Lastly, I note I will be reading these stories in my '65 paperback, but may consult the magazine versions at the internet archive. The titles of the three stories above serve as links to the scans of those old magazines, and this link right here should take you to a scan of the very edition I am reading.
"The Silken-Swift" (1953)
"The Silken-Swift" is set in a fairy-tale world where the Squire lives in a Great House, a world inhabited by two beautiful women, one purest good and one purest evil, and a strong handsome man both women have their eyes on. The topic of "The Silken-Swift" is Sturgeon's perennial topic, love and sex, and like so many of Sturgeon's stories, it is kind of edgy, perhaps disturbing or offensive--Sturgeon loves to challenge conventional morality. I sometimes complain that writers include too much description in their stories, and Sturgeon really goes to town describing the Squire's Great House and the nearby Bog and what happens in these fantastical locales, but Sturgeon's descriptions, I feel, add to the atmosphere and make more comprehensible and creditable the behavior of the characters, behavior that is pretty extreme and perhaps only really believable in a fairy tale setting.
The Squire is often away, leaving his beautiful daughter Rita to her own devices. Rita is totally evil, and loves more than anything to tease men to the point of madness, to humiliate them by insincerely offering them her body and then withholding it to torture them; she also tortures them in other ways. Her latest victim is Del, the villager with the big beautiful muscles and the long beautiful hair. Rita lures Del into the Great House and entrances him with her sexy dancing and the fancy food she serves, promising her body but keeping it from him. The climax of her manipulations is to trick him into drinking a potion that renders him blind. Then she continues to tease and trick him so that he chases her around the House and then outside the House, banging into things and falling down stairs so he is injured and stunned.
Living nearby is Barbara, a beautiful girl in touch with nature. She is friends with all the animals and plants, and has a good attitude about life. She is in love with Del but it is a noble and pure love--she isn't sick with frustrated desire because he doesn't pay any attention to her, but is warmed and comforted just to see the handsome and sturdy Del in the distance. Similarly, when she sees the unicorn that comes to the pool of pure water in the Bog, Barbara cherishes the sight of the beautiful creature.
Barbara comes upon the injured Del as he lies dazed in front of the Great House. She comforts and tries to heal him, her love giving her strength to lug his big muscular body to a comfortable place where she can tend his wounds. Blinded and still amazed, Del thinks Barbara is Rita and that this helpful behavior is further tantalizing torture. Barbara thinks it may comfort Del to hear about the beautiful unicorn, and she sings for Del the song she composed about the marvelous beast. Thinking her Rita, Del rapes Barbara, taunting her with the fact that only a virgin can attract a unicorn.
Some time later Del's eyesight has returned and he confronts Rita. Rita denies having tormented him outside the House and told him about a unicorn. She offers to prove she is still a virgin by capturing this unicorn, and enlists Barbara, whom she knows is familiar with the Bog, to guide her to the pool. Del and the rest of the villagers accompany the women. What will happen when the unicorn arrives? Will Rita the virgin capture it with the golden bridle she has brought with her? Or will the unicorn flip the script and show favor to Barbara, who, though no longer a virgin, is a good person (after all, she didn't have Del dragged before the authorities for raping her)?
This is a well-written and compelling story which feels convincing when you are reading it even though it is pretty over-the-top with its cartoonishly good and evil women. We expect Sturgeon's work to push boundaries and challenge our assumptions, edgy, and "The Silken-Swift" is challenging in multiple ways. When I was in college, the feminists talked about the Madonna-whore complex, the way men see women not as complex nuanced personalities but as either super good and sexually innocent or super evil and sex crazed, and of course this is exactly how Sturgeon depicts the two women in this story (though of course Rita's real sin is not having too much sex but withholding sex after getting guys all revved up.) Sturgeon also challenges us with his somewhat counterintuitive and perhaps confusing philosophy of love and goodness ("...Barbara's life was very full, for she was born to receive....loving is a most receiving thing, as anyone can attest who has been loved without returning it...it is the one who is loved who must give and give....") and with his expectation that we sympathize and forgive a rapist. Even if we object to what Sturgeon is doing with "The Silken-Swift" or disagree with some or all of what he is saying, he presents it all in a way that indicates he is sincere and has actually considered these ideas, that he isn't just trying to shock you in a cheap exploitative way by saying something crazy or depicting creepy sex, and so the story is thought-provoking and engaging (and no doubt for some titillating in its depiction of abusive sexual behavior.)
Thumbs up for "The Silken-Swift."
"A Saucer of Loneliness" (1953)
(Don't worry, maybe in real life I take a walk in ill-fitting shoes and my foot is still hurting two months later, but in a book people get beaten unconscious and they are just fine twenty minutes later.)
On the third and fourth pages of "A Saucer of Loneliness," the two characters are talking on the beach, the woman demanding the narrator not touch her and saying "You don't know who I am. Nobody knows who I am." The next eight pages of the story are a flashback describing, for some reason in the third person, not in the voice of the narrator or this suicidal woman, who she is.
At seventeen she was an unattractive and not particularly intelligent girl from a not very well-off family. Walking in Central Park in Manhattan, a flying saucer like five or six inches across came down from the sky and stuck briefly to her forehead before falling off. In mere minutes the FBI got to her and the dead saucer and dragged her off to confinement where various government entities tried to get information out of the girl--it is believed that an alien intelligence or entity entered her brain from the saucer, and the government wants as much data as they can get from this alien encounter to help defend the Earth from hostile E.T.s or defend the West from the Reds. But the girl, who never had a boyfriend or even a date, and never had a bedroom to herself, now finally had something of her own and refused to tell anyone anything about what she has learned from the aliens.
Eventually she was released, though she received a purely nominal punishment for contempt of court for not saying anything about the alien entity. The papers and pop culture are full of her story, and all such media is unsympathetic. Her mother the drunk doesn't want anything to do with her anymore, and people are afraid to have her around as they have the idea she may be a spy or a traitor. Men date her but they all turn out to be policemen or intelligence agents of some type or another trying to get info about the aliens from her. All alone, she has tried to fill her life with hobbies, like reading novels and learning about nature, but she was soon disillusioned with these pastimes. (Novels, for example, are always about the beautiful people, with whom she cannot identify.) She started throwing into the ocean bottles that contain a piece of paper with a little poem about being lonely written on it. Eventually she quit throwing the bottles, as she realized the government was collecting them all.
But the Feds missed at least one! It turns out that the narrator is a man as lonely as this woman. He has a club foot and a speech impediment and an ugly face so can't get women or a job. He found one of the bottles and through tireless research figured out where it must have come from. The poem is the only thing the woman learned from the aliens--the saucer was a message in a bottle just like the ones she threw into the sea, only the aliens thrown their bottles across space. By coincidence, the very day the narrator came to find her is the day she finally decided to kill herself. Luckily he saved her and these two unattractive people can live together happily ever after.
The big theme of Sturgeon's career is love and often in his stories he writes affectingly about human relationships, and "A Saucer of Loneliness" does that. At the same time, Sturgeon is an elitist who has contempt for most of humanity, and that elitism and contempt are very present in "A Saucer of Loneliness," and, for me, mar the whole enterprise. Sturgeon is scathing in his description of the crowd that surrounds the girl in Central Park when she collapses from being hit by a flying saucer, he makes fun of people worried about communism and enemy attack as if no communist ever hurt anybody and nobody ever attacked anybody else, and the only person he has anything positive to say about is a shrink. Presumably this appeals to the many SF editors and readers who are leftists who take Freudianism seriously, but I find this misanthropy and whistling past the graveyard when it comes to foreign threats to be trying and annoying.
In addition, some of the scenes and plot elements feel overwritten and overdone, like the suicide attempt in the first two pages; I was all right with the extravagant detail and extreme personalities and behavior in "The Silken-Swift" because it was set in a fairy tale landscape, but laying it on similarly thick in the real world of New York City, the Soviet Union and psychologists damages the story's credibility.
I've got complaints, but "A Saucer of Loneliness" feels original and is always engaging, never boring, so I can mildly recommend it.
"A Saucer of Loneliness" debuted in a copy of Galaxy that we may be cracking open some day because it prints stories by Damon Knight and Algis Budrys I don't recognize; there is also a pretty hostile review of August Derleth's Beachheads in Space by Groff Conklin.
Mr. Derleth's twelfth anthology contains 14 stories, 5 of which are A, 2 are B-, one is C, and 6 are D or D-....Class A stories are Simak's "Beachhead," van Vogt's "Repetition," Russell's previously anthologized "Metamorphosite," Asimov's "Breeds There A Man . . . ?" and Wyndham's "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down." The rest of the tales (even the mildly "B" ones) we really can do without.I think I've read six stories from Beachheads in Space, and you can see if I thought we could do without any of them here.
"A Saucer of Lonliness" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections (it is the title story of the seventh volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon) and anthologies including those that purport to offer "masterpieces" and stories that represent the SF of the 1950s.
"The Sex Opposite" has much of the structure and stock elements of a detective story, and again and again characters withhold information from each other and Sturgeon withholds information from us readers, information that is sprung later in a way that is supposed to be dramatic. I often find this kind of thing annoying; I'm a simple soul with limited patience for dead ends, cul-de-sacs, and red herrings and would just like to get from point A to point B.
Budgie is one of those young female reporters we encounter in genre fiction who is always wheedling and whining and cajoling in her efforts to get a scoop. She busts into the morgue on Dr. Muhlenberg, as she apparently does all the time, looking for some juicy 411 to build a story around. It also seems that Budgie and Muley have some kind of mutual but not quite acknowledged attraction to each other--if you were foolish enough to read the editor's introduction to the story in the Fall 1952 issue of Fantastic, you'd know that the climax of the story is Budgie and Muley finally becoming an item. (Sex seems to be a theme of the issue--the cover has a wretched homeless bum on it, but the interior illos offer an abundance of femmes fatale and curvaceous ladies, including a portfolio of Heinrich Kley's drawings of nude women ice skating with crocodiles.) Budgie and Muley each are aware of some very strange and exciting events, but instead of just telling each other the blockbuster news they have, they are both cagey and have to manipulate each other into giving up the goods. To make a long story short, conjoined twins were in the park after dark, maybe making out or engaging in heavy petting or something (!) and got murdered--Budgie heard the scream of the dying, the most horrible sound she has ever heard, and after she recovered from the shock she followed the ambulance to the morgue where Muhlenberg is amazed by the bodies of the victims, they being the most perfectly formed and least-uncomfortably conjoined Siamese twins he has ever become aware of. The two hear that unique scream again--was it outside, the cry of another victim? Or are the "bodies" in the morgue still alive?
While our hero and heroine are outside investigating, somebody with knowledge of surgery and chemistry uses chemicals to burn up the bodies in the morgue--nothing is left of the corpses after the 7000 degrees Fahrenheit inferno! Sturgeon tries to turn Muhlenberg's fighting the fire into a thrilling action scene, but it is just confusing--Muley closes a door on the fire and then takes fire extinguishers in both hands and somehow puts out the fire but Sturgeon doesn't say that he set down any of the fire extinguishers or opened the door, but I guess he must have.
Budgie is back home when Muley goes to a Mexican bar to drink beer and listen to Yma Sumac on the jukebox. In the bar is a beautiful woman--she also loves Sumac! This woman is Muhlenberg's dream girl, just the kind of woman he has always wanted, and he feels totally at ease, absolutely sympatico with her. She goes back with him to his place where they listen to records and read classics aloud to each other. She implies they are going to have sex but while he isn't looking she sneaks off; fortunately, they made a date for tomorrow night at a dive bar in a tough part of town.
The next evening after work at the morgue, Muhlenberg goes out to meet his dream girl and runs into Budgie. Budgie tells him that today she met her dream man in the morning and spent the day with him walking in the country and made a date with him to meet right here at this dump. The dream-creature appears, a woman in masculine clothes--she spent last evening with M and today with B.
Then comes the long explanation. Living among us is a race of females who reproduce asexually by budding. This budding produces a clone, so, to make sure the race enjoys the benefits of genetic variation, these beings also perform what Sturgeon calls "syzygy"--two of the beings melt together, exchange some genetic material, and then separate, each changed to some degree. Sturgeon says paramecium do this. (If I am understanding this right, wikipedia calls this process "conjugation.") Last night's murder victims were in the process of syzygy when some punks came upon them and killed them. Why were these beings doing this in public instead of some safe place. Because they love nature!
As we might expect of creatures in a Sturgeon story, these sexless women are superior to the human race in almost every way--peaceful, in touch with nature, equipped with psychic powers, possessed of empathy bordering on a collective consciousness, blah blah blah. What they lack is the ambition, the affinity for risk, that we humans have and that leads us to build technology, machines, institutions. So, they live in a symbiotic relationship with us homo sapiens--they benefit from our building and they use their psychic powers to inspire our greatest artists. It was these psychic and empathic powers that she used to make M and B feel so warm and cozy with her--these sexless females are experts in all aspects of love except the sexual. Of course, they have to keep their existence a secret because human beings are so violent and always try to kill people who are different--it was she who obliterated the evidence in the morgue. (Science fiction readers love this "woe is me, I am different than everybody else (and better, of course) and so everybody is mean to me" goop.) Sturgeon puts in a good word for world government through this woman's mouth, making me groan--giving the Chinese Communist Party and Islamic jihadis even more influence over my life is not what I am looking for, Ted.
The sexless woman has not only invited Budgie and Muhley to this crummy bar, but the three men who slew her fellows in the park while they were in the middle of the most wonderful of all (non-sexual) love experiences. When she can see the killers out the bar window, she uses her psychic powers to make them kill each other. Then she uses her psychic powers to make Budgie and Muhlenberg forget everything she just told them. But after she leaves, her beneficent influence lingers--B and M admit they love each other and we readers are able to believe they live happily ever after. (Science fiction readers love the idea of using special powers to get revenge on or manipulate the normies.)
This is today's weakest story, and I have enumerated my many complaints above, but like "A Saucer of Loneliness," "The Sex Opposite" is strange and challenging in the way serious SF should be and is never boring, so I'm putting it at the border of acceptable and good.
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| The Jan '68 ish of Fantastic prints two interior illos by Jeff Jones, so you Jones completists should check it out |
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Sturgeon's action scenes are clunky, and some of his attitudes are silly and his ideas groaners, but he's a writer who is serious and passionate and holds the reader's interest and often throws stuff at you that feels new. So a decent crop of stories. Stay tuned for more interaction with Killdozer Ted, including stories that did not debut in science fiction magazines.
Sturgeon's action scenes are clunky, and some of his attitudes are silly and his ideas groaners, but he's a writer who is serious and passionate and holds the reader's interest and often throws stuff at you that feels new. So a decent crop of stories. Stay tuned for more interaction with Killdozer Ted, including stories that did not debut in science fiction magazines.
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