Microcosmic God Read Online Free PDF

keep all parts spinning in the air at any one time. Why not allow a minimum of three?
    This relates to Sturgeon in two ways. First, I probably would not have wanted to write science fiction if Sturgeon’s work had not affected me the way it did. Second, I probably would not have hit on my working method—and certainly not hit on it for my first book—if the “Maturity” episode had not been part of our field’s history, so that as a 19-year-old, twelve years after the fact, I could still be aware of its excitement, its energy, its message: science fiction
can
be revised,
can
command commitment,
can
strive for a stylistic clarity, concision, and invention beyond that of mere journalism. For science fiction to mature, this awareness had to grow out of science fiction’s own space. It couldn’t be imported—for the conceptual space of science fiction is finally far closer in organization to the performance space of the circus (with its extraordinary vertical as well as horizontal organization recalling science fiction’s spaceships and alien worlds; with its audience surround and its oddly fuzzy distinction between backstage and performance area recalling SF writers’ relation to their vociferous and ever-present fans; and the circus was the first art to insist openly that more must go on in the performance space than can possibly be seen at once) than it is to the staid divisions of the theater (backstage, stage, and audience), which, since Shakespeare, has constrained our view of “Literature.” For it is precisely in the circus space that the virtuoso gesture is held outto tempt novices to trip over themselves in the rush to achieve it; whereupon they become victims of a derision far sharper and crueler than that which greets the clowns, who first lured them from their seats and into the ring with their parodic versions of all the splendor passing and twirling, roaring and soaring.
    Looking back on the “Maturity” episode, two other general points might be made. First, this clearing of the conceptual space for this commitment could only have happened with a writer of the reputation Sturgeon had already garnered within the field by 1947. Second, given this late ’40s setting, it could probably only have occurred around a story as profoundly safe as “Maturity”: Any signs of daring or protest in the text itself would have immediately slanted the general interpretation of the supposed motivation for that subsequent revision away from one of pure ethical/aesthetic commitment. For we are talking of mythology now—not an actual writer with actual paper in an actual typewriter. But these myths, frustrating as they are for the man or woman at their core, have their formal importance. And “Maturity” is about as well-mannered a tale, by the conventions of ordinary ’50s fiction, as someone is likely to find in the Sturgeon
oeuvre;
and the later version is slightly more well-mannered than the former. Anyone acquainted with the context, if not the text itself, should have been able to predict this. Certainly they should not have been, as Lem was, surprised by it. For that matter, all great writers have been concerned with good manners as their times define them. But to seek Sturgeon’s greatness in a tale achieving notice in such circumstances and then to declare oneself put out at not finding it, as, in effect, Lem does, seems almost willfully obtuse. The careful analysis of a public success, however small that public, is always instructive. But by the same token—accepting public opinion as an essential given of someone’s analytic insight, because public opinions are myths, and myths, as Cassirer and others have noted, are invariably conservative “if only through the committee nature of their composition”—the worst one can say of Lem is that, coming from a country with no pulp tradition of its own, he had no feel for the context and simply ignored or misread the contextual signs. The best one can say