundred thousand who would realize that the above paragraph is written most laboriously in anapestic feet; that is, there are two unaccented syllables followed by a strong accent, but with most of the sentences beginning and ending in the middle of the foot so that the thing doesn't get sing-song. This happens to be my prime kick in writing. It's a thing you don't dare do very often; but when you apply it lightly and briefly, you find yourself woven into your copy with a completeness that can't be approached in any other way that I know of. But be careful; the trick's much more addictive than opium. There are a zillion different kinds of feet you can use. The largest charge of it I ever put into a story was in one of my WEIRD TALES, or proving grounds, yarns, when I used a monster that changed its meter every time it changed its mood. That went on for three thousand words. Have fun, chillun.
I think that is about enough. I've spent more time talking about what I think than what I ever did. That's probably because I'd rather know other people by what they think than what they do, or have done, or where they came from.
Then there was this girl who was so cultured she gave yogurt ....
---- Theodore Sturgeon
SCIENCE-FICTION and FANTASY STORIES by THEODORE STURGEON
Title........................................................................................Magazine................................................Date
Abreaction..............................................................................Weird
Tales............................................July 1948
Artnan
Process.......................................................................Astounding
S F.......................................June 1941
Bianca's
Hands......................................................................Argosy
(British)......................................May 1947
Biddiver.................................................................................Astounding
S F.......................................Aug. 1941
Biddiver.................................................................................Astounding
(British)...............................Aug. 1941
Blabbermouth........................................................................Amazing
Stories......................................Feb. 1947
Bones, The (with/James H.
Beard)........................................Unknown
Worlds...................................Aug. 1943
Bones, The (with/James H.
Beard)........................................Unknown
(British)..................................May 1944
Brat........................................................................................Unknown
Worlds....................................Dec. 1941
Brat........................................................................................Unknown
(British)...................................Spr. 1949
Butyl and the
Breather...........................................................Astounding
S F........................................Oct. 1940
Butyl and the
Breather...........................................................Astounding
(British)................................Oct. 1940
Cargo.....................................................................................Unknown.................................................Nov.
1940
Cargo.....................................................................................Unknown
(British)..................................Nov. 1940
Cellmate................................................................................Weird
Tales..............................................Jan. 1947
Chromium Helmet,
The.........................................................Astounding
S F.......................................June 1946
Chromium Helmet,
The.........................................................Astounding
(British)...............................Dec. 1946
Clock,
The..............................................................................Calling
All Boys.............................................1948
Completely
Automatic............................................................Astounding
S F......................................Feb. 1941
Completely
Automatic............................................................Astounding
(British)..............................Feb. 1941
Deadly
Ratio..........................................................................Weird
Tales.............................................Jan. 1948
Derm
Fool..............................................................................Unknown...............................................Mar.
1940
Derm
Fool..............................................................................Unknown
(British).................................Mar. 1940
Die Maestro
Die.....................................................................Dime
Detective......................................May 1949
Dreaming Jewels,
The............................................................Fantastic
Adventures..............................Feb. 1950
Ether Breather
.......................................................................Astounding
S F.......................................Sep. 1939
Fluffy
....................................................................................Weird
Tales............................................Mar. 1947
God In a Garden,
A...............................................................Unknown.................................................Oct.
1939
God In a Garden,
A...............................................................Unknown
(British)..................................Oct. 1939
Golden Egg,
The...................................................................Unknown................................................Aug.
1941
Golden Egg,
The...................................................................Unknown
(British)..................................Mar. 1942
Green-Eyed Monster,
The....................................................Unknown
Worlds.....................................June 1943
Green-Eyed Monster,
The....................................................Unknown
(British)...................................Aut. 1944
Hag Seleen, The (with/James H.
Beard)..............................Unknown
Worlds.....................................Dec. 1942
Hag Seleen, The (with/James H.
Beard)..............................Unknown
(British)....................................Feb. 1943
Haunt,
The............................................................................Unknown..................................................Apr.
1941
Haunt,
The............................................................................Unknown
(British)....................................July 1941
He
Shuttles...........................................................................Unknown..................................................Apr.
1940
He
Shuttles...........................................................................Unknown
(British)....................................Spr. 1948
Hurkle is a Happy Beast,
The..............................................Magazine of
Fantasy..................................Fall 1949
It
..........................................................................................Unknown..................................................Aug.
1940
It...........................................................................................Unknown
(British)...................................Aug. 1940
It...........................................................................................Argosy
(British).....................................Jan. 4, 1947
Jumper,
The.........................................................................Unknown
Worlds.....................................Aug. 1942
Jumper, The.........................................................................Unknown
(British)....................................Spr. 1945
Killdozer!.............................................................................Astounding
S F........................................Nov. 1944
Killdozer!.............................................................................Astounding
(British)................................May 1945
Largo....................................................................................Fantastic
Adventures................................July 1947
Love of Heaven,
The...........................................................Astounding
S F........................................Nov. 1948
Martian and the Moron,
The...............................................Weird
Tales.............................................Mar. 1949
Maturity...............................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Feb. 1947
Medusa................................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Feb. 1942
Medusa................................................................................Astounding
(British)................................Mar. 1942
Memorial
............................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Apr. 1946
Memory...............................................................................Thrilling
Wonder Stories..........................June 1947
Messenger...........................................................................Thrilling
Wonder Stories...........................Feb. 1949
Mewhu's Jet
.......................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Nov. 1946
Mewhu's
Jet.......................................................................Astounding
(British).................................June 1947
Microcosmic
God...............................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Apr. 1941
Microcosmic
God...............................................................Astounding
(British)................................ Apr. 1941
(El Dios
Microcosmico).....................................................Los
Cuentos Fantasticos................................No. 18
Minority
Report..................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................June 1949
One Foot and the
Grave.....................................................Weird
Tales...............................................Sep. 1949
Perfect Host,
The...............................................................Weird
Tales..............................................Nov. 1948
Poker Face
.........................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Mar. 1941
Poker
Face..........................................................................Astounding
(British).................................Mar. 1941
Prodigy................................................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Apr. 1949
Prodigy................................................................................Astounding
(British).................................Sep. 1949
Professor's Teddy Bear,
The..............................................Weird
Tales..............................................Mar. 1948
Purple Light, The................................................................Senior
Scholastic......................................Sep. 1948
Scars....................................................................................Zane
Grey's Mystery Mag................................1949
Shottle
Bop.........................................................................Unknown...................................................Feb.
1941
Shottle
Bop.........................................................................Unknown
(British)....................................Feb. 1941
Sky Was Full of Ships, The
...............................................Thrilling Wonder
Stories..........................June 1947
Smoke.................................................................................Calling
All Boys...............................................1948
That
Low.............................................................................Famous
Fantastic Mysteries.....................Oct. 1948
There is no
Defense............................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Feb. 1948
There is no
Defense............................................................Astounding
(British)................................June 1948
Thunder and
Roses.............................................................Astounding
S F........................................Nov. 1947
Tiny and the
Monster.........................................................Astounding
S F.........................................May 1947
Two Percent
Inspiration.....................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Oct. 1941
Unite and
Conquer.............................................................Astounding
S F.........................................Oct. 1947
Until Death Do Us
Join......................................................Shock
Well
Spiced........................................................................Zane
Grey's Mystery Mag...............................1949
Wham
Bop.........................................................................Varsity..............................................................1948
What Dead Men
Tell.........................................................Astounding
S F........................................Nov. 1949
WITHOUT SORCERY (Book of shorts)..........................PRIME
PRESS, Philadelphia...........................1948
Yesterday Was
Monday....................................................Unknown..................................................June
1941
Yesterday Was
Monday....................................................Unknown
(British)...................................Sum. 1941
Yesterday Was
Monday....................................................From
Unknown Worlds.....................................1948
Stories under the name of E. WALDO HUNTER
Nightmare
Island..............................................................Unknown...................................................June
1941
The Purple
Light...............................................................Astounding
S F..........................................June 1941
Story under the name of E. HUNTER WALDO
Ultimate Egoist, The........................................................Unknown...................................................Feb. 1941
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated May 16, 2001. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.