I thought that I had read all of Sturgeon\u2019s fiction except for one novel. But it turns out that he wrote five other books that I hadn\u2019t heard of.<\/p>\r\n
Three of them are novelizations of movies:<\/p>\r\n
But the others appear to be original novels:<\/p>\r\n
I found out about all this because Stephen King (in his book On Writing<\/cite>) quoted a line of Sturgeon\u2019s that King said came from Sturgeon\u2018s Some of Your Blood<\/cite>:<\/p>\r\n \u201cThey caught the kid doing something nasty under the bleachers.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \u2026which I recognized as the opening line of Sturgeon\u2019s novel The Dreaming Jewels<\/cite> (1950). Went and checked the latter, and found that it\u2019s very close to but not quite identical to what King quoted:<\/p>\r\n \u201cThey caught the kid doing something disgusting out under the bleachers at the high-school stadium, and he was sent home from the grammar school across the street. He was eight years old then. He\u2019d been doing it for years.\u201d<\/p>\r\n (\u2026I should note that the \u201csomething disgusting\u201d turns out to be something very different from what most people would assume\/guess. In fact, it\u2018s something that\u2019s considered perfectly normal for everyone to do, in public, in some places.)<\/p>\r\n I\u2019m guessing that King misremembered what book the line was from, and slightly misremembered the line, and nobody fact-checked it. But now I\u2019m curious whether Sturgeon reused a variation on that line in Some of Your Blood<\/cite>.<\/p>\r\n Anyway, the mention of a Sturgeon title I hadn\u2019t heard of led me to look it up in isfdb<\/a>, which showed me that there were four others that I also hadn\u2019t heard of.<\/p>\r\n
\r\n