from science fiction by
Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon

This page:
Introduction to Sturgeon in Orbit
Extrapolation
The Wages of Synergy
Make Room for Me
The Heart

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Introduction to Sturgeon in Orbit

Copyright © 1964 by Theodore Sturgeon

As a writer who has been involved in films, TV, radio, books and magazines, and who has therefore encountered many different kinds of editors, I depose and say that the most important communion a writer can have is between himself and his words. The man who intervenes least in this rather sacred process is the magazine editor, especially the small magazine editor who is his own staff. When he really does know what a writer is for, when he counsels wisely and mends invisibly, he is a pearl of great price. If you find one, stick with him, even at a penny a word, even if you’re selling elsewhere for thousands. He is worth your loyalty.

Topics:

Writing

Editors

text checked (see note) Oct 2007

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Extrapolation

originally published as “Beware the Fury”

Copyright © 1953 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
Copyright © 1964 by Theodore Sturgeon

Those who love love, and those who love themselves, cannot wait. Those who love another can and do.

Topic:

Love

“You only need a few facts about the one you love. Just enough to point the way.”

“Three points on a graph to give you a curve, so you can know its characteristics and extend it. Is that what you mean?”

“That’s one of the things I mean.”

“You won’t believe it until your little graph’s all plotted, with every fact and figure in place. Me, I know. I’ve known all along. It’s so easy.”

“Hating is easy too,” said the Major. “You’ve probably never done much of that. But unhating’s a pretty involved process. There’s no way of doing it but to learn the facts. The truth.”

Topic:

Hate

I want to be in a place, the Major thought suddenly, passionately, where the truth makes a difference.

Topic:

Truth

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The Wages of Synergy

Copyright © 1953 by Better Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1964 by Theodore Sturgeon

Prue lived in ways which, in aggregate, are called sophistication; but Killilea had learned that the only true sophistication lies in exemplary and orthodox behavior. It takes a wise, careful and deeply schooled gait to pace out the complicated and shifting patterns of civilized behavior. It takes a nimble and fleet hypocrisy to step from conflict to paradox among the rules of decency. A moral code is an obstinate anagram indeed. So Prue, thought Killilea, is an innocent.

Topic:

Sophistication

“Don’t you see, Killy,” she said earnestly, “that you can have something important, or you can have me? But you can’t have both.”

There was a gallant protest to be made at this point, and he knew better than to make it. If he told her how very important she was, she would look at him in astonishment—not because she could not realize her importance to him, but because he would have so badly misused the term. He understood her completely. There was room in his life for Prue and his work when he built on his steroid nuclei as Bach built on a theme, surely and with joy. But when the work became “important,” it excluded Prue and crêpes Suzettes and a lovingly bitten toe: music straight from a sunset rather than a sunset taken through music: the special sting across the sight from tears of happiness: and all the other brittle riches that give way when that which is “important” grows greater to a man than that which is vital. And she was perfectly right in saying that he had not needed her then.

Topic:

Importance

“Just take my word for it.”

“No.”

“Trust me. You used to trust me, Prue.”

“You used to tell me things that were so. You used to say things that came true. But if you’d begun to say that this table is not a table, that lark isn’t singing, it’s a noise a cow makes . . . then I never could have trusted you at all.”

“But—”

“Prove it to me, Killy. Find a way, I mean a real way, not words, not just clever ideas all strung out like a diamond necklace, all dazzly and going right around in a circle. Prove it a real way, like one of the things you did in chemistry. Build it, and show it to me.”

“Yes, anti-science! Even the politicians are saying we have to turn to higher spiritual accomplishments because of what science has created. But their way of doing it will be to stop science from creating anything. It’s a little like blaming the gunsmith every time somebody gets shot, but that’s what’s happening. Hell, four-fifths of the stories in science fiction magazines are anti-scientific.”

He was a scientist—or rather, an ex-scientist—rather more sure of things he did not believe in than those in which he did. [...] He was at a serious disadvantage with other people because of a deep conviction that people were good. And though he had found that most were good, the few who were not invariably caught him off-guard.

“Look,” said Killilea, “I don’t know what the word ‘fidelity’ was supposed to mean when people first began to use it, but it’s come to mean being faithful, not to a person, but to a set of regulations. It’s a kind of obedience. A woman that brags about fidelity to her husband, or a man that’s puffed up because he’s faithful to his wife—these people are doing what one or two zebras, a few fleas, and millions of dogs do—obey. Point is, they have to be trained to do it. They have to develop a special set of muscles to stay obedient. It’s a—a task. I think it’s a bad thing”

“Yeah, but you—”

“Me,” said Killilea. “If what I have with someone needs no extra set of muscles—if I don’t and couldn’t want anyone else—then I’ll stick with it. Not because I’m obedient. But because I couldn’t do anything else. I’d have to have the extra set of muscles to break away.”

“Yeah,” said Hartog, “but suppose your girl don’t feel the same way?”

“Then we wouldn’t have anything. See what I’m driving at? If you have to work at it, it isn’t worth it.”

Topic:

Fidelity

“Why don’t you ever call me ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’?”

Because ‘Prue’ means all those things and says them better.”

“They all respected homo sapiens, and themselves for being members of it, for all they feared it. They all feared it the way a good sailor fears a hurricane; they feared it competently. [...] And they all still knew how to wonder like children.”

“An act can be both moral and ethical. But under some circumstances a moral act can be counter to ethics, and an ethical act can be immoral.”

“I’m with you so far,” he said.

“Morals and ethics are survival urges, both of them. But look: an individual must survive within his group. The problems of survival within the group are morals.”

“Gotcha. And ethics?”

“Well, the group itself must survive, as a unit. The patterns of an individual within the group, toward the end of group survival, are ethics.”

Cautiously, he said, “You’d better go on a bit.”

“You’ll see it in a minute. Now, morals can dictate a pattern to a man such that he survives within the group, but the group itself may have no survival value. For example, in some societies it is immoral not to eat human flesh. But to refrain from it would be ethical, because that would be toward group survival. See?”

Topics:

Morality

Ethics

text checked (see note) Oct 2007

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Make Room for Me

Copyright © 1951 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
Copyright © 1964 by Theodore Sturgeon

“The more I think about it, the less I think school teaches you anything. Oh, sure, there are some encyclopaedics that you sponge up, but that’s secondary. A school’s real function is to teach you how to learn. Period.”

“All right—then what about the degree?”

“That’s just to convince other people that you have learned how to learn. Or to convince yourself, if you’re not sure.”

Topic:

Education

“I have something lined up. Advertising—direct mail. It isn’t too tough. I’ll stay with that for a couple of years. See how the other half lives. The half with money, that is. When I’m ready, I’ll drop it and write a novel. It’ll be highly successful.”

“Real cocky,” said Manuel.

“Well, damn it, it will be. With me. I’ll like it.”

“I’m going where I’ll know who’s my boss, and I’ll know who takes orders from me. What I’ll wear, where I’ll live—someone else can decide that. Meantime I’ll work in communications, which I’d be doing anyway, but someone else will buy the equipment and materials.”

“You’ll be caged. You’ll never be free,’ said Vaughn.

“Free for what? To starve? Free to argue with salesmen and landlords? Nuts. I’ll go and work with things I can measure, work with my hands, while you two are ex-prassing your tortured souls. What would you like to see me do instead? Take up writing sonnets that nobody’ll ever read? Suppose I do that, and you go join the Marines.”

Dranley Hamilton drank the highball with the cold realization that it was one too many, and went on talking cleverly about his book. It was easy to do, because for him it was so easy to define what these fawning critics, publishers, club-women and hangers-on wanted him to say. He was a little disgusted with his book, himself, and with these people, and he was enjoying his disgust immensely, purely because he was aware of it and of his groundless sense of superiority.

Topic:

Authors

He stopped and stared out to sea. The thick furrows across his forehead deepened as he thought about the sea, and the way people wrote about it. It was always alive, or mysterious, or restless, or something. Why were people always hanging mysterious qualities on what should be commonplace? He was impatient with all that icky business.

“It’s just wet salt and distance,” he muttered.

Topic:

The Sea

The book was a strange one—one of those which captivates or infuriates, with no reader-reactions between the extremes. There were probably far more people who were annoyed by it than not, “which,” said Dran, “is one of the few things the book has in common with its author.”

It was cold and clear, and the stars competed with one another—and helped one another, too, the aesthetic pointed out: “. . . for every star which can’t outshine the others seems to get behind and help another one be bright.”

text checked (see note) Oct 2007

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The Heart

Copyright © 1955 by Greenleaf Publishing Co.
Copyright © 1964 by Theodore Sturgeon

Her lips curled back wickedly from her teeth, and her eyes slitted; and then, with shocking suddenness, her face relaxed completely. She said, “I’d hate you if I wasn’t afraid to hate anything ever again.”

In that second I was deathly afraid of her, and that in itself was enough to get me interested.

Hate’s a funny thing. I hope you don’t ever know how—how big it can be. Use it right, and it’s the most totally destructive thing in the universe.

Topic:

Hate

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Background graphic copyright © 2003 by Hal Keen