Theodore Sturgeon: "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" and "Affair with a Green Monkey"

The recent criticisms of Theodore Sturgeon voiced by master blogger tarbandu, at his famed blog The PorPor Books Blog and here in the comments section of my very own little enterprise, have brought old Ted to mind.  I've been pretty hard myself on a bunch of Sturgeon stories, including "The Skills of Xanadu," "The Wages of Synergy," "The Comedian's Children," "Fear is a Business," and the Hugo-winning "Slow Sculpture."  But while tarbandu attacks Sturgeon's prose, calling it "mediocre," my main gripe about Sturgeon is his utopianism, his elitism, and his attachment to the idea of collective consciousness--I actually think Sturgeon is an able writer, and I even liked works tarbandu specifically singled out for attack, like the posthumous novel Godbody and the Dangerous Visions story "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"  Other Sturgeon stories I have lauded here at MPorcius Fiction Log include "The World Well Lost," "Make Room for Me," "The Heart," "And Now the News..." and "The Martian and the Moron."  (I'm not listing the many Sturgeon stories I have read since the debut of this blog over ten years ago which I judged only "acceptable" or "marginally good.")  So I guess you are going to have to call me a Sturgeon fan and a dissenter from tarbandu's view.  

Let's read some more Sturgeon today from my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange.  (The Hans Arnold cover of this DAW printing, DAW No. 286, isn't great, but I like the Jack Gaughan frontispiece; you can see both--and more!--by clicking those links to some of my most information- and entertainment-rich tweets, tweets guaranteed to yield a rich harvest of unregretted user-seconds.)  There are nine stories in A Touch of Strange and I haven't blogged any of them, though at least one, "The Other Celia," I read in the years before I started this blog.  We'll start from the beginning of the book, reading three stories today and covering the rest in two further blog posts.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" (1953)

With the way he romanticizes collective consciousness in works like The Cosmic Rape AKA To Marry Medusa and the molding of society by elites in works like "Slow Sculpture," I tend to think of Sturgeon as a collectivist elitist.  So I was a little surprised to see the villain of "Mr. Costello, Hero" espouse a philosophy of unity, pursue a policy of government planning of all social and economic activity, and cavalierly dismiss the profit motive, almost as if the story was a satire of collectivists and maybe even a defense of individualism and business people.  I suppose it may still be that in part, but by the end of the story Sturgeon has diluted that angle, also painting the villain as a religious fanatic and as a power-hungry man who has no principles and just likes to pit majorities against minorities along whatever fault lines are available (not just ethnic distinctions) in order to destabilize societies and gain control over them.  The way the story's themes are inconstant and jump from one angle to another is matched by the personality of the villain, the Costello of the title, whose powers and modus operandi, as well as his motives, are unclear and a little all over the place.  Is he a hypnotist?  Or just a charismatic manipulator who also makes brazen use of blackmail?  Sometimes Costello seems like a sincere totalitarian ideologue and a real clever operator, other times to be absolutely insane.

"Mr. Costello, Hero," is narrated by the purser of a civilian star ship, a trading vessel that follows a regular route, making port at the same five or six systems one after the other in a regular circuit.  The narrator is not very smart, but is a sort of whiz with arithmetic and statistics, and is ideally suited to the job of managing the ship's stores and merchandise and handling passports and manifests and things.  As the story begins, the captain of the ship is complaining that a passenger, Mr. Costello, has had a strange effect on crew behavior--the men trust each other less, and seem to have developed a reluctance to be alone.  Everybody on the ship, except the skipper, is very fond of Costello, and there is an off-stage political/psychological struggle between Costello and the captain which we learn about in fragments second or third hand--Costello is the winner of the struggle, largely by employing the strategy of making recording of people's speech and then using the recordings as blackmail or as misleading legal evidence. 

Costello gets off the ship at a planet the economy of which relies largely on trappers who live alone out in the wilderness for long periods of time and then bring furs to market.  When the narrator's ship comes to this planet next time he finds that Costello has reworked the entire society, turning the place into a totalitarian police state dedicated to his own stated belief that all of humankind should be "a single unit" and "sin" is the result of being alone, of enjoying privacy.  Being alone has become illegal and people are forced to live in barracks where they can't even use the toilet in privacy, and the trappers are a shunned and demonized class, and the fur trade has been destroyed.  Costello wants to hire the narrator to help him keep track of population and economic statistics, to help him better control this planet, and, when he expands his rule to other planets, the entire human race.  Costello even suggests the purser will be awarded a sexy blonde girlfriend, the woman who stars in Costello's propaganda broadcasts, on which she recites such arguments as "All sin starts in the lonesome dark" and "humanity is a thing made up of many parts...any part that wants to go off by itself hurts the whole...." 

Even as he is describing stuff about Costello that makes us readers skeptical or hostile to the man, the narrator steadfastly maintains his fondness for Costello and he considers taking the job when his current contract runs out.  But when he next gets to that trapper planet he finds the Earth's Space Navy has the place blockaded and Costello has been seized and put in a mental institution.  The narrator is allowed to meet the internee, and finds Costello manipulating native hive insects the way he manipulated people on that trapper planet, setting a majority of alien ants against a minority, the same way he pitted the urban majority against the rural trapper minority.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" is just OK.  I've already suggested that it lacks singleness of purpose.  In the end we are told that Costello's modus operandi is to find a minority in a society and drive a wedge between it and the majority, and that all that unity of mankind anti-individualism stuff is just a smokescreen.  But on the ship at the start of the story Costello doesn't seem to have found a scapegoat minority, and all the collectivist stuff seems sincere.  This muddles the message, or exposes the story as having only a banal message or no message at all, which is disappointing.       

Another problem with "Mr. Costello, Hero" is that it feels long (it is it is like 25 pages in DAW No. 286) and a little slow.  I have a sort of allergy to stories in which a guy goes through the same experience again and again, like going to the same planet again and again, as in this story, and seeing a neutered Costello in captivity in the end to get the psychological explanation is pretty anticlimactic.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, seeing as Sturgeon titled the story "Mr. Costello, Hero," we have the fact that our narrator is more of a spectator than a participant in the story--the story isn't about the purser's pursuit of goals (he doesn't have much of any) and isn't propelled by his handling of obstacles or making of decisions.  The real protagonist is Mr. Costello, but most of Costello's struggles, his triumphs and defeats, happen off screen, and his real motives and personality are not clear, but are a mystery that is solved not by the narrator but by minor characters who pop up now and then only to disappear soon after.  Maybe "Mr. Costello, Hero," is Sturgeon's meditation on the idea of the hero in popular literature, say like John Carter or Conan, or on the hero in history, say Caesar or Napoleon, the man who bends the universe to his will and remakes society to his specifications.  How do ordinary people view these larger-than-life figures?  What are the motivations of the great man that lead to his campaign to change the world?  Should we admire or fear such men? 

Despite all these many gripes, the story is not all that boring or annoying as you are in the process of reading it, so "Mr. Costello, Hero" gets tossed into that large basket of stories that are neither deplorable nor laudable but merely acceptable.

   

"Mr. Costello, Hero" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many anthologies, among them Frederik Pohl's Assignment in Tomorrow and Tom Boardman's Connoisseur's Science Fiction, which has a strange and perhaps disturbing cover illustration.  

Am I crazy, or is that cavalryman's face a woman's squashed breasts?

"The Touch of Your Hand" (1953)

Another Galaxy story, this one the cover story, though the great astronaut image by Emsh on the cover of the ish illustrates some other piece and has nothing to do with Sturgeon's "The Touch of Your Hand."  "The Touch of your Hand" hasn't been anthologized, but it has turned up in many Sturgeon collections.  

Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" is a long one (like 43 pages here in A Touch of Strange), and it feels very long because Sturgeon spends page after page describing boring activities, like work at a construction site, and on exposition that instead of setting the stage for the action explains the action after the fact, including a lecture on logic and a somewhat ludicrous sociology and history lesson.  Also like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it seems to be addressing one set of issues but then switches gears, and also like that story has a protagonist who doesn't really drive the plot, which is resolved by minor characters.     

The first half or so of "The Touch of Your Hand" feels like a fable or a fairy tale, an exploration of economic history and the rise of civilization that touches on subjects like the division of labor and economies of scale.  Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it also considers the motivations of the great men who bend the universe to their will and build and change society, and whether those of us who are not great should embrace or resist such men and their visions.  

Our protagonist is a beautiful blonde woman, Jubilith, who lives in a peaceful village where individuals grow their own food and make their own tools and only a few people are specialists who engage in trade.  She is in love with a tall strong handsome man, Osser, but has seen Osser bullying other villagers into working with him, for him, building a stone tower.  Who needs a stone tower?  Why does Osser insist on forcing people to help him build it, but refuse to permit Jubilith, who aches to be at his side and support him, contribute to the construction?

To explain, Osser leads Jubilith on a long foot journey to a huge crater, within which are metal ruins.  Osser takes Jubilith deep underground, navigating the darkness with flashlights, to a chamber where he shows her a black and white film--never before has Jubilith experienced electricity or motion pictures.  The film is a sort of documentary of space flight and of a huge modern city of skyscrapers, automobiles, aircraft, and extravagantly attired crowds.  Osser finds in the city a grand vision and a purpose for himself; no doubt the city was built by strong driven men like himself, in command of inferior men and in competition with other great men.  Jubilith is skeptical--is all this material wealth worth pushing people around?  Do people really need multiple sets of clothes or to fly in the air--do such things make them happier?  Osser insists that the greatness of the city is worth all the cruelty and hardship involved in building the city, and sees himself as the founder of a rebirth of the high tech civilization of their ancestors.  His stone tower is only the beginning.

The text thus far had led me to believe that the story was set on Earth after a nuclear war.  But Sturgeon then pulled the rug right out from under me after Osser and Jubilith had seen the film.  First, Jubilith repairs a malfunctioning flashlight, opening it up and working on the innards of the thing, even though she has never seen one before.  Then, when the two climb out of the underground cinema, Sturgeon tells us there are two suns--this cannot be Earth!

Jubilith, unsure what to do about Osser, goes to consult the village's wiseman.  The guru explains the astonishing truth behind what is going on with Osser and the nature of Jubilith's people.  You see, these people have telepathy and a sort of collective consciousness, but it operates on a sort of subconscious, autonomic level--they don't talk with each other through thought waves or transmit and receive images and feelings, the way telepaths usually do in SF stories.  Instead, they subconsciously share expertise when confronted by a problem.  When Jubilith's flashlight was failing, the memories of another person from some other village on the planet, who had at one point repaired a flashlight, flooded into her mind.  Jubilith and almost everybody else on the planet takes this power for granted, doesn't even realize the knowledge is coming from another person.  With access to this vast store of knowledge, these people don't need to congregate in cities and almost nobody needs to specialize, because the knowledge of any one specialist is available to all others on the planet.  These people also don't have any written language or movies, as they have a far more efficient means of accessing information.  

So, what is up with Osser?  Well, the behind-the-scenes rulers of this society wanted to see what a person would be like who didn't have this telepathy, so they hypnotized a baby so it couldn't receive the telepathic transmissions.  Osser was that baby.  Osser felt like a loser all his youth, as he had to work hard to figure everything out, whereas everybody else just seemed to know how to handle any problem automatically.  The secret masters guided Osser to that movie theater, and the film led him to believe that his society was a fallen society, a weak one, and that he, being physically strong, could rebuild this  high-tech superior society by leveraging his strength and pushing people around.  

So, what is up with those ruins and that the movie theatre?  Well, ages ago, aliens who lacked telepathy arrived on the planet and the friendly natives permitted them to build cities in designated areas.  But eventually the fast-breeding aliens started encroaching on territory without permission and the natives had to exterminate them.  But the film is not of those colonials' cities--it is a film of the Earth!  Realizing the threat posed by alien races, the secret masters have sent probes out to study alien planets and monitor alien space ships.  Earth is one such planet.  The rulers' conclusion is that the telepaths cannot live in harmony with non-telepathic people--such people are violent and imperialistic and the only solution is to destroy them upon contact.  

In the kind of coincidence we see all the time in fiction, the very day Osser is trying to herd all the villagers out of their individual houses to the environs of his stone tower to become city dwellers is the day a space ship is due to arrive from Earth.  Autonomically accessing high tech knowledge, the villagers build and deploy a powerful piece of energy artillery while Osser watches.  The bulldozer and the energy cannon they somehow throw together in just hours put his stone tower to shame, and Osser goes insane seeing the building prowess of his fellows, people he thought totally uninterested in, and almost incapable of, building.  The Earth ship is disintegrated in the air above (Jubilith is assured the Earthers died painlessly.)  The wiseman hypnotically reverts Osser to childhood--he will live as a child in an adult's body all his days, happily innocent, blissfully unaware he was turned into a dangerous guinea pig and put through a terrible ordeal by the authorities.  That is unless Jubilith, who is given the key to awakening Osser back into adulthood by the guru, decides to free him from the hypnotic spell.

"The Touch of Your Hand" is a pretty convoluted story that starts out on one tack and then changes course; unfortunately, the themes it takes up in the second half are less interesting than those I thought were the main topic while I was reading the first half--we go from a discussion of the meaning of progress, the role of the city, and the motivations of ambitious men to silly conspiracy jazz and childish utopianism: "well, golly, it would be awesome if we just knew everything everybody else knew without having to make any effort."  I'm already against utopian stories, and I'm already against stories in which aliens are shown to be better than Earth people, but at least most utopian stories suggest a program, and at least most stories that present goody goody aliens offer up the possibility that humanity could be positively influenced by the goody goody aliens; such stories hold out hope that our current society could be improved by the changes advocated by the writer.  But "The Touch of Your Hand" is total pessimism--in this story humanity was born deficient, and there is no hope of us just spontaneously developing collective consciousness or having it conferred upon is by the aliens.  The only solution for us is death!

Gotta give "The Touch of Your Hand" a thumbs down.    

"Affair with a Green Monkey" (1957)

In the intro to Robert Bloch's "Toy for Juliette" in Dangerous Visions, while discussing the "dichotomy" that the "gentle" and "peaceful" Bloch writes stories that are "gruesome and warped," editor Harlan Ellison brings up "...Sturgeon's lament that after he had written one--and one only--story about homosexuality, everyone accused him of being a fag."  Assuming Ellison is accurately reporting something Sturgeon said and Sturgeon was being truthful, what is the "one--and one only--story"?  Could it be "Affair with a Green Monkey?"  isfdb has a "LGBTQ+" tag on "Affair with a Green Monkey," so maybe!  Let's turn our gaydar up to maximum gain and investigate!

"Affair with a Green Monkey" is a slightly cryptic joke story, and the joke is sort of naughty (that is if I understood it.)  It is also one of those stories about how humans (or at least the male of the species!) are all jerks that presents aliens who are so much better than we are.  

Fritz Rhys is a big strong man, middle-aged, and head of a human services department of some kind in Washington.  He has a much younger wife, Alma.  At a park Fritz and Alma witness a gang of thugs attacking some guy--Fritz rescues the guy, driving off the malefactors.

Fritz prides himself on understanding people, and he immediately senses that the victim, who has a wacky name like Loolyo, is a homosexual and the thugs assaulted him because of this fact.  Sturgeon doesn't use any words like "homosexual" or "gay" but makes it all clear through little jokes and things.  Fritz has nothing against gays, and insists Loolyo stay in his home with his wife all day to recover from the beating, instead of going to the hospital.  While Fritz is at work, his wife and Loolyo go to all the tourist attractions together and read books to each other and play records together and so on.  Alma falls in love with this guy, whom Sturgeon hints is a space alien.

Some days later, Fritz finally finds time to have a serious talk with Loolyo.  A well-educated member of the elite liberal class, Fritz wants to give Loolyo, a member of an oppressed minority, some friendly, expansive, condescending know-it-all advice.  Fritz explains that people hate and fear those who are different and at the drop of a hat will form a mob to beat up those who are different should they discover them.  Fritz has his own little metaphor--if you painted a monkey green the other monkeys would form a mob and beat up the green monkey because it is different.  He advises Loolyo to act like a heterosexual man, to feign interest in fishing and hunting and be gruff and never show emotion and so forth.

Fritz finally sees his wife and Loolyo together and from the way Alma looks at the guy, Fritz can tell she has a crush on him.  Fritz tells them to go spend a few hours together, thinking Loolyo will explain he is a gay man and so their love is impossible.  Sure enough, when they are alone, after he kisses her and gropes her, and before she watches him hop into his space ship, Loolyo explains to Alma that they can't be lovers, but the reason is because, if I am reading the clues right, his erect penis is seventeen inches long and over five inches thick.  Alma, when she returns home, laughs about how small Fritz's penis is, humiliating him and likely threatening the survival of their marriage.

I guess we'll say this one is OK.

Besides Venture, where "Affair with a Green Monkey" first hit the stage, you can check out this elaborate dick joke, which I guess also serves as a warning not to judge people by their appearance, in various Sturgeon collections but also Modern Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Norman Spinrad, and a French anthology on the theme of invaders.  

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All three of these stories start off addressing some conventional but interesting topic (are ambitious men and their projects really so great for the rest of us?) or making some obvious but legitimate argument (don't beat up gay people!) and then veer off into convoluted plot twists involving less than credible psychological and biological explanations (we've all got a superpower you don't even realize you have, except for this guy we hypnotized as a baby...) or just an oblique bizarre joke (E.T. has a monster cock!)  Also, none of them is actually good.  Though only the longest of these stories is actually poor, it seems that today I cannot respond to tarbandu's criticism of Sturgeon with a ringing endorsement of ol' Ted.

But don't give up hope, Ted fans!  We've got three more Sturgeon tales coming up, and any one of them might be a blockbuster!