The 1980s and 1990s saw a number of projects reprinting the work of mid-century SFF authors in fine, hardcover editions. This is the first volume of one of these, The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. The series comprises 13 volumes published 1995-2010. I bought these as they appeared, and had better get going if I'm eventually to read all of them.

Sturgeon (1918-1985) is considered by many of his peers to be the best short-fiction writer that American science fiction produced, but Sturgeon's Law applies to Sturgeon also - most of these will be only so good. It's quite possible that I've already read all of his best stories in the various collections he published during his lifetime. I aim to compile a list of those stories, and see if I find ones that are new to me. Of course I also may have to reevaluate stories that are not as good as teenage me thought.

The book starts with effusive introductions by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Wolfe - signs of the high regard in which the SF world held Sturgeon. Forty-six stories follow. Many are quite short, what we now call flash fiction. Most are quite slight, but all are competently written. Sturgeon was a wordsmith from the start. Series editor Paul Williams chose to order the stories by date of composition - not of publication. In this volume, that means 1937-1940. Williams supplies 36 pages of end notes, tracing the circumstances surrounding the composition of many of the stories, based on Sturgeon's contemporary letters and later interviews.

Stories include weird fiction, fantasy, horror, and stories without a speculative element. Many have nautical elements derived from the author's brief career as a merchant seaman. Most end with ironic, O. Henry style twists, more so than one would encounter in modern SFF. In "Strangers on a Train", for example, a woman and a man share the last-car observation platform of a train that's leaving Reno, Nevada. As they converse, we learn that each has just gotten a divorce in Reno; they are newly free. The twist is that they divorced from each other - and they decide to get back together again.

Outdated views of women, or at least of how women may exist in society, predominate. In a number of these, a woman falling for a controlling man is treated as "cute." In "A Noose of Light", a smart "girl" uses science to outwit her more glamorous roommate in a competition for a man. So women do have agency, but limited range to use it.

The men in these stories often think and act in ways that don't make sense in terms of how I understand human motivation. Some of that is magazine-market convention, but some is a characteristic preoccupation of Sturgeon, I suspect. He was always interested in people who are different. A certain American wiseguy voice is common, as it was throughout American SFF of the era. Did anyone ever actually talk that way who had not read Damon Runyon?

"Ether Breather" relates trouble caused by differences between original and altered television sequences - if only contemporary media consumers understood the idea, the last five years of political life in the US might have gone much better. In "The Ultimate Egoist" a man discovers he can disbelieve things out of existence, including eventually himself; I don't see why this was the title story. "Derm Fool" contains the great line "My face fell, and I grabbed it and hid it under my coat."

The best stories here were published about a decade later than their composition dates. The jump in quality is striking, and editor Williams goes into lot of detail to show that, in particular, "Bianca's Hands" was indeed written as early as he says. Unless Sturgeon was lying in later interviews, it seems Williams was right.

The two stories we might call canonical are "Bianca's Hands" and "It." I started the superbly creepy horror story "Bianca's Hands" expecting it not to be as good as I remembered - but it was better. An arrogant, domineering man pursues, not Bianca whom he considers ugly and stupid, but her beautiful hands. The ableism here might disqualify the story for many readers, but could be considered an artifact of the man's point of view. An excellent story, even if it did cause what must have been the Great American Ellipsis Shortage of 1939. Paul Williams calls "Bianca's Hands" Sturgeon's first major story, but it's not quite up there with his best, in my view.

In "It," an assembly of vegetable compost on a forest floor accretes around an old, human skeleton and becomes a bipedal monster, wandering about and killing. I remembered this as a simple monster story, but Sturgeon's pacing, and his relation of some of the humans in the tale as also monstrous, improves it over my recall, as does the element that the creature is not malevolent, just curious. This story is apparently part of the inspiration for the "Swamp Thing" comic books.

Williams' notes are interesting also for the glimpse they give into Sturgeon's world - in particular, the world of labor. The rather minor story "God in a Garden" sold to John W. Campbell, Jr. for $80. I looked it up: the inflation multiplier from 1939 to 2021 is 18.6, the story is about 8600 words, so Sturgeon got $0.17/word in today's dollars, well above the current $0.08 that SFFWA sets as the minimum professional rate. This, for a beginning, 21 year old writer who was clearly promising but not yet famous. Also, Sturgeon filled gaps in his income by taking seagoing jobs. These seem to be easily available; this doesn't match my understanding of the grim nature of the Depression job market. War production ramping up? Of course if Sturgeon's market was good, it would have been much worse for more-marginalized people.

I look forward to reading the rest of these books. In this volume, I found no great stories that were new to me - there are none of his very best stories here - nor did I revise downward my opinion of any I already knew. The stories that a general reader might find worthwhile:

"Bianca's Hands"
"It"
"Derm Fool" - as a sample of the more ordinary stories here ( )

My write-up of the 1940 stories in this collection with regard to the 1941 Retro Hugos:

Derm Fool - Shedding skin, and consequent japes.
Butyl and the Breather - engineering romp, fighting a disembodied entity by smelly chemicals and television.
It - great story of undead monster in small town America
The Long Arm - not SF.
Mahout - not SF
The Man on the Steps - young man inspired by George Washington.
Place of Honor - not SF
Punctuational Advice - not sf
The Ultimate Egoist - solipsim taken to its logical extreme ( )

My reactions to reading this collection in 1999. Spoilers follow.

There is no way I am going to review every one of the stories in here. This series covers Sturgeon's work chronologically, so they are of interest only to literary scholars and hardcore Sturgeon fans. Many are romances or crime stories which show Sturgeon's early cleverness in plotting and reliance on gimmicky endings. I've noted the more interesting stories below. Almost every on has an interesting accompanying note by editor Williams.

“About Theodore Sturgeon”, Ray Bradbury -- Bradbury, who was published after Sturgeon, describes his envy, as an aspiring writer, at studying Sturgeon’s stories. He describes Sturgeon as someone who wrote “with his glands”.

“About Theodore Sturgeon”, Arthur C. Clarke -- Clarke refers to Sturgeon, along with Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, as the writer who had the most emotional effect on him and talks about his own stories inspired by Sturgeon or dealing with similar themes.

“About Theodore Sturgeon”, Gene Wolfe -- Wolfe talks about his relationship to Sturgeon’s writings since he was introduced to them in sixth grade.

“Heavy Insurance” -- Short story about an attempted robbery by a shipping clerk going bad – however, in a twist ending, the clerk uncovers an insurance fraud perpetrated by the shipper of the package he tries to steal, and he gets a promotion. The notes for the story reveal it sprang from a poor Sturgeon who contemplated robbing American Express but didn’t have “the guts to do it myself.” This is Sturgeon’s first sale.

“The Heart” -- Fantasy story about a woman who can magically, through sheer hate, destroy hearts – including her own.

“Cellmate” -- This story involves a man’s body really inhabited by two personalities and two bodies, twins of a strange sort. Here the body s inhabited by two personalities, one a criminal, one an idiot, the other a smart criminal who has the odd power to convince people to do his will.

“Fluffy” -- An entertaining story where protagonist Ransome, a parasite and professional houseguest, finds that cats are intelligent and sentient and converses with one What follows is a witty exchange in which Ransome is compared to Fluffy, the cat. Both are “self-centered, ungrateful, hypocritical, fickle. It is their similarity that makes communication and dialogue between the two possible. It is an entertaining and cynical commentary on cats. At story’s end, the cat frames Ransome for murder. The notes indicate that Sturgeon, said he often exaggerated (though he doesn’t specifically mention this story) his own faults in his protagonists.

“Mailed Through a Porthole” -- Though it doesn’t have much of a plot and was never published, I liked this story. I consists of letters mailed to the spirit of the sea, one Davy Jones, in which a veteran seamen (Sturgeon made several voyages as a merchant marine so the details seem, and probably are, credible) taunts Davy Jones by saying he’s never seen a deadly hurricane and a novice seamen wants to see one. Of course, it turns out the narrator does see one which kills him and the novice. This story comes from Sturgeon’s experiences on a tanker which tensely awaited the coming of a hurricane which never hit them.

“Accidentally on Porpoise” -- I liked this story (though mainly for the nautical details which came from Sturgeon’s personal experiences) though it was never published before this collection. (Sturgeon liked it.) The notes indicate that the plot of an injured sailor assuming the identity of a dead rich man fits into a recurring Sturgeon theme of “re-creation of a human being”.

“Permit My Gesture” -- Sort of an O’Henry like story in which a woman who has sent her boyfriend away is told to wire him with a five dollar bill he gives her. In a spiteful gesture, the bill turns out to be counterfeit.

“Watch My Smoke” -- An engrossing short-short story about a pilot from a struggling (he’s one of the owners) charter service who decides against all odds to land his burning plane on a Canadian lake rather than bail. At story’s end, it’s revealed that it’s not his plane on fire; it’s his parachute.

“One Sick Kid” -- Sturgeon didn’t like this story much. He called it “ding-dong stuff”, “a shot of super super pseudo-patriotism”. I liked this story, again because of its nautical setting which is drawn from Sturgeon’s personal experience and newspaper reading. Actually, the only part that even remotely justifies Sturgeon’s criticism is a two sentence paragraph. The tale regards the intricacies of evacuating a sick merchant marine at sea. There is an interesting, in the notes, letter from Sturgeon to his mother in regards to this story. He says that he’s sees himself not as an artist with something important to sell but a craftsman of commercial fiction. He says “there is no such thing as prostituting my art”.

“A God in a Garden” -- Sturgeon’s first sale to John W. Campbell, Jr and the editor’s fantasy magazine, Unknown. This is sort of application of Sturgeon’s later advice to writers to always take the next step in outlining the consequences of your story’s premise. A man uncovers an old and sentient idol/god in his backyard. The idol, out of gratitude, gives him the power to define the world just by his words. This causes some marital tension when his wife begins to suspect she is losing her mind – and then she thinks the protagonist is losing his – when her memories of the world don’t match reality because of the protagonist’s powers. Eventually, the man defines the idol away.

“Ether Breather” -- This story reminded me of Frederic Brown’s 1945 story “The Waveries”. Both stories feature intelligent beings who come in the form of the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Brown’s aliens are invaders from off world while Sturgeon’s have always existed around Earth. Their thoughts are the same frequency as tv signals, and they interfere with broadcasts in a childish, eager-to-please, would be funny way which is not appreciated while Brown’s aliens imitate past broadcasts. It’s an interesting notion of Sturgeon’s. The endnote quotes Sturgeon on remarking the quick technological obsolescence of sf. He researched the matter of contemporary (1939) tv transmission thoroughly. However, I don’t think the story bears the young Sturgeon’s classification as a masterpiece though it was popular at the time.

“Strike Three” -- Evidently this story was never published. The young Sturgeon regarded it as one of his better efforts. It’s tempting to say he was wrong given the slight story about a high school student trying to buy the affections of three high school girls by giving them all one of his poems, the same one. Of course, things go wrong, and the girls discover his play. Sturgeon’s annoyance is understandable beyond the hassle of a professional writer not making a sale. The demands of the short short story, which Sturgeon did for newspapers, required great skill at plotting and exposition at such a short length. Sturgeon probably learned a lot about his craft by doing these slight newspaper stories, a craft which proved useful when writing the sf and fantasy stories which made him famous.

“The Call” -- A borderline sf story (another newspaper short short) involving telepathy, specifically a man “saving” his wife from gas asphyxiation. The twist of the story is that, even with the gas oven on and unlit, air conditioning saves her from danger. I’m not sure if air conditioning was different in 1939, or Sturgeon didn’t fully understand it.

“Helix the Cat” -- A delightful tale that, like Sturgeon’s “Fluffy”, looks at the imperious, superior, ungrateful, aristocratic nature of cats. This story involves a displaced soul (his body dead) on the run from the soul-eating Them and his attempts to alter the brain and body of Helix the Cat to make a new home for his soul. (This is done with the aid of the narrator who is also the cat’s owner.) As with “Fluffy”, the intelligent cat (his ability for mischief altered by the modifications to his brain and body) double crosses everyone. The best line of the story is when Helix, after embarking on a reading program, tells his master “You don’t really know very much do you?”. This story has an interesting history. While written in 1939, it was not published until its appearance in Astounding, the John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, ed. Harry Harrison. Campbell had read the story and liked it but rejected it as not fitting with Campbell’s fantasy Unknown or science fiction Astounding.

“Bianca’s Hands” -- This is Sturgeon’s classic horror story and, like many of the better horror stories I’ve read, it’s creepily illogical and surrealistic. Bianca is an ugly, imbecilic girl whose hands began to obsess the handsome but not very bright Ran. He rents a room with Bianca’s bitter mother who hates Bianca. Described as “beautiful parasites”, Bianca’s hands, and their relationship with Ran, are described in pretty overt sexual terms. The attempts of Ran to hold Bianca’s hands are described very similarly to a rebuffed sexual seduction. Eventually, the couple marries, their hands touching – again the language is sexual. Ran that allows Bianca’s hands to strangle him, and Bianca’s mother is hung for the crime. Bianca’s hands shrivel to “brown leaves”. This sexual description of handholding, the undertone of sentience to Bianca’s hands are creepy and illogical though the sexual fetishism of hands is not that hard to understand.

“Derm Fool” -- Amusing story about a couple who develop a condition whereby they slough their skin every 24 hours. (The story opens with some good hook lines from the narrator picking up the litter of his feet and hands about his apartment.) Sturgeon cleverly imagines the narrator making art from his discarded skin and, later, infecting people (it’s the venom from a snake that initially brings on the condition) and curing them of the condition as a dermatology treatment.

“He Shuttles” --A story that was kind of hard to follow on the first reading but was cleverly plotted. It’s a three wishes story where the wishes are granted to a very unpleasant, egotistic financier who wants to be master of the universe. His first two wishes are the complete domination of others' wills. His second wish is absolute freedom from any penalties for his actions, and how the universe arranges itself to do this is amusing. He deliberately renders a third wish inoperative till the second day of his wishes. The first day, to test his absolution from penalties, he tries to commit several murders, but the universe arranges things so he is not blamed or suspected. Finally, he arranges to commit a murder in such a way that he has to be changed. But he’s too clever. The only way his wish can be granted is for time to reverse, and the day repeat itself – a day in which is third wish is still unavailable. The story also has an opening which has a first person writer being spoken to by the spirit that granted the wishes. To modern eyes, a writer addressing the reader directly seems terribly modern, but it’s an old technique from past centuries.

“The Ultimate Egoist” -- Appropriately enough this story was a response to “The Indigestible Triton” written by egotist Rene Lafayette aka L. Ron Hubbard. It’s a good example of Sturgeon’s admonition to take the next step in detailing the consequences of your premise in a sf story. Here the narrator, on a lark, tells his girlfriend the universe exists just for him (sort of a variation of physics’ anthropic principle), that no “object, theory, or principle” can exist without his belief. Then he finds out this is true. His disbelief causes an entire genus of fish to vanish. He sees the world, via an act of will, as an incredible neurotic (and it’s a frightening world) does – and then, via disbelief, wills Drip the neurotic into oblivion. His girlfriend disbelieves his claims of power but says he created her with too much discernment to stay with a lunatic. Eventually, in despair, he wills himself into oblivion by speculating, in the ultimate act of solipsism, that he may be a figment of his own imagination.

“It” -- A very effective, powerful horror story about a monster, “not born”, unbreathing, moving, but unalive, created in the mold of the forest floor. The story is set in the wood where the newly created creature kills a dog and the monster that searches for it. The point of view of the curious, intelligent monster is very well done, the control of tone masterful, and the subplot of a hardscrabble farm and the tensions between brothers Alton (who survives – the monster is washed away in a brook) and Corey is realistic. The monster turns out to be an amalgam of mold, rotting vegetation, and the skeleton of a vanished man. Other writers might have tired to allay the story’s ending with something of a happy ending since the Drew family is rewarded for finding the skeleton. Sturgeon, though, ends the story with the Drews being richer but Babe Drew, stalked by the monster before it’s death, with daily nightmares and wasting away. The creature bears a resemblance to the comic book character The Swamp Thing, and the resemblance is not accidental. (The story itself was adapted as a comic in 1972.) Sturgeon was given, in 1975, the Golden Ink Pot award for the influence of this story (It was granted at the San Diego Comic Convention) in not only Swamp Thing but the Man Thing. Evidently many comic and screenwriters were influenced by this classic tale.

“Butyl and the Breather” -- Sequel to “Ether Breather” in which the narrator tries again – and succeeds – in making contact with the Ether Breathers again. At story’s end, we find out their ability to interfere with the electromagnetic spectrum will be used to insert ads in radio broadcasts. The story is not that interesting, and its humor has dated. ( )

I've heard such good things about Theodore Sturgeon. But man, these stories--many of them commissioned pieces--don't date well at all, what with their casual sexism, jingoist flag waving, etc. This isn't a reflection on Sturgeon as a person or as a writer--a guy's gotta eat, after all. But it doesn't make for pleasurable reading. I'd say this one's for completists only. ( )

This first volume of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon reprints all of the earliest surviving Sturgeon stories, some of which have never before been published. Most of these are "short shorts with a gimmick," stories that he churned out weekly during 1939 and 1940 as he tried for the first time to make a living as a writer.

As is clear from reading the fascinating Story Notes at the end of the book, Sturgeon himself had a low opinion of many of these stories, and it seems doubtful he would have ever chosen to include them in a collection. Still, they certainly show him as a young writer striving to master his craft, and if several of these "short shorts" are downright mediocre (especially the made to order holiday themed stories), a few are delightful. My favorites of this ilk were "Golden Day" and "The Long Arm."

Scattered through the collection are eleven more ambitious stories that range in quality from very good to stunning. "Bianca's Hands" is the first distinctively different tale. "It" is a pulse-pounding horror story with a twist. In "He Shuttles" we see a protagonist that gives hints of the characters that would dominate Alfred Bester's two great novels that would appear a few years later. Sturgeon is on occasion very funny. I am still laughing about "Fluffy" the most insightful story about cats ever put on paper. And "Ether Breather" included a couple of the funniest lines I can remember reading in recent years. Several of these are short little romances, and we certainly see evidence of Sturgeon's unique facility (amongst science fiction authors, anyway) of capturing people in love.

Everyone should read Theodore Sturgeon, and while this collection may not include his very best stories, it is fascinating to see how he got started. ( )