The Nail and the Oracle Read Online Free PDF

Times Book Review
section, to let me review
Alive and Well
. And he did, beneath the copy editor’s headline “Sturgeon’s Law Overtakes Him.”
    No good deed …
    Here, reprinted for the first time, is that review, from the April 18th, 1971
Los Angeles Times
.
    You will kindly note the cost of this 221 page hardcover in the early Seventies. This will give you an idea of the kind of money a writer as excellent as Sturgeon had to subsist on, it will also inform your understanding of the love-hate attitude even as lauded an artist as Sturgeon had with his work environment.
    Sturgeon Is Alive and Well
A new collection of stories by
Theodore Sturgeon
(G.P. Putnam’s Sons—$4.95)
    Alive and well, yes definitely. But up to the level of his past brilliance, no I’m afraid not.
    Theodore Sturgeon, you see, is without argument one of the finest writers—of any kind—this country has ever produced. His novels
More Than Human, Some of Your Blood
,and
The Dreaming Jewels
stand untarnished by time and endless re-readings as purest silver. His short stories have so completely examined the parameters of love in a genre of imagination woefully shy in that particular, that the words
love
and
Sturgeon
have become synonymous. The word
syzygy
also belongs to him.
    He is also much-quoted as the author of Sturgeon’s Law, a Deep Thought that suggests 90% of
every
thing is mediocre … puddings, plays, politicians; cars, carpenters, coffee; people, books, neurologists … 
every
thing. A realistic assessment of the impossibility of achieving perfection that, till now, has applied to everyone and everything save Sturgeon. Sadly, and at long last, his own Law has caught up with him. Ninety per cent of this new collection of stories is mediocre.
    After a long and painful dry spell in which the creative well seemed emptied, Sturgeon began writing again three years ago, and eleven of the twelve stories herein contained date from this latest period of productivity. Only two of them approach the brilliance of stories like “The Silken-Swift,” “A Saucer of Loneliness,” “Killdozer,” or “Bianca’s Hands.” It has been said time and again about Sturgeon, that had he not suffered the ghastly stigmatizing ghettoization of being tagged a “science fiction” writer, he might easily surpass John Collier, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, or even Kurt Vonnegut as a mainstream fantasist of classic stature. Yet here, freed of that restriction, the fictions seem thin and too slick and forgettable; stories that could have been written by men not one thousandth as special as Theodore Sturgeon.
    “To Here and the Easel,” a 1954 novelette printed here in hardcover for the first time (and the only story to have a previous publication), is the longest, and the dullest. A fantasy of schizophrenia in which a painter who can’t paint swings back and forth between his life as Giles, helpless before his empty white canvas, and his life as Rogero, a knight out of
Orlando Furioso
, this overlong and rococo morality play seems embarrassingly reminiscent of the kind of pulp writingtypified by L. Ron Hubbard’s
Slaves of Sleep
, a novel bearing almost exactly the same plot-device Sturgeon employs.
    Of the remaining eleven tales, five are straight mainstream, four are clearly s-f oriented, and two are borderline. However, only two crackle with the emotional load
aficionados
have come to revere in Sturgeon’s work. In “Take Care of Joey,” a man whose world-view is built on the concept that no one performs a seemingly unselfish act “without there’s something in it for him,” finds just such a situation operating. A nasty, troublemaking little bastard named Joey is watched over by a guy named Dwight, who obviously hates the little rat. He goes way out of his way to keep Joey from getting the crap kicked out of him, up to and past the point where Dwight himself gets stomped. The narrator of the story has to find out why, and he does, and he