The Man Who Lost the Sea (47 page)

“The Man Who Told Lies”:
first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1959, under the pseudonym “Billy Watson” as part of a feature called “Quintet.” “Quintet” consisted of three short-short stories and two poems, all credited to names unfamiliar to the magazine’s readers. The editor’s introduction to the feature read as follows:

“The imaginative eye of a child sees without the blinders of culture and sophistication, and the result, in the case of a truly creative child, is a fresh and different kind of art which an adult cannot easily duplicate.… Or can he? That is the question at hand. At least one of the following pieces was written by a child under 12; at least one was written by either Damon Knight, Jane Rice, Theodore Sturgeon, or Alfred Bester—all of whom are, shall we say, over 35. All of the pieces are, we think, worth reading on any grounds; we offer the additional piquancy of asking you to guess which of the following bylines are the actual names of creative children, and which hide the identities of professional writers. To give you adequate time to think about it, we withhold the answers till next month.”

“The Man Who Lost the Sea”:
first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, October 1959.

In his introduction to “The Man Who Lost the Sea” in the 1979 collection
The Golden Helix
, Sturgeon wrote:

In 1959 I left for the West Indies seeking a balmy climate and a low-rent district. For the first time in my life I worked eight hours a day, seven days a week on a regular schedule. And in practically every way it turned into a disaster. I just couldn’t make a story jell. I finally got going on a space-travel story and ground out words, one after the other, until I had a start, a middle, a finish. It was awful—wordy and slow and muzzy
.

So literally for months I cut. I cut until the story and I bled. I cut it from 21,000 words down to 5,000, and at last called it finished. I showed it to my wife and she couldn’t understand it. I showed it to my mother, who was alive at the time, and she couldn’t understand it. I had completely lost perspective on it, and I returned to the States, bloody and very much bowed
.

Shortly afterward Bob Mills called and wanted a story for an All-Star issue of
F&SF.
I told him that all I had was this, but that if I sent it, I never wanted to see it again. I did, and he read it, and called back to say it was okay, he guessed
—but it needed cutting!

I guess I got a little hysterical I told him to burn it. But he bought it, and ran it, and it wound up in that year’s Martha Foley Award Anthology as one of the best short stories of the year. Moral: Don’t believe what everybody tells you, even if everybody is your mother
.

“The Man Who Lost the Sea” did in fact get selected for Martha Foley’s prestigious annual anthology
Best American Short Stories
, possibly the first time a story first published in a science fiction magazine was awarded that honor. And it is described as “perhaps his most-praised story” on the back of the year 2000 Vintage Books Sturgeon collection,
Selected Stories
.

On March 31, 1959, Sturgeon mailed “The Man Who Lost the Sea” to his New York literary agent from Grenada Island accompanied by a letter that began:
Here at last is the story on which I have worked so hard for so long—longer, as a consecutive effort, than anything else I have ever written. It has been profoundly researched: if anyone ever wants to know, I will supply a formidable bibliography. Everything in it, the landscape, the sky phenomena, the ship design, the suit, the sickness, even the special kind of in-shock mental aberration suffered by the protagonist, is in
accord with the best references I have or can lay my hands on
.

Yet I am profoundly discouraged with it. What I have been trying to do—what has taken me so long—is to hit the top slick markets with a kind of s-f which is truly scientific, but not the ultra-ultra of wild distant worlds and phantastic beasties. What I want is the future of the day after tomorrow, clearly linked to today’s headlines. I see clearly that I ought not to change my style or approach, but simply go on with what I’ve done all along, if only because Ray Russell [of
Playboy],
among others, is willing to list already published stuff as items he would have bought, as is. But I have been unable to do this, since I regard my association with you as a profound break with all that has gone before, and a new career in new places. Perhaps I should go back to the same as before, and rely on you to throw it high and let it find its own level. Maybe you’ll have a word of advice for me on this
.

To be specific, I feel that in this story I have aimed at a market which requires less “science,” not more: more direct, simple-minded clarity, not less. But what I’ve produced is an elaborate switching of points-of-view, tense, and locale, self-consciously “skillful” to the point of obscuration
.

I’d like to rewrite it and will if you say so: and I’ll do it quickly, by the way—don’t worry about that! I have it all blocked out. I think the very worst fault of this version is similar to that I detected in “Ride In, Ride Out”
[a not-yet-published Sturgeon/Ward story]—
a protagonist who does virtually nothing, but lounges along letting things happen to him. I think in the rewrite this problem of the “sick man” should be a fight, a battle every inch of the way, until at the end, he wins. He still dies, but he wins his particular battle, which is to figure out where he is—an act which is obscured to him, in his sickness, by his subconscious mind’s unwillingness to face the fact that he is not only dying but more alone than anyone has ever been before. So bit by bit, piece by piece, he gathers the evidence before him until he has the truth, then transcends it in his triumphant last line. So that instead of the current, supine waiting for it all to clear up for him, he
makes
it clear up—surely the essence of good narrative
.

“The Man Who Lost the Sea” was nominated for a Hugo Award for best science fiction short story of the year 1959.

In her discussion of “portrait stories” (mentioned above in the note to “A Crime for Llewellyn”), Lucy Menger wrote: “Despite an exotic locale, ‘The Man Who Lost the Sea’ is not, by Sturgeon’s own definition
[A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content]
, science fiction because its scientific elements could be replaced by relative commonplaces. Told in an unusual manner, it is the drama of a man becoming aware of his own circumstances and realizing that his defeat is only one facet of a larger victory.” Menger notes that the Sturgeon definition she quotes is from page 10 of a 1962 book edited by Damon Knight called
A Century of Science Fiction
.

Sturgeon’s daughter Noël has said, “one of the things that has always struck me about this story is how it turned out, eerily, to be a description of how he [TS] died, slowly losing the ability to breathe.”

“The Man Who Figured Everything”
by Theodore Sturgeon and Don Ward; first published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
, January 1960.

Editor’s introduction to this story from the original magazine appearance:

“An unorthodox Western detective story—unorthodox because it not only breaks the rules of Westerns but of crime fiction as well. As a matter of fact, the authors, messrs. Sturgeon and Ward, deliberately set out to write a Western that departed from tradition and formula—and they succeeded.

“So meet Arch Scott, a Western law man, and the Badlands Bookkeeper, a Western bad man, who play their usual roles in unusual ways …”

TS in 1956 described the process of collaboration between himself and Ward:
Don dreams ’em up and I write ’em my way and submit them without his seeing them
. Ward in his introduction to their 1973 collection,
Sturgeon’s West
, described the collaboration as “my contribution minor, his major.”

“Like Young”:
first published in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, March 1960.

There is a half-page, 19 single-spaced lines, typed note among Sturgeon’s papers found at his former home in Woodstock, that is clearly the genesis not just of this story’s idea but of some of its language:
They called us the Immune, but that was a misnomer. We’d all had it. It’s just that we hadn’t died of it. Mankind was dead; we weren’t, just yet
.

Humanity wasn’t.… I guess these things are open to definition. There were six hundred and four of us left alive, and we’d all grown up to a
long lifetime devoted to the single idea of seeing to it that with mankind dead, humanity would survive—humanity in the sense of aspiration, generosity—if you like, nobility
.

We were going to give it to the otters
.

Ever since the first man observed with delight the playfulness of the otters, ever since they had been seen using tools—the sea otter always has, you know, floating on his back, bracing a shellfish against his chest, cracking it with a stone—the evidence had been before us that the Otters were the next Ones. Adaptable, intelligent, humorful in the way that only humans had been humorful, continuing it all their lives, while other species got grim at adulthood—wonderfully able to survive in arctic or tropics, highland and low—it had always been obvious that the otters would be Next
.

Experiments in accelerating their development were made, of course, but without success except in the extrapolative, statistical sense; it became obvious that they would advance to civilized status, but not in our lifetimes
.

When the narrator says, near the middle of this story,
“For our kind to end with a whimper … this was Bad Art”
I hear echoes of these lines from the closing pages of Sturgeon’s first novel,
The Dreaming Jewels: She has given her life for an alien caste … It might be that “justice” and “mercy” are relative terms; but nothing can alter the fact that her death, upon earning her right to survive, is bad art
. I asked Sturgeon about these lines in 1978 when I was writing an introduction for a reprint of that novel. He told me:
I think I derived that from an early Heinlein story, which one I don’t remember. where a real nuts-and-bolts engineering type was asked if he believed in life after death, and he said immediately and without hesitation, of course I do. And this girl was really astonished and says, why is that? And he says “It has to be that way, otherwise it would be bad art.” That impressed me tremendously, it really did
.

“Night Ride”:
first published in
Keyhole Mystery Magazine
, June 1960. Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: THE RUNAWAY BUS WAS CARRYING A STRANGE GROUP ON ITS ONE-WAY PLUNGE TO DOOM. THERE WERE 32 LIVE PASSENGERS—AND ONE CORPSE!

“Need”:
first published in the Sturgeon collection
Beyond
(Avon paperbacks, July 1960).

“Need” was nominated for a Hugo Award for best science fiction novelette of the year 1960.

In a letter to Damon Knight dated Nov. 13, 1959, TS wrote:
I sold a new book to Avon in the summer. They wouldn’t play unless I promised a new novelette to go with it. I get $750 if I send them 10–15M
[10 to 15 thousand words].
I can’t write the 10–15M
. [This in the context of describing a bout of writer’s block that had started in the West Indies.] This letter to Knight is also interesting for a paragraph in which he reports his recollection of how long it took him to write certain stories and novels that he wrote relatively quickly (and easily) as opposed to the long struggle he was having with “Need”:
I wrote “Saucer of Loneliness” in four hours, “The Pod in the Barrier” in one day, “Drusilla Strange” in three, “Killdozer!” in nine
, I, Libertine
in 22
. More than Human
took five weeks total
.

There are ten pages of “maundering” notes among Sturgeon’s papers, trying to develop this story idea, several of them headed “Gorwing.” The following passages (from one single-spaced sheet of typing) suggest that TS had already written the opening scene (or had pictured it, thought about it) and was using that plus presumably a basic idea of a story about a guy (Gorwing) who has a telepathic ability (and, sometimes, curse) to be aware of people in need and of what they seem to be feeling a need for:

It seems to me that perhaps the best narrator is the first (taxi) victim. This guy is really burning at being taken this way; yet overriding that is a growing curiosity as to how the hell Gorwing did it. He goes to work on the one weak link—Noat. What happens when the plug-ugly is treated well, covered for his boss, treated as a real human being with real problems? Perhaps he’s always been underprivileged and warms to this. GLIMMERING of a sequence where Smith almost learns the trick, walking about under the stars and sensing the crying, yearning, hungry hopeful masses around him … but my Machine won’t produce this until it has a clear Build to the yarn … Hm … THIS MUST BE TRUE: If I keep whanging away at this plot it will yield. And then—think of it! All I’ll have to do then is to write what moves me, about anyone, anywhere—and the hell with sf & f … I wonder if I could write the Sylvana story in a week once the draft is done? I bet I could. And oh then the lovely
money … GALAXY and then Doubleday or Farrar, Strauss, and later, Gold Medal or Dell … but I can’t do any of that until this ruddy Avon chore is done with … so let’s go: Gorwing has a talent. Marvelous as it is, it profits him little because too seldom does anyone close enough need anything he has to offer. He enlists the aid of a mass of muscles nzmed George Noat, known as G-note. One episode has to do with $100 asked demanded for a one-way ride from Nyack to Congers, victim, one Smith. With this as the basis, get right to work and build a good reader-identification plot
.