More Sturgeon
Back to reading Sturgeon—finished the complete-Fredric-Brown book a week or two back, unfortunately somewhat disappointing, would like to write an article comparing/contrasting Brown's work with Sturgeon's of the same period, but doubt I'll have time—and have discovered that volume 4 of the complete-Sturgeon series is where he truly begins to shine. The book (covering his fiction written in 1946 and 1947, when he was roughly 28 to 29) opens with "Maturity," a masterpiece in the original sense of the word, and goes on to "Tiny and the Monster" and "Thunder and Roses" and "The Professor's Teddy Bear" and "A Way Home," among others.
Delany's back-cover blurb says: "'Maturity' is one of the most-respected stories in the greater Anglo-American science fiction community." It seems clear to me that the story prefigured Flowers for Algernon (1966)—yeah, there'd been plenty of other superman stories for both to draw on (going back to Wylie and Stapledon at least), but in "Maturity" we see the course of a superman's development due to meddling with his body by well-meaning scientists; the connection seems unmistakable. I admit that Algernon is better than "Maturity," even in its original short-story form (1959). (Actually, I may've liked the story better than the novel; I forget.) But "Maturity" is good, and worth reading, nonetheless.
"Tiny and the Monster"'s best feature is a wonderful mother-of-protagonist character; she's something of a Heinlein Heroine, in that she knows plenty about everything, talks entertainingly nonstop, and is firmly committed to certain old-fashioned ideals. About her amazingly loud car horn, she says: "I have a friend in the shoelace business. Wanted to stimulate trade for him. Fixed this up to make people jump out of their shoes. When they jump they break the laces. Leave their shoes in the street. Thousands of people walking about in their stocking feet. More people ought to, anyway. Good for the arches." About half of her dialogue is like that; I laughed out loud repeatedly. Unfortunately, the other half is devoted to getting her daughter married. Daughter notes that she doesn't want to get married ("Not yet, anyway"); mother replies that "...a woman is only forty percent a woman until someone loves her, and only eighty percent a woman until she has children." Sigh.
"Thunder and Roses" is still apropos today in some ways. It's set in a United States which has been thoroughly destroyed by a sudden nuclear attack from two different enemy nations. "Why tell her that everyone was going to die? Why tell her that other, shameful thing: that we hadn't struck back?" It reminds me that I keep meaning to write about Sturgeon's stories written in response to the atomic bomb; in particular, the fact that several pieces written shortly after Hiroshima talk about how everything has changed now. Which in turn reminded me that for decades, Americans lived under the threat of nuclear destruction, to the point that in the mid-eighties people were talking about it as just a fact of life, a fatalistic attitude on the part of young people, the expectation that things were bound to end up in nuclear war. I don't recall whether I personally felt that way, but the point is, it's a good reminder that Americans haven't had the sense of invulnerability and safety that people talk about until pretty recently. That's what I should've said in an entry a couple months ago.
Anyway, enough on all that. Off to face the day.