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| Left, a 1964 Italian edition. Right, a 1970 US edition |
Thank you for attending another of our Ted talks. Today we finish up with my DAW 1978 edition of Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 collection A Touch of Strange. The book has nine stories, and we discussed the first three here, and the middle three here. Today we deal with the final three. I have already read the first of today's three stories, and I liked it so much when I read it over ten years ago that I still remember it and have no doubt that this blog post will contain my favorite of the stories in A Touch of Strange.
"The Other Celia" (1957)
So here it is, perhaps my favorite story by Sturgeon, a brilliant weird tale I read long ago and reread today and happily find I love as much as I did the first time round. Five out of five peepholes for "The Other Celia," a speculative fiction masterpiece!
In the past I have complained that Sturgeon has a penchant for describing activities in too much detail, to the point that it is boring and takes the reader out of the story--he does this in "Killdozer" and in "The Touch of Your Hand" when describing the operation of heavy construction equipment. Here in "The Other Celia" he describes activities in similarly exhaustive detail, but in this story the actions he describes are bizarre and fascinating, and instead of boring you and wasting your time, Sturgeon paints vivid and striking images and generates almost unbearable suspense. Perhaps more importantly, in "The Other Celia" Sturgeon creates two unforgettable characters, people quite alien to the reader (I hope!) and yet with disturbingly sympathetic personalities that lead the reader to identify with them despite their fundamental strangeness.
Slim Walsh is a tall, thin, shy guy who has no respect for personal boundaries! He is driven by a powerful curiosity--he feels an irresistible urge to know as much about other people, their secrets, as possible. He doesn't leverage these secrets to make money or anything, he just gots to know! Sturgeon describes in detail how he spies on other people in his shabby boarding house, creating peepholes and trespassing while leaving no signs of intrusion and so forth. All these descriptions are compelling and put the reader on edge--he is invading the privacy of others in a way that is disturbing, and at the same time we sort of sympathize with Slim and worry he will be caught.
The most unusual person in the boarding house is a nondescript woman who studiously keeps to herself, a Celia Sarton. This woman seems to have no character, no personality--when Slim invades her apartment he finds no sign of any interests or relationships whatsoever. Intrigued, he takes pains to learn more, and stumbles upon an almost unbelievable reality--Celia is of some other species which has somehow evolved in parallel with humanity and whose members masquerade as human. Slim, and we readers, watch as Celia conducts the necessary operations to make her totally alien body conform to human shape so she can continue her lonely and humdrum life among us. Slim, ever curious, interferes with Celia's assumption of her disguise, to see what might happen, and his meddling has tragic consequences.
We might consider "The Other Celia" a story about urban loneliness, and/or a feminist story, an allegory of how women do things in private to alter their appearances, things men might find strange or disgusting but which (according to feminists, at least) they are forced into by men if they want to lead any sort of independent existence in our society. We might even say that it is the male gaze that kills poor Celia, who never hurt anybody. Thinking more broadly, the story may be about we all have secrets and the revelation of those secrets might, if only metaphorically/psychologically, destroy us.
A Sturgeon story the equal of or superior to his famous "Microcosmic God." The thing is flawless: every passage contributes to the plot or atmosphere. Characteristics like Sturgeon's vaunted "humanism" and aforementioned tendency to describe in detail are present and contribute to the success of the story, while other of Ted's recurring attributes, the ones that might annoy me, like the elitism that leads a guy to become famous for saying that 90% of everything is shit and to stuff his stories with misanthropy and condescending lectures, are thankfully absent. Strongly recommended to fans of all sorts of genre fiction, as "The Other Celia" has crime/detective elements as well as weird/science fiction/fantasy elements, what with all the suspenseful sneaking and spying going on.
"The Other Celia" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many science fiction and horror anthologies.
"The Pod in the Barrier" (1957)
isfdb labels "The Pod in the Barrier" a novelette, and it has the structure of a novel, with lots of characters who have their personalities described and then demonstrate those personalities, and whose personalities and relationships evolve as the story proceeds in ways that drive the plot and resolve the plot obstacles.
I'll try to describe the narrative briefly, background first, which we don't learn in one gulp but in intermittent installments. The human race is in trouble because of overpopulation, one symptom of which is riots breaking out all the time! Mankind has explored many star systems, but very few inhabitable planets have been discovered, and the accessible ones are already being overcrowded with human colonists. An additional bunch of systems with planets we could colonize have been discovered, but they are beyond an impenetrable forcefield! The people who put up the forcefield, the Luanae, are very friendly, real generous goody goodies who would love to do us a solid, and in fact they have transmitted to us all kinds of useful information that has advanced human technology by leaps and bounds. But they are unable to turn off the forcefield! Sturgeon devotes long passages to describing the historical, sociological, and technological reasons why and how the Luanae set up a forcefield run by an AI that is now smarter than they are; these fictional history lessons are actually sort of convincing and rather fun.
The main plot involves the latest of many human expeditions sent to the forcefield in hopes of somehow getting through it to those much-needed planets. The ship has a crew of four scientists and three crewmembers: the captain/pilot, a sort of handyman lackey guy they call the utility monkey, and a professional prostitute referred to as the crew girl or CG. One of the scientists is our narrator. Each of these seven people has an idiosyncratic personality, including the narrator, who is an arrogant jerk. The CG, for example, is terrible at her (ostensible) job. CGs are a typical component of star ship crews, and are there to have sex with the men to maintain morale. But the CG on this trip has a personality that the four scientists find absolutely repulsive, so they have no interest in having sex with her. This woman is a radical skeptic who doubts everything, and somehow, perhaps just with the tone of her voice, transmits her doubt to others, making the men doubt themselves and all their beliefs, a very uncomfortable situation. Only the utility monkey can stand the CG, and they don't have sex, though the monkey is in love with her, and strives to get her believe in something.
The ship gets to the barrier. Each of the four scientists has a theory on how to defeat the force field, and all fail--in fact, the captain points out the glaring faults in their theories even before they have been tried. This mission has been conducted under false pretenses--the captain himself is an expert in many sciences, maybe the superior to the four passengers, and the CG is the key to penetrating the force field! She casts a field of doubt that has the potential to make Luanae technology fail. The captain explains to her how Luanae technology operates, and she doubts the explanation, and this dampens enough of the field that she can fly in a pod to the space station that controls the field and detonate a nuclear bomb to permanently deactivate the field and save the human race. Her doubt also makes the ship's own Luanae-designed interstellar drive fail; it is expected that she will die in the nuclear explosion, because if she lives the ship won't be able to reach to any human habitable planets! They have all been on something like a suicide mission! The sacrifice of the CG drives the utility monkey berserk!
Luckily, the kindness of the Luanae saves the CG's life from the nuclear blast and the love of the utility monkey eases the CG's doubts so that the drive gets back online, so everybody survives the mission.
Like "The Other Celia," "The Pod in the Barrier" has hallmarks of Sturgeon's work--here all the love and Utopian jazz--that can sometimes sink a Sturgeon story, but these Sturgeon hobby horses are reined in so as not to be obnoxious or overwhelming and appear alongside effective adventure and speculative science material. The result is a story I can recommend. Thumbs up for "The Pod in the Barrier."
"The Pod in the Barrier" first saw print in Galaxy, and has reappeared in many Sturgeon collections, but few anthologies--isfdb lists only one, a French one from 1977 with a title that means something like Star Beacons and Atomic Trails or Stellar Lighthouses and Atomic Wakes.
"The Girl Had Guts" (1957)
Oy, this story is extreme, and did make my mind reel--"The Girl Had Guts" is one of the most disgusting exercises in body horror I have ever experienced. Gross!
Our narrator is a space captain who has just returned from a mission, a check up on some scientists conducting a survey of an Earth-like planet. He describes to his wife what he discovered--the horror that destroyed almost all members of the survey team. Sturgeon does not skimp when describing these people's horrible injuries, nauseating illnesses, and psyche-shattering terror. The space captain relates the nightmare suffered by the scientists not in detective story fashion--narrating how he figured it out from documents and interviews and other clues--or in newspaper fashion--the most important facts followed by details--but like an adventure story, chronologically.
The scientists again and again got involved in fights with the large native fauna of the planet and also found themselves falling victim to natural disasters and all were injured, killed, and/or diseased. One of the monsters was a sort of oozing blob creature that seemed to appear out of nowhere and secreted acids that could burn right through human flesh--a man's face and a woman's fingers were both melted away. Horrific. Eventually the astounding truth about this blob monster is revealed to use readers--the creature is the abdominal organs of a mammal, ejected through the mouth during a moment of terror to act as an autonomous defender of its erstwhile owner. (Apparently Sturgeon got this idea from the behavior of some sea cucumbers, which expel parts of their respiratory systems when attacked, and the way some lizards shed their tails to distract predators.) A native primate, scared by a scientist, "used" this involuntary, autonomic ability, ejecting its liver and stomach which then proceeded to flop around and attack the scientist. Even more horrible, even more disgusting, this ability was not native to the primate, but the result of infection with a kind of parasitic virus, and the scientist unknowingly contracted the same ability! And so did the other scientists! And when they got scared by other dangers, their organs leapt out of their mouths to start attacking others! Yikes!
To cap off the horror, the space captain, after telling this story to his wife, learns his wife has been unfaithful to him with one of his crewmen when she gets a scare and ejects her abdominal organs, she having contracted the virus from his cuckolding comrade! Yikes again!
A very effective story, well-written, well paced, and well organized, though I will repeat as a warning to the squeamish that the main effect of the story is to disgust the reader. There are additional themes that develop in parallel to the gore and horror, including a celebration of the heroism of one of the women scientists, and a subtheme that concerns the nature of sexual relationships in the future. (All three of today's stories have female characters who are integral to their plots and are sympathetic or admirable or both, and all have noteworthy sexual elements or at least undertones.) Like "The Pod in the Barrier" there is a lot going on in this story and it is all pretty compelling, though the body horror business overshadowed everything for this squeamish reader.
"The Girl Had Guts" appeared in the same issue of Venture as Poul Anderson's "Virgin Planet;" I read the novel version of Virgin Planet back in 2017 and enjoyed it. "The Girl Had Guts" has been reprinted in a few anthologies besides Ashley's, including a 1984 French anthology.
So, we finish off A Touch of Strange with three good stories, including two that are remarkable, "The Other Celia" being a masterpiece and "The Girl Had Guts" being remarkably disgusting. Did the DAW people deliberately put the three best stories at the end of the book? The stories are in a totally different order in the 1958 Doubleday hardcover, with "The Pod in the Barrier" the first story and "The Other Celia" and "The Girl Had Guts" together in the middle. Hmm.
Well, I'm thrilled to have finished this series of blog posts with three winners after having contended with mediocre material in the first two installments of this three-part project, and to have gathered some examples with which to defend Sturgeon from the criticisms of tarbandu and other Sturgeon detractors.
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It's been I think eight posts in a row about short stories by major speculative fiction writers. Let's mix things up with a crime novel next time. See you then!
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