In his 1953 magazine article “Why So Much Syzygy?” TS wrote: What I have been trying to do all these years is investigate this matter of love, sexual and asexual … To do this I’ve had to look at the individual components … In “Rule of Three” and “Synthesis” [“Make Room for Me”] I had (in reverse order) a quasi-sexual relationship among three people, and one among six so it could break down into three couples and be normal. In “The Stars Are the Styx” I set up several (four, as I remember) different kinds of love motivations for mutual comparisons.
Magazine blurb: OF COURSE YOU’D BE HOST TO GUESTS FROM OUTER SPACE; IT’S COMMON COURTESY. BUT BEING A HOST CAN HAVE A PARTICULARLY NASTY MEANING!
“Make Room for Me”: first published in Fantastic Adventures, May 1951. Originally written in 1946 in collaboration with Rita Dragonette. Apparently rewritten—see Oct. 11, 1950 letter quoted in “Rule of Three” note—in October 1950. Regarding that letter, “Make Room for Me” does indeed include a New Year’s Eve sequence and is therefore surely the “other” story referred to. This letter is the only place I know of where Sturgeon acknowledges that the story was co-written (the one I wrote with someone else). In 1976 I interviewed Rita Dragonette; she told me that she and Ted wrote “Make Room for Me” together early in 1946 when the two of them, who had been friends in high school in Philadelphia, were living together in New York City. She said they completed a version then, but… “I never saw it again until Phil Klass came to me and said, ‘Look at this,’ and there it was in print. Under Sturgeon’s name. And he thought he could make it all right by giving me a check …” Dragonette’s contribution to the story was not mentioned when the story was included in the collection Sturgeon in Orbit in 1964.
The three characters in the story—which must have been called “Synthesis” at one time, judging from Sturgeon’s mention of it under that name in his 1953 article—are caricatures of Rita (Vaughn), Ted (Dran Hamilton) and their high school pal Manny Staub (Manuel). Rita (a published poet under the name Ree Dragonette) told me that she and Manny and Ted had “talked about these things in high school—the trinity, the three of us, about the need to coalesce, to be re-embodied … Some of the conversations [in the story] were verbatim.”
In a 1978 interview with Larry Duncan, TS said, I think that the greatest piece of music that I know of is Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. In 1975, he told Paul Williams: I have one or two real long-term friends. A man called Manny Staub has been my close friend ever since high school … he left high school to join the Marines, and was decorated for bravery in action, in China, long before World War Two. He was blown off his bicycle by a bomb one time. [In high school] we went to movies together, we used to walk all over Philadelphia, we made all the museums and we went to concerts … I think we had a rather profound effect on one another.
In his 1964 introduction to this story (chiefly about the magazine editor who published it in 1951), Sturgeon said: Howard Browne bought this one, because, he said, he liked it. He must have found it a refuge from what he was doing at the time, for it is a strange and filmy kind of effort, whereas Howard was writing … a series of hard-heel detective novels …
“Special Aptitude”: first published under the title “Last Laugh” in Other Worlds, March 1951.
Theodore Sturgeon to Paul Williams, December 1975: I became a cadet in the Penn State Nautical School when I was seventeen … It was a terrible experience. The fourth class, which is the youngest, were absolutely brutalized and enslaved by the others.… The fourth class had to line up, put on their dungarees upside down and backwards, stand at attention … They would come along and they would fill your mouth with rock salt; or they’d say, “take a seat.” “Take a seat” meant, go into a half-squat, with your arms stretched out in front of you, and stay that way till you collapse. It was absolutely brutal, the indignities, they’d open your mail and read it aloud in the mess hall. Sturgeon recalled with horror that the officers watched these shit sessions and did nothing to stop it.
Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance: THERE WAS NOTHING SO TERRIBLE AS THE GABBLERS. HUMAN EARS COULD NOT WITHSTAND THEIR HORRID UPROAR—AND DEATH TO ALL COMERS GLARED FROM THEIR EYES.
“The Traveling Crag”: first published in Fantastic Adventures, July 1951.
Sturgeon’s introduction to this story in Alien Cargo (1984): For years I have felt that this is one of the worst stories I ever wrote. A lot of people have said they think otherwise, so here it is.
TS had worked as a literary agent himself for other science fiction writers, including William Tenn and A. Bertram Chandler, throughout 1946.
The line from Weiss’s second story that Naome reads to Cris—Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj—is an inside joke. H. L. Gold used this line in an ad for Galaxy that ran in the first issue of that magazine, October 1950. Under the heading “You’ll Never See It in Galaxy!” are parallel columns, one a science fiction story that begins “Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down” etc. and the other a pulp western story that begins, “Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass …” Gold’s point was that Galaxy (unlike some of its competitors) was not going to publish routine genre fiction transplanted to a science-fictional setting.
Lucy Menger (in Theodore Sturgeon, 1981): “In ‘The Traveling Crag’ and ‘Rule of Three’ Sturgeon seems to have been haunted by a vision of what man could be and tormented by the difference between this vision and the actuality around him. Aliens in ‘TTC’ express this anguish concisely: ‘There are few races in cosmic history with a higher potential than yours or with a more miserable expression of it.’ ”
“Excalibur and the Atom”: first published in Fantastic Adventures, August 1951.
Interesting that TS, in the course of this story, indicates his awareness of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) and C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945).
This story has never appeared in a Sturgeon collection or any other book before.
Magazine blurb: THEY SAY A PRIVATE EYE CAN HANDLE ANYTHING FROM A BOTTLE TO A BLONDE. BUT WHEN MERLIN CAME IN WITH A SWORD, THINGS BEGAN TO POP!
“The Incubi of Parallel X”: first published in Planet Stories, September 1951.
Sturgeon’s introduction to this story in Sturgeon in Orbit (1964): THE INCUBI OF PARALLEL X is the most horrible title to appear over my byline, and I’m sure Malcolm Reiss, the editor, will forgive me for saying so. It was a typical Planet Stories title, and I’ve been sitting here trying to remember some of the parody titles George O. Smith used to dream up, I can, too, but I can’t share them with you, not even in these liberated days …
“Never Underestimate”: first published in Worlds of If, March 1952. Probably written autumn 1951, as Sturgeon’s pregnant wife Marion was successfully persuading him to leave his Time Inc. job and move to the country and devote more of his time to his writing.
This story has never appeared in a Sturgeon collection before.
The first page of this story may be considered a playful discussion of the logic behind Sturgeon’s distinctive manner of hooking his readers with the opening lines of his stories.
In 1972 TS told interviewer David Hartwell I used to write a lot of very funny stuff and cited “Never Underestimate” as an example.
There are notable thematic links between “Never Underestimate” and “The Martian and the Moron” (1948) and Sturgeon’s 1960 novel Venus Plus X.
“The Sex Opposite”: Another thematic precursor to Venus Plus X. First published in Fantastic Stories, Fall 1952. In the Sturgeon papers is a letter from Howard Browne dated Jan. 21, 1952, addressed to TS at 862 Union Street in Brooklyn: “Enclosed is our check No. 11492 in the amount of $170.00. This represents payment in full of all magazine rights to your story “The Sex Opposite,” which will appear in a forthcoming issue of our new FANTASTIC.” This tells us the story was written before Ted and Marion mo
ved out of New York City, possibly as late as December 1951.
In 1976 Marion Sturgeon told me she first met Ted at a party and again on his birthday in 1950: “He was working for Time Inc. then. Then we began to get together; his marriage was already breaking up. Then we moved to Brooklyn, to Union Street. I worked in the Brooklyn Public Library. And that’s when we used to go to Rudy’s Restaurant, which is in one of his stories [“The Sex Opposite”], a Mexican restaurant in midtown Manhattan.”
About the move to Congers in Rockland County, Marion said, “I’d had the idea of living in the country with a writer, that was one of my little dreams. And so I wanted Ted very much to stop working at Time Inc. It didn’t fit in at all with what I’d imagined.”
In a chapter on Sturgeon in his 1956 book of criticism In Search of Wonder, Damon Knight wrote: “He writes about people first and other marvels second. More and more, the plots of his short stories are mere contrivances to let his characters expound themselves. ‘It Wasn’t Syzygy,’ ‘The Sex Opposite’ and ‘A Way of Thinking’ are such stories: the people stand out from their background like Rubens figures that have strayed onto a Mondrian canvas: graphic evidence that Sturgeon, like Bradbury, long ago went as far as he could within the limitations of this field without breaking them.”
I think what I have been trying to do all these years is to investigate this matter of love, sexual and asexual. I investigate it by writing about it because I don’t know what the hell I think until I tell somebody about it. And I work so assiduously at it because of a conviction that if one could understand it completely, one would have the key to cooperation itself: to creative inspiration: to self-sacrifice and that rare but real anomaly, altruism: in short, to the marvelous orchestration which enables us to keep ahead of our own destructiveness.
… Why so much syzygy? [in TS’s stories]—well, it’s pretty obvious why a clear-cut method of non-reproductive exchange should be so useful in such an overall investigation. It’s beautifully open to comparison and analog. It handles all sorts of attachments felt by any sensitive person which could not conceivably be sexually based.
—TS, in “Why So Much Syzygy?” (1953)
Editor’s blurb from the first page of the original magazine appearance:
SOMEONE ONCE SAID THAT THEODORE STURGEON HAS ONLY ONE REAL STORY TO TELL, BUT THAT HE TELLS IT SO WELL EDITORS WILL GO ON BUYING IT FOREVER. DON’T YOU BELIEVE IT! THE BASIS FOR SUCH A REMARK COMES FROM THE AUTHOR’S VARIATIONS ON A SINGLE THEME: SOMEWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE ARE ALIEN BEINGS THAT CAN HELP MAN TO GAIN HIS RIGHTFUL HERITAGE.
IF ALL THIS SOUNDS TOO ESOTERIC, DON’T LET US MISLEAD YOU. THE SEX OPPOSITE OPENS WITH THE MURDER OF TWO LOVERS IN A NIGHT-SHROUDED PARK AND ENDS WITH A TRIPLE SLAYING ON A STREET CORNER. AND OUT OF IT COMES THE TENDER STORY OF A YOUNG COUPLE WHO MIGHT NEVER HAVE FOUND LOVE HAD NOT DEATH POINTED OUT THE WAY …
“Baby Is Three”: first published in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1952. Written circa May 1952 in the author’s new home in Congers, New York with his wife Marion and their new baby Robin. The appearance of this story in Galaxy created a stir of enthusiasm in the science fiction community, and a book editor asked Sturgeon to expand “Baby Is Three” into a novel. This he did by writing two long stories about the events preceding and following those described in “Baby Is Three.” This novel, More Than Human, is Sturgeon’s best-known work. It was published in autumn 1953, and won the International Fantasy Award in 1954. SF critic and novelist James Blish described More Than Human as “one of the very few authentic masterpieces science fiction can boast.”
The text of “Baby Is Three” in this volume is that of the original Galaxy story, not the revised version that makes up the middle section of More Than Human. The magazine story and novel section differ significantly in their last pages; in the novel, Miss Kew is in fact dead.
On June 25, 1952, TS sent the following note to his friend Judith Merril on a postcard: It’s okay I wrote one and migod it’s fine. Sold it + everything and I think maybe if I do more and like doing it as much I won’t have to worry about who I’m: I’ll find out.
From Sturgeon’s 1978 introduction to Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, The Graphic Story Version (Byron Preiss Visual Publications): Some time in the spring of 1952, living in a little stone house in the woods in Rockland County, New York, I sat down and knocked out yet another story because by that time I knew how to knock out stories. As I recall, I hadn’t a clear idea in my head as to what it was going to be about, except that I had recently read a novel by Pearl Buck called Pavilion of Women, in which there was a minor character, a Chinese monk, who took care of a ragged passel of kids in a cave somewhere in the wilderness. The image would not scrape off, and I knew I was going into something similar somehow. It took about eight days and I sent it off to Horace Gold at Galaxy magazine. He bought it and I paid some rent and bought some furnace oil and hamburger and paper towels and the like for my wives and children, and got to work on something else.
Next thing you know it was October, and the story, called “Baby Is Three,” was in print, and to my immense and total astonishment began pulling rave mail from all over. Truly, I had an “I didn’t know it was loaded” feeling about the whole thing—not that I felt it was a bad job, but I really had no idea it would hit that hard. Anthology requests began to come in almost immediately here and from England, France, and Latin America. The mail was just lovely.
A year or so later, a book publisher asked me for a novel. The only thing I wanted to write about at that length was something about where the people in “Baby Is Three” came from, and something more about where they went to. I went to New York and had lunch with some people and we worked out a deal whereby if I wrote 30,000 words of events before “Baby,” and thirty more after, but wrote them in such a way that each could stand as a separate novelette, then they would undertake to sell them to high-paying slick-paper magazines before book publication. (That way, I suspect, they could salve their consciences about the miniscule advance they were willing to pay.) I chuntered around with ideas for a few months, then suddenly sat down and wrote the first part, “The Fabulous Idiot,” and the third part, “Morality,” in about three weeks.
I lugged the two stories in to New York and found that, as is often the practice with publishers, all the people I had dealt with had been fired, transferred, or kicked upstairs, and their replacements didn’t know anything about any handshake agreement to sell the stories to magazines first. They just wrapped up the whole thing and published it as a book.
TS, in his liner notes to a 1977 Caedmon LP called “Baby Is Three [abridged] from More Than Human read by the author,” talks about Pavilion of Women as above and goes on: That was the springboard; there is no accounting for the myriad variables which went into the rest of it; why, for example, I structured it from the appearance of young Gerry in a psychiatrist’s office instead of any of the many other ways in which it might have been done. It went very quickly—two weeks or so, if I remember correctly, and all first draft.
Also in the Caedmon notes he says: The heart and soul of More Than Human is, clearly, the second part, “Baby Is Three.” It appeared in Galaxy, a science fiction magazine under the editorial guidance of Horace L. Gold. Its explosive acceptance astonished and puzzled me almost as much as did the later reception of the book, and its inclusion in the [Science Fiction] Hall of Fame, chosen by successive ballots by my peers in the Science Fiction Writers of America, is a matter of great gratification to me. In his introduction to the 1973 book The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, editor Ben Bova says that when the members of SFWA were asked to select the ten best science fiction stories of all time out of a list of 76 they had previously nominated, “Baby Is Three” was fifth in total votes. Overall, Theodore Sturgeon was the author receiving the second largest number of votes, after Robert Heinlein.
Stern, the psychotherapist in “Baby Is Three,” is the shrink that I have always wanted, but have never been able to fin
d, Theodore Sturgeon told Paul Williams in a taped interview February 29, 1976. He’s the same shrink as Dr. Outerbridge [In TS’s 1961 novel Some of Your Blood], same guy, operates the same way. His operative technique is basically basic Dianetics; and the only reason I ever got away with that is I never said so out loud, because it has such a violent image against it, and we’ve got this appalling willingness to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Dianetics worked—not “worked” but works—absolutely magically. But because Hubbard turned into a megalomaniac, and a classic kook, which he is (and I don’t care if Process comes and shoots me for that, that’s the truth), you cannot, absolutely cannot put down the value of basic Dianetics, as laid out in the first third of the original book, which has been drastically rewritten since then… (L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction writer, synthesized—not invented, as TS points out elsewhere in the interview—Dianetics, later known as Scientology, in 1950. John W. Campbell and Theodore Sturgeon were early practitioners.)
As that 1976 interview continued, TS talked about some of his experiences as an auditor (Dianetics therapist) in the two years before he wrote “Baby Is Three”: There’s a funny little laugh and you just know that someone’s discharged. By the end of 1951, TS said, I departed from Dianetics. I had audited 102 hours and been audited myself six hours, and I really began to feel the imbalance.
In his introduction to the Graphic Story Version, Sturgeon mentions that as of 1978 More Than Human had been optioned by film companies eleven separate times (and never filmed). He says, The weirdest of these involves one of the greatest directors of all time (I won’t tell you his name) and me, who wrote a screenplay and two complete revisions in only twenty-eight days, when all of a sudden the company blew apart. (The director/co-writer was Orson Welles.)
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