Microcosmic God Read Online Free PDF Page B

is that, well, giants will wrangle.
IV
    But it is often the Sturgeon stories that gained notice, if not notoriety, in their day that seem now on the thin side. “The World Well Lost,” for example, which despite its powerful picture of homophobia brushes rather pastel fingers over the subject of male homosexuality itself, was for a while frequently mentioned as an example of science fiction’s growing “liberality” in matters sexual, along with Philip José Farmer’s “The Lovers.” Today the Farmer tale seems, at best, intriguingly troglodytic, and the Sturgeon only a step from rank conservatism—although it certainly made my eyes water when I first read it at fifteen. Another Sturgeon story much discussed in the few years after its publication was “Affair with a Green Monkey”: however artful its opening, today we have to admit that its whole thrust is toward a rather trivial one-liner. A contemporary reader, finding the excited references to it that litter the fanzines and magazine letter columns of its day, is likely to ask: What was all the fuss? The only way to understand the fuss is, again, to reconstruct the surrounding situation, i.e., a social moment in which not only were the actions involved in these stories considered a sin, a sickness, and a crime by law, but the words themselves were forbidden to print. We can take an example from Sturgeon’s science fiction novella, “To Marry Medusa” (1958—which Sturgeon later expanded into his briefest science fiction novel,
The Cosmic Rape
[1958]): “ ‘… an’ him runnin’ out an stickin’ his head back in an’ callin’ me a—’ Sanctimoniously, Al would not sully his lips with the word. And the rye-and-ginger by the door would be nodding wisely and saying, ‘Man shouldn’t mention a feller’s mother, whatever,’ ” or, later on, from the novel’s Chapter 12, “ ‘… Pop. Hey, Pop! Carol’s sayin’ summon a bish.’ And Tony would say, ‘Don’t say that, Carol,’ whereupon the lights of the oncoming vehicle would be upon him and in dedicated attention he would slit his eyes, set his jaw, and say precisely what Carol was trying to repeat.” In light of today’s realistic novel and film dialogue, readers tend to see these now as coy gestures toward a vanished piety. But what such passages actually are is ironic commentary on their epoch’s very real and absolutely enforced (by lawand threat of imprisonment) printing conventions—conventions that would not begin to relax till nearly a decade after the tales carrying such lines had been first published. Here we are again left with two points to make: first, verbal tropes such as the one-liner of “Affair with a Green Monkey” or the pastel touch in “The World Well Lost” are what that decade substituted for sex (of whatever persuasion) in print, while piously insisting that the clear discomfort these substitutions caused was precisely what was being avoided by eliding the sex itself.
    We cannot be surprised if Sturgeon, the writer most sensitive to those years, was also, in the work of this period, very much of those years himself. But we should also note that when, for example in his Western story “Scars,” Sturgeon dealt with some of the same material both “Affair With a Green Monkey” and “The World Well Lost” had focused on (i.e., men’s dubiousness about masculine sexual expectations), he did so with much less heavy hands, to produce one of his strongest and most compassionate stories by today’s standards.
    But it is not in Sturgeon’s well-mannered stories (be they conservatively or shockingly well-mannered) that today’s reader is likely to find what is most interesting, most stimulating, most impressive, most obsessive, and most simply and awesomely beautiful in Sturgeon. The ten-year delay in finding a publisher for one of Sturgeon’s earliest written stories (then the thousand-dollar first prize from
Argosy
magazine—a story by Graham Greene took