Microcosmic God Read Online Free PDF Page A

exhausted, let it go from me, sick over where it falls short of perfection and grimly smug over where it approaches it, then I am no longer a scamp.
    I am a criminal.
    This is the historical reason SF writers must play down the work that goes into their texts. Along with the synchronic reasons outlined above it, this is the historical background—far stronger in the thirties than it was in 1947 (and all but vanished today—though there is always the possibility for a resurgence), the date of “Maturity”—against which Sturgeon actually
revised
a story, revised it because of his own dissatisfaction with some Lukacsian ethical/aesthetic interface. This was the virtuoso stance suddenly cast aside. This was Faust admitting that the formula for his potion was reallymore complicated than the artificial sweeteners and fruit colorings listed in small print at the bottom of the label. This was not a commercial writer’s acquiescence to some editorial exhortation to tone this down for propriety’s sake or beef that up for excitement’s. It was the acrobat, after the trick had been performed for all practical purposes successfully, as much a virtuoso as ever (it had been published, had it not?), suddenly shaking his head, going back into the ring, and doing it again—not for some effect of the performance, but out of commitment to what was being performed.
    The effect—on a good deal of the audience—was stunning.
    The temptation was, no doubt, to see this as simply an importation of “mainstream” behavior into science fiction. That some of Sturgeon’s contemporaries saw it as such and thought it inappropriate no doubt added energy to the dialogue—which is why we can recall it today. Nevertheless, meanings are matters of context and metonymy: Faust, no matter the caduceus he wave aloft nor the bedside manner he assume, is
not
the Good Physician. And the whole occurrence was not caduceus-waving—it was real (that is, it was something the field
had
to deal with); it was perceived as authentic. What it did was to clear an area in that conceptual space that is science fiction (the texture of particular moments in that space expressed in—and as—particular SF texts) in which such commitment could now be recognized to exist and could continue to exist, if not with a terribly sophisticated critical vocabulary for talking about it then at least with a vocabulary of actions, situations, and responses through which it could be thought about dramatically. Such a clearing and defining reorganized the structure of a conceptual space in such a way that the structure recomplicates and expands through that space until the mental space of construction for the actual text (and thus the texture of the text) is changed.
    A personal example, if it will help: My basic working method has been (at least up until the time of word processors) not extraordinary for an SF author making a living by writing. I instituted it with my first SF novel and, with minor variations, it remains my working method today: I write a longhand draft; from this I make a rough typescript, specifying, expanding, toothbrushing out redundancies,excising unnecessary adjectives and phrases, clarifying parallels as I go. From this I make a polished typescript, in which I can catch any missed details as well as do any doctoring necessary on those details thrown out of sync between the first and second layers. In my personal vocabulary this tri-layered process
is
my “first draft.” Anything beyond this is “revision.” And should that revision run over a sentence or two, it goes through the same tri-layered process. It is a highly utilitarian method: it makes for prose that stays in print. (Word processors have simply expanded the tri-layered process into a ten-or-more layered one.) Also, it acknowledges that the cleverest of us is extremely fallible, that a story is a very complex engine, and that in the best of them far too much is going on for even the author to