And Now the News (53 page)

An odd thing has happened to me throughout my writing life: a hint, or an impulse, or some such which sidles into what I am writing, ignoring my lack of any formal training, or indeed, any real information. Next thing I know—or years later—this “something” will show up in the marketplace, or in a new mental therapy, or in the form (as happened recently) of a long quotation in the
Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
from one of my yarns, describing a futuristic device which is suddenly on the cutting edge of a modern technology. And sometimes a notion like that hasn't been used yet, but will be because it must be. A perfect example is buried in this story: it's the therapeutic use of the glaring, flashing red light in the correction of certain negative self-evaluations. I know of no therapist who uses it in all the years since it appeared (in 1956) but I know someone will. There are, by the way, much better ways of doing this than by punching little holes in an audio tape; these had not been devised when I wrote the story. You'll understand all this when you read it
.

A word must be said about the title. Many readers have told me that if they think of it at all, they are satisfied that it has to do with learning to crawl before learning to walk. It has nothing to do with that. I chose it because it is the opening line of a poem, or song, or bit of doggerel, which I seem to have known since I was a child, and therefore concluded that everyone must know it. As far as I have been able to find since, however, nobody has ever heard of this source, and if anyone can identify it for me, I'll be pleased. The line is:

“ ‘Won't you walk into my parlor?' said the spider to the fly …”

Attached to the carbon of this rubric found amongst Sturgeon's papers are two letters from readers responding to the above request and identifying the poem the story's title is taken from as “The Spider and the Fly” by Mary Howitt, which actually begins, “Will you walk …”

Editor's blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: SITUATIONS CAN PILE UP ON A MAN SO THEY DRIVE HIM TO DESPERATE ACTION. USUALLY, THOUGH, THE DESPERATE ACTION IS ALONG THE WRONG LINE; PROPERLY APPLIED, IT WOULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM …

“New York Vignette”:
first published (posthumously) in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 1999
.
Written sometime in 1955 as a script for the “Pulse” program on the NBC radio station in New York City, The manuscript of the story/script was found among Sturgeon's papers after his death, and was submitted to F&SF in 1999 by the Sturgeon Literary Trust when the editor of F&SF asked for an unpublished Sturgeon story for use in the annual anniversary issue. The story was evidently submitted to the same magazine in the form of a recording in early 1956. In a letter to F&SF editor Anthony Boucher dated Feb 4, 1956, TS wrote:
You shall ere long receive … one flat grey package containing a phono record (NOTE: It plays 33/1/3 rpm but with a 78 needle) and its script. The reading is by John Wingate, and no one could have done a more sensitive job. The music was chosen by Draper Lewis, who was producer of this particular show. PULSE was a 13-week experiment by NBC, a local offering featuring remotes all over town, a roving mike, and various features presenting a new freedom from the rigid 30 or 15-minute shackles of radio; if a feature took 17 minutes they wouldn't cut it; if an interview tok an interesting turn, they let it run. PULSE is now an early-morning show of somewhat more conventional nature; the experiment (which ran on Saurdays from 7
A.M.
to 2
P.M.
)
was not exactly a failure; the gigantic network MONITOR is very largely the postcursor of the original PULSE. If you want this [story] on paper in the event of acceptance for F&SF, it can be easily arranged
.

“The Half-Way Tree Murder”:
first published in
The Saint Detective Magazine
, March 1956. Editor's blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: IN THE BRIGHT JAMAICAN SUNLIGHT IT WAS HARD FOR COTRELL TO BELIEVE THAT MURDER COULD WEAR
SO CRUELLY TREACHEROUS A MASK. Editor's introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance: “It isn't often that a writer with a top-echelon reputation in one branch of imaginative fiction reaches a shining pinnacle of mastery in another. But Theodore Sturgeon is the exception which disproves the rule. True, a good many science fiction writers besides Mr. Sturgeon have an enviable record of accomplishment in the mystery field. But a yarn such as this, a perfect gem of a mystery which will linger long in memory, is rather special, we think.”

As the readers of this series of books know, Sturgeon knew Jamaica well, having lived there in 1941 and '42.

“The Skills of Xanadu”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, July 1956. Editor's blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: WHEN A MALIGNANT WORLD ENDANGERS ANOTHER, SURGERY IS THE USUAL ANSWER. BUT PERHAPS THERE IS ANOTHER—KILL IT WITH KINDNESS!

Sturgeon's introduction to this story in his 1979 collection
The Golden Helix:

Wishful thinking … I yearn to live on Xanadu, and wear their garment, and join with them in their marvelous lifestyle
.

Well, I can't live there and I can't live as they do, but I can do the next best thing: to infect locked-up minds with the idea of freedom in highly contagious ways
.

Dr. Toni Morrison, novelist, essayist and educator, gave a commencement address at Bard College in 1979 in which she said (among many other powerful things) that your freedom is worthless unless you use it to free someone else, and that happiness is not happiness unless it makes others happy
.

I never set down in a simple declarative sentence the theme of my Xanadu story, and now a truly great human being has done it for me
.

A radio dramatization of this story aired on WBAI-FM in New York City sometime in he 1960s.

The title of the story, and the name of the planet and community where it takes place, are clearly taken from Coleridge's poem “Kubla Khan,” which is so well known in the English-speaking world that
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary
defines “Xanadu” as “a place (as a town or village) of idyllic beauty.” This story and its companion piece “The Touch of your Hand” (1953), which presents the same very powerful and original-to-Sturgeon
idea and ideal, are clearly conscious efforts at utopian writing by Sturgeon (as he confirms in the story-introduction quoted above).

“When I was a child,” science fiction novelist Somtow Sucharitkul wrote in
Locus
in July 1985, “I wanted to be exactly like Theodore Sturgeon when I grew up. This was because I discovered a short story called ‘The Skills of Xanadu' in an anthology in a carton of abandoned books on the floor of the library at the Bangkok British School. It was a story set in a universe of astonishing beauty and brutality, a universe ultimately redeemed by compassion. This story changed my life. Later I parlayed the story's theme into an entire tetralogy of my own, but you see, Ted said it all in only twenty pages.”

“The Claustrophile”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, August 1956. Editor's blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, ALONG COMES A STORY LIKE THIS THAT TURNS ‘COMMON SENSE' AROUND—AND PLUMPS IT DOWN SQUARELY ON ITS FEET!

Sturgeon's introduction to this story in his 1979 collection
The Stars Are the Styx:

We are a hero-hungry culture, and it has been a convention to visualize our heroes—especially in the early days of science fiction—to give our heroes bulging deltoids, perfect teeth, and a short temper. The transference of this hero to the controls of spacecraft is understandable but hardly rational. Why a man who is best qualified for bare-handed conflict with a Siberian tiger is the ideal spaceman defies logic
.

“Show me a man who cannot be by himself,” said my dear old mother, “and I'll show you a man who is not good company.” It was this cogitation that led me to wonder why, in so much science fiction, the spaceman had to be the intellectual heir of Conan the Conqueror
.

Or, for that matter, why had he to be a man at all? Despite the proven preferences of NASA, women really are as smart as human beings, and by and large, are smaller and lighter
.

This is the line of thought that produced “The Claustrophile.”

“Dead Dames Don't Dial”:
first published in
The Saint Detective Magazine
, August 1956. This story was adapted as a television drama and broadcast on a program called Schlitz Playhouse in 1959.

Editor's blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance:

ARRESTING A KILLER FOR A MINOR BREACH OF THE LAW MAY BACKFIRE DISASTROUSLY. BUT WITH LIEUTENANT HOWELL IT WAS A PATHWAY TO GLORY.

“Fear Is a Business”:
first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, August 1956. Editor's introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance: “Earlier in this issue, I quoted Heinlein's prophecy of the ‘mass psychoses' of ‘the sixth decade' of this century, and referred to the ‘saucer' hysteria as an example. Much—far too much—science fiction has been writen about saucers, and far too little about saucerism, its causes and implications. Here the compassionate eye of Theodore Sturgeon contemplates a successful saucermonger and finds—well, as in all of the best Sturgeon stories, a little of the truth about all of us.”

“The Other Man”:
first published in
Galaxy Science Fiction
, September 1956. Written sometime in 1955 or early in 1956. This is one of two stories in this volume that can be considered a collaboration between two of the acknowledged grand masters of science fiction writing, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert A. Heinlein.

I went into a terrible dry spell one time, Sturgeon said in his Guest of Honor speech at the 20th World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago in 1962. It was a desperate dry spell and an awful lot depended on me getting writing again. Finally, I wrote to Bob Heinlein. I told him my troubles; that I couldn't write—perhaps it was that I had no ideas in my head that would strike a story. By return airmail—I don't know how he did it—I got back twenty-six story ideas. Some of them ran for a page and a half; one or two of them were a line or two. I mean, there were story ideas that some writers would give their left ear for, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Some of them were merely suggestions; just little hints, things that will spark a writer like, “Ghost of a little cat patting around eternity looking for a familiar lap to sit in.”

This mechanical, chrome-plated Heinlein has a great deal of heart. I had told him my writing troubles, but I hadn't told him of any other troubles, but clipped to the stack of story ideas was a check for a hundred dollars with a little scribbled note, “I have a suspicion your credit is bent.”

It is very difficult for words like “thank you” to handle a man that can do a thing like that
.

I have used, incidentally, two of his ideas since, with due credit built in. Heinlein has some pen names, you know … and when I use one of his ideas I use the names throughout the manuscript in some way. One of the stories, “Fear Is a Business,” has pure Heinlein as the basic idea. I think the other one was “The Other Man.” I am not sure about that, but I do know “Fear Is a Business” was one of them
.

The latter statement is incorrect; Sturgeon while preparing his talk seems to have confused “Fear Is a Business” with another story of his that he sold to the same magazine the same year, “And Now the News …”, which does indeed have “pure Heinlein” (from Robert Heinlein's Feb. 11, 1955 letter to Sturgeon full of what he refers to as “Sturgeonish ideas”) as its basic idea and indeed the source of its plot in detail. “Fear Is a Business,” however, does not seem to derive from any of the story ideas or suggestions in Heinlein's letter, which I found among Sturgeon's papers after his death.

“The Other Man” definitely uses one of Heinlein's letter's ideas as a springboard, and Sturgeon acknowledged this by naming Richard Newell's alternate personality in the story “Anson” (Robert A. Heinlein's middle name and the first part of Heinlein's 1941 pseudonym Anson MacDonald). On the second page of his typewritten, single-spaced, five-page letter, Heinlein wrote:

“We know very little about multiple personality, despite the many case records. Suppose a hypnoanalyst makes a deep investigation into a schizoid … and comes up with the fact that it
is
a separate and non-crazy personality in the body, distinct from the nominal one, and that this new personality is a refugee from (say) 2100
A.D.
, when conditions are so intolerable that escape into another body and another time (even this period) is to be preferred, even at the expense of living more or less helplessly in another man's body.”

The next paragraph of Heinlein's letter follows this train of thought to provide the basis for what would be one of Sturgeon's finer stories, “The Other Man”:

“Or do it this way: hypnoanalyst hypnotizes patient; second personality emerges and refuses to go away. Original-owner personality is a nogood, a bastard, a public enemy, a wifebeater, etc.; new personality is a real hero-type, good, smart, hardworking, etc. What is the ethical situation? Should the analyst try his damnedest to suppress and wipe out the false personality and give the body back to its owner? Or should he
accept that the world is improved by the change? This could be made quite critical.”

In his introduction to “The Other Man” in the 1979 collection The Stars Are the Styx, Sturgeon wrote: A great many scientists and technologists are involved in science fiction. During the Big War, the largest block of subscriptions to Astounding Science Fiction was in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the next largest in Hanford, Washington—facts, John Campbell told me, that the German military intelligence never discovered or noticed. Whenever I appear on radio or television, the interviewer may or may not know anything about the field, but you can bet the guys behind the glass wall do. Many famous scientists, like astronomer Fred Hoyle, anthropologist Chad Oliver, rocket designer G. Harry Stine, and the late Willy Ley, have written it, and some, like Carl Sagan and M.I.T.'s brilliant Marvin Minsky, have come to science through an early love for it. And I had the heady experience of being told by a Nobel caliber scientist that he became a microbiologist because of a single story I wrote
.