Theodore Sturgeon: "Ghost of a Chance," "Prodigy" & "Blabbermouth"

Back in August I purchased a 1955 copy of Caviar, Ballantine #119, because I admired the Richard Powers cover.  I actually like much of Sturgeon's work, and Caviar, a collection of stories first published in the period 1941-1955, includes a bunch of things I haven't read yet, so let's have at it!  Today we'll investigate three of the eight tales in the collection, "Ghost of a Chance," "Prodigy" and "Blabbermouth."  Of the other stories in Caviar, I have of course read the classic "Microcosmic God," ages ago, and, during the period of this blog, "Medusa." 

Nota bene: Today's stories debuted in 1940s science fiction magazines, but I am reading them in my 1955 paperback--let's hope it survives the adventure.  

"Ghost of a Chance" (1943) 

This story debuted in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Unknown under the title "The Green-Eyed Monster."  When it reappeared in 1951 in the short-lived magazine Suspense behind a cover featuring a murdered nude blonde it bore its new title, "Ghost of a Chance," under which it has reappeared ever since.

I'll note first that, while I made a big production out of telling you I am reading this in my flesh and blood paperback and not in a PDF scan of a magazine, "Ghost of a Chance" here in Ballantine #119 suffers from numerous printing errors, including lines printed out of order, rendering a conversation hard to comprehend, so I did end up looking at a scan of Unknown online.

"Ghost of a Chance" is sort of a slight joke story, but the main gag is OK and the minor jokes sprinkled throughout are tolerable and Sturgeon's writing style is quite good and carries you pleasantly from start to finish.  The characters, though they act extravagantly, are likable and you can identify with their all-too-human desires and emotions.  Sturgeon's big theme throughout his body of work is the power of love, and this story demonstrates various species of love, including the brotherly love of men who are friends and try to help each other, in a way that I found affecting.  So, "Ghost of a Chance" adds up to an entertaining piece I can comfortably recommend.

The plot.  A working-class guy, Gus, encounters a pale girl with white hair who behaves strangely.  He falls for her, but she avoids him because she is haunted by a jealous ghost who ruins the lives of every man who gets close to her.  Sturgeon describes many different ways a ghost can torment a living man, some of them slapstick humor, others closer to real horror stuff.  Things get pretty over the top, with the girl threatening to kill herself if Gus won't leave her alone and Gus becoming a homeless drunk in response.  Throughout the story, Gus seeks aid from various sources, including an advice columnist and a friend of his, a head shrinker.  Eventually Gus adds up the various pieces of advice he accumulates and solves the problem--the girl, pale and with white hair, looks like a ghost and so a ghost has a crush on her; the solution is to get the girl a dye job so she is a brunette.

"Prodigy" (1949)

This one first saw print in a pseudonym-heavy issue of Campbell's Astounding alongside stories by L. Ron Hubbard (as by Rene Lafayette) and by John Christopher (as by Christopher Youd) and a portion of a serial by Jack Williamson (as by Will Stewart.) Besides the many printings of Caviar, "Prodigy" has been reprinted in several foreign language Sturgeon collections and volume V of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

It is the post-apocalyptic eugenic future.  Centuries ago an atomic war damaged the human gene pool, and the government took up the job of sorting and educating all the newly born children.  Every child is interned in the government creche and carefully examined over a series of years, the mutants and other irregulars identified and euthanized.  The normal kids are subjected to government propaganda that justifies the destruction of the freaks; Sturgeon comes up with nursery rhymes to demonstrate this.  

So it went for like 200 years.  Recently there have been reforms.  Now, mutants and other irregulars are separated and carefully studied with the idea that maybe some of them have useful traits that will breed true and improve the genetic stock of the human race--the government is trying to breed homo superior!  It also seems that parents now have to give permission for their kids to be euthanized.

Our characters are one of the women who work in the creche, Mayb, and an irregular child, Andi, who is currently under observation as a possible superior specimen.  Four-year-old Andi is a real pain in the neck, aware of his specialness and always making demands, demands he can back up with his psychic powers.  He escapes and returns to his mother.  Mom initially protects Andi, but soon brings him back to the creche to be destroyed because his demands and his use of his powers is intolerable.  

The twist ending is that the real special thing about Andi is that he is a one-way telepath in a world where almost everybody is a two-way telepath; Andi can transmit psychic messages but not receive them, and I guess because he can't "hear" his own telepathic projections or those of others he doesn't know how to modulate his transmissions, to make them safe and comfortable for others, and so is always doing the telepathic equivalent of screaming or shouting, constantly disturbing everybody around him.

I can moderately recommend this one, as the story is well-written and well-structured.  The twist ending, that Andi is the only person who can't receive psychic messages, is a little questionable, however, as Sturgeon tricks you into thinking Mayb and others are not telepaths.  For example, Mayb's boss calls her on the "annunciator," which I guess is like an intercom, and Mayb calls up Andi's mother on the videophone--if all these jokers can communicate telepathically, why do they need telephones and intercoms?  Maybe because telepathy has limited range?  But the boss, Mayb and Andi are all in the same building, and the boss and Mayb can both sense Andi's psychic screams, but these two adults still use the intercom to talk to each other.  Personally, the fact that mom is eager to kill Andi after spending time with him is enough of a twist for me; the one-way telepath thing feels a little clunky and superfluous.           

"Blabbermouth" (1947)  

"Blabbermouth" is listed as a 1945 story at isfdb but I think they are just reproducing a typo that appears on the publication page of the 1977 printing of Caviar, as my 1955 book has a copyright date of 1946 for "Blabbermouth" and the story debuted in Amazing in 1947.  Amazing printed "Blabbermouth" a second time in 1967 alongside Jack Vance's "The Man from Zodiac,"  and like "Ghost of a Chance," you can find "Blabbermouth" in the third volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

This one feels slow and long, the central gimmick is kind of goofy and the plot does not operate smoothly.  The jocular style, though (like the plot) similar to that in "Ghost of a Chance," doesn't land as well, at least not to me, partly because there is a lot of talk about living in poverty, suicide, and murder that I think we are supposed to take seriously.  "Blabbermouth" is the weakest story of the day, which I guess tracks with the fact that Amazing has a lower reputation than Unknown and Astounding.

Our narrator is a real Mr. Charisma, Eddie the radio DJ (though they call them M. C.s back then, for "master of ceremonies") who gets lots of chicks and has tons of friends.  As part of publicity for his show, he participates energetically in the city's nightlife, yakking it up with fun fashionable people who become his regular correspondents; they call in (or telegram in, in this time period) with song requests and little comments, bringing material, a sense of community, and interactivity to Eddie's show.

As "Blabbermouth" begins our narrator bumps into a beautiful woman as he tries to grab a cab.  She is the best-looking girl he has ever seen!  She looks a little familiar...it is a woman he had one date with back in college, Maria, and she looks better now than she did then.  Eddie pursues her; she is cold at first, thinking they wouldn't be good for each other, but eventually Maria succumbs--after Eddie threatens to jump out a skyscraper window--and they get married.

As the story proceeds, various events occur that provide clues as to why Maria was reluctant to marry Eddie even though our narrator is a charming hunk.  Early in the story we learned that, after college, she made a serious study of the occult, including spending an extended period alone on a mountain top mediating and experimenting, and it seems to us readers that now she can read minds.  Also, it appears that Maria is a compulsive gossip, and when Eddie's back is turned she can't help but, for example, tell women what their husbands are up to when it comes to their extramarital affairs and business deals and all that kind of stuff they are keeping from the little woman.  Soon Maria is ruining all of our narrator's many friendships by spreading everybody's secrets around, jeopardizing his popularity and thus his ratings and thus his career!

Confronted by our narrator, Maria explains to him exactly what is going on, and it is even more contrived and silly than we readers have suspected.  You see, your guilt and suspicion and other negative emotions, kept bottled up inside, create a poltergeist.  Maria is susceptible to being possessed by such poltergeists.  These poltergeists yearn to be free, or something, and so when they take over Maria they compel her to voice--to their objects--the secret hatreds and misdeeds of those around her.  This is not very interesting or very convincing (and it gets worse.)

Maria stops leaving the apartment, so she never is taken over by poltergeists, and things regarding Eddie's friendships and career settle down.  But then, months into their marriage, Eddie's radio station is up for sale to a national network--if the network takes over the station it will mean a 20% raise for Eddie!  But to cement the deal, Eddie has to bring Maria to an important dinner party with the network execs!  At the party, Maria can't help but tell people secret and unwelcome facts about the network's business plans and who is sleeping with who's wife, and a fight breaks out and somebody gets killed.  

Eddie's career in radio is over, and our couple falls into poverty.  Maria tries to commit suicide by turning on the gas but is revived in a nick of time.  Then Eddie has a brain wave and the story becomes even more contrived and even harder to credit.  Eddie theorizes that if Maria doesn't actually tell people the secrets she learns about them, but just writes the secrets down on a piece of paper and then hides the piece of paper so nobody mentioned on it can see it, this will free the poltergeists without breaking up people's relationships.  It works!  Eddie becomes a gossip columnist--he and Maria go out to dinner at night clubs and so forth, hobnobbing with important people, Maria learns all kinds of secrets and writes them down while sitting at the table, and then Eddie works them into a regular newspaper column; Eddie and Maria get rich.

Barely tolerable--the poltergeist "rules" make no sense, and people's relationships make no sense--Eddie has all these friends, then they drop him, then they pick him up again, then they drop him again, then they pick him up again, and nobody puts two and two together when their secrets are revealed in the media after they had dinner with Eddie's wife who the entire dinner is scribbling stuff down in a notebook?    

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It is always sad when the final story covered in a blog post is the worst and the first is the best.  Also sad is the fact that the act of reading this seventy-year-old book has led to its spine breaking and half the pages falling out.  Oh, well.

There are three more stories in Caviar I haven't read yet, and maybe we'll tackle them soon.  But first, three stories published about 20 years after today's subjects.

In the 1970s Ballantine sought to sell Caviar with sex appeal,
while our British friends sold it as a horror collection