Theodore Sturgeon: "A Crime for Llewellyn," "It Opens the Sky," and "A Touch of Strange"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading the 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Theodore Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange.  Today we tackle the middle three stories of this printing, "A Crime for Llewellyn," "It Opens the Sky," and the title track.  Hold on to your seats as the boys down in marketing are promising us three unforgettable masterpieces and, in a blurb on an abridged 1965 edition of A Touch of Strange, Damon Knight proclaimed Sturgeon "certainly one of the top two or three living American science fiction."  Certainly!

"A Crime for Llewellyn" (1957)

First up, a story that debuted in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and was promoted on the cover alongside a violence-against-women illo that you probably shouldn't admit makes your heart go pitter patter!  Also present in this issue is a story by Robert Sheckley, whose work I generally avoid because I always expect his fiction to consist of broad jokes, though he and Judith Merrill have caught me via the cunning use of pseudonyms.  "A Crime for Llewellyn" has not been anthologized, though it did appear in British and Australian editions of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, mate, and a bunch of Sturgeon collections.

Llewellyn is a short fat guy who is none too bright.  He was raised by two maiden aunts who died when he was young, and has no family.  He works a job as a clerk at a free clinic; all the men with whom he works tell tales of their weekend drinking, gambling, bar fighting, and chick banging.  Llewellyn doesn't drink or smoke or gamble, and his colleagues think of him as a goody-two-shoes who has never sinned.  But Llewellyn doesn't think of himself as a goody-two-shoes--he thinks of himself as a rogue!  You see, Llewellyn has a dark secret that none of his colleagues know about!  Llewellyn is keeping house with a woman named Ivy, a smarty who does proofreading for a living, and has been for nineteen years!  Llewellyn's knowledge that he is living in sin--having sex on a regular schedule (six times a month)--means he feels the equal of the other men and isn't made envious or embarrassed by their braggadocio.  

But then one day Ivy reveals the terrible truth--very early in their relationship he got drunk (for the first and only time) and while he was blotto they got married!  He hasn't been living in sin after all!  He begins to feel like a loser!  Inspired by the soap operas he listens to on the radio, he decides to have a fling with an actress!  But he doesn't have any money--Ivy handles all the money--he doesn't even have a wallet!  Those spinster aunts taught him nothing, and Ivy has been doing everything for him, so he has no idea how to function in the world beyond their apartment or his cage at the clinic.

The story becomes a series of joke incidents in which Llewellyn tries to commit some sin in order to regain his self esteem and sense of himself as a man but is foiled.  He tries to steal bonds from Ivy but it turns out that the bonds are legally his.  He leaves Ivy and tries to commit bigamy by marrying some other woman, but in the meantime Ivy has talked to a shrink who has somehow diagnosed her husband's mental condition without ever meeting him and explained Llewellyn's problem to her and so she has had their marriage annulled--as a result he is not a bigamist after all.  Finally he drugs his new wife so she won't wake up while he is gone and sneaks into Ivy's apartment and tries to murder her first wife, but Ivy is already dead of pneumonia.  Llewellyn is doomed to a living death, a sinless existence in which he doesn't feel like a real man.

"A Crime for Llewellyn" is a story about what it means to be a man and about emasculation, about how being coddled by women who--for your own good!--deny you any independence destroys you and ushers in further destruction.  Ivy calls her husband "Lulu," which sounds like a woman's name.  He listens to soap operas with headphones because Ivy doesn't like them--the world turned upside down!  Lulu helps with the cooking and does the marketing, all based on a rigid schedule, just like his sex life!  Both of his wives handle all the finances, Lulu being unable to navigate even the most rudimentary process of banking.  Thus emasculated, Llewellyn overcompensates, committing (or at least trying to commit) terrible crimes to prove his manhood, hurting the women who love him.  (Chillingly, he doesn't seem to have any affection for these women, sees them as mere instruments in managing his own convenience and psychological well-being.)  

I enjoyed "A Crime for Llewellyn" for most of its length, when Llewellyn, Ivy, and the fat ugly woman who thought no one would ever love her until Llewellyn proposed and married her felt like real people with realistic relationships who earned my sympathy.  The style and pacing were comfortable and funny.  But as the story neared its conclusion and got increasingly crazy and the characters started doing terrible things and suffering terrible fates my enjoyment waned.  "A Crime for Llewellyn" is on the borderline between acceptable and marginally good.

The Berkley Medallion 1965 edition of A Touch of Strange prints only seven stories.
The 1978 Sturgeon collection printed by French firm Presses Pocket features an ant with a fleshless 
human skull for a head, which is a new one on me.  

"It Opens the Sky" (1957)

As with "A Crime for Llewellyn," I enjoyed "It Opens the Sky" until the end, which was disappointingly ridiculous.  This story bears some resemblance to Harry Harrison's first Stainless Steel Rat novel, which is sort of interesting, and has a structure much like that of a hard-boiled detective story.

It is the future--the human race has had a vast interstellar civilization for thousands of years.  Peace is maintained by the Angels, golden supermen who have an array of powers--invisibility, flight, teleportation, invulnerability, immortality, etc.  There has been no war and very little crime for centuries.  

Deeming is one of the few criminals.  He feels oppressed by ordinary life, as if the sky is a lid, weighing down on him--this is a metaphor that recurs throughout the story.  So he has become a master of disguise who lives a double life--normally Deeming is a boring clerk, but when he sees an opportunity to steal he takes on the role of expert con man and thief.  "It Opens the Sky" begins with a scene in which Denning robs a sad drunken widow of a very valuable watch, the only thing she has left from her husband.

A staggeringly rich businessman, Richard Rockhard, contacts Deeming.  He needs a man of Denning's abilities to undertake a perilous mission--as a reward, Deeming will receive a tremendous reward, far more moolah than he has ever seen!  Rockhard has a son who is in trouble, Donald.  Don is an archaeologist and wanted to conduct a dig on a planet the Angels have decreed forbidden and surrounded with an impenetrable force field.  Richard and Don came into possession of two tiny one-man alien space craft that can penetrate the force field.  Unfortunately, they didn't realize that the alien vessel can only penetrate the forcefield one way--now Don is trapped on the forbidden planet.  Luckily, Richard's boffins figured out how to modify the second alien ship to pass through the force field both ways.  Deeming's job is to take the second alien ship and rescue Don.  There are a bunch of intermediary steps to this mission that I won't go into here.

Sturgeon does a good job with all the things Deeming has to do to get to Don: all the technology--like how the space ships work--all the espionage and heist and chase elements, and all the moral dilemmas Deeming has to resolve.  Deeming learns on a news broadcast that the government has arrested Richard Rockhard and seized all his assets--should Deeming still take the terrible risk of trying to rescue Don, even though now no reward will be forthcoming?  While trying to achieve his mission, Deeming meets "a slender girl in her mid-teens" and falls in love with her--will he exploit her to get the job done despite her innocence and his feelings for her?  And so forth.

I was really enjoying this story for like 35 pages but then came the twist ending.  There is no Richard Rockhard!  There is no Donald Rockhard!  Deeming has not been outwitting the Angels as a thief since his childhood, nor in his effort to rescue Don!  It has all been an illusion, all a test run by the supergenius Angels!  Since he was a kid, Deeming showed great intelligence and ambition and these admirable characteristics have manifested themselves in his thefts and (apparent) evasion of detection by the Angels.  But it is now revealed to us readers that Deeming always gave back to people that which he had stolen!  And it is revealed to Deeming by the Angels that they were watching his every move since childhood because he is a candidate for Angelhood!  The commission from Rockhard, a man who does not exist, was an elaborate illusion, a test of Deeming's ability to solve problems and to make the correct moral choices while under pressure.  And he has passed the test!  Deeming can become an Angel!  The powers he will have as an Angel will end his feeling of being constricted, will open up the sky for him.

Before he takes on the mantle of Angelhood, the Angels hook Deeming up with that "girl in her mid-teens" and they get married and have a bunch of kids and grandkids.  Deeming is transformed into an immortal Angel after his wife dies of old age.

"It Opens the Sky" is the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too story.  Deeming is a master thief who is always outwitting people--but still a very very good guy!  The future is a totalitarian police state whose overlords employ surveillance capabilities and invincible commissars the likes of which the Chinese Communist Party can only dream--but don't worry, the commissars who watch your every move are all nice guys who do everything to protect you and nothing to abuse you!  Deeming decides to devote his life to serving mankind, but he doesn't have to sacrifice love and family life to do so--he can spend 60 years building a beautiful family with a wonderful spouse and then be mustered into the ranks of the immortal guardians.  In real life we all have to face trade offs, make sacrifices, incur opportunity costs, but not here in Ted's wish fulfillment fantasy (in which you can marry a 16-year-old, hubba hubba!)  Ted has laid yet another utopia on us!    

Alright, so I have some gripes about the last four or five pages of this story.  But I am still going to say "It Opens the Sky" is moderately good.  For one thing, I really did enjoy like 80 or 90% of it.  Also, even though the ending threw me for a loop, Sturgeon plays fair; all the wacky stuff at the end is foreshadowed and could have been predicted by a smarter reader than your humble blogger.  The style is smooth and the pacing and structure are all good.  

"It Opens the Sky" debuted in Venture, and has not been anthologized in English as far as isfdb can tell, though it has appeared in Russian anthologies.

"A Touch of Strange" (1958)

Are mermaids still trending?  I feel like mermaids were a trend a few months ago--crappy stores I found myself in seemed to have among the junk they were peddling stacks of mugs and T-shirts with the word "mermaid" emblazoned on them.  Anyway, Ted back in 1958 was on top of the mermaid trend with this here story, "A Touch of Strange," which first appeared in F&SF, and people seem to have loved it.  "A Touch of Strange" has reappeared in quite a few anthologies, including two different F&SF retrospectives, one printed in 1970, one in 2009.  When Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Mermaids! first appeared in 1986, Sturgeon's name was on top of the list on the cover, above Gene Wolfe's and Jane Yolen's.  M. L. Carter included the story in 1972's Demon Lovers and Strange Seductions, which has a strong Jeff Jones cover.  When Demon Lovers and Strange Seductions appeared a year later in Germany under the title Horror-Love, it had a somewhat shocking cover that pushes our buttons regarding topics like masturbation and self-mutilation.  Be careful with those scissors down there, lady!

Considering the titles borne by Ms. Carter's anthology, I expected something horrible to happen to somebody, but "A Touch of Strange" turns out to be a meet-cute love story with a happy ending, though there are some odd and creepy elements to it.  

A guy has been regularly having nighttime rendezvouses with a mermaid on a bunch of rocks a short swim away from the shore known as "Harpy's Jaw."  Tonight he goes to meet her and finds a human woman already there--she has come to Harpy's Jaw for one of her regular meetings with a merman!  The two humans start to talking, learn that they both are ordinary boring people without any particularly outstanding characteristics or experiences.  Symbolizing this, his name is John Smith and hers is Jane Dow and they both hail from a town called Springfield, though towns in different states.  The most interesting, the only strange, thing that has ever happened to either of them is the recent relationship with a merperson.  These relationships have an erotic character, but do not seem to include conventional mammal-style sexual intercourse; for one thing, merpeople reproduce as do many fish--the female lays a bunch of eggs and then the male ejaculates on them.  The humans have been kissing the merpeeps, an odd and even unsettling experience because merpeople's lips and teeth and tongues are very different from a human's.  Perhaps even more weird and disturbing, merpeople like to be insulted and to learn new "cuss words," and a major component of both John and Jane's relationships with merpeople is the development and utterance of harsh names and bitter sarcastic complaints, like "you baggy old guano-guzzler" and "Was that really you singin' or are you sitting on a blowfish?"

John and Jane fall in love, and before either of their scaly dates arrive they hurry away to live happily ever after.  It is hinted that maybe the merpeople set these two up--the merpeople are definitely portrayed as manipulative and controlling.  "They have a way of getting you to do what they want," says John of the merfolk, and the name of the rocks where these encounters all seem to happen is perhaps an oblique reference to the sirens of Greek mythology who draw men to their doom with their irresistible singing.  

This story is OK, I guess.  Besides finding "A Touch of Strange" a little slight, I am also finding it a little cryptic.  On the one hand it seems to be designed as a heartwarming celebration of the magic that is love, and on the other it has those weird bestiality and fetishistic erotic elements.  I keep wondering if I am missing some element of the humans' relationships with the merpeople, something beyond the kissing and "cussing," something that is hinted at the way homosexuality and penis gigantism are hinted at in "The Affair of the Green Monkey," one of the Sturgeon stories we read last episode.  Jane suggests her relationship with the merman is different than his relationship with the mermaid, but I'm not sure how--maybe John really did have intercourse with the mermaid?  Or more likely she erroneously assumes John had intercourse with the mermaid and John just doesn't disabuse Jane of her misapprehension.  Also, I'm not really sure what the significance of the merpeople's fascination with "cussing" is, how it connects to the other elements of the story, if at all.  Is the idea (sort of like in "A Crime for Llewellyn") that John and Jane are too monochromatically good and need to misbehave a little to become well-rounded people and thus truly lovable?

**********

These three pieces are better than the first batch of tales from A Touch of Strange.  None of them is bad and I'm willing to entertain the idea that two of them are good.  So, a welcome trend.  In our next episode we will finish up with A Touch of Strange and I already expect to be rating one of the stories very high, having read it years ago, so the trend is likely to continue.