The Ultimate Egoist

Theodore Sturgeon, age eighteen December 1936, aboard the school ship
Annapolis

T
HEODORE
H
AMILTON
S
TURGEON
was born February 26, 1918 on Staten Island in New York City, and died May 8, 1985 in Eugene, Oregon. This is the first of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This earliest volume contains stories written between the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1940. Some are being published here for the first time; many others are appearing for the first time in book form.

For invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume, the editor would like to thank Noël Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Sturgeon, Ralph Vicinanza, Lindy Hough, Richard Grossinger, Debbie Notkin, Tom Whitmore, Samuel R. Delany, Dixon Chandler, Marty Traynor, Stephen Pagel, Jeannie Trizzino, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Wolfe, David G. Hartwell, Jonathan Lethem, Charles N. Brown, Judith Merril, Eric Van, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Gordon Van Gelder, Sam Moskowitz, Robert Lichtman, Donna Nassar, Robert Silverberg, Russell Galen, John Clute, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

My thanks also to the staffs of North Atlantic Books and Publishers Group West for their enthusiasm and their efforts on behalf of this challenging project. Succeeding volumes in this series will be appearing regularly until the collection is completed.

THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES

P
ERHAPS THE BEST
way I can tell you what I think of a Theodore Sturgeon story is to explain with what diligent interest, in the year 1940, I split every Sturgeon tale down the middle and fetched out its innards to see what made it function. At that time I had not sold one story, I was 20, I was feverish for the vast secrets of successful writers. I looked upon Sturgeon with a secret and gnawing jealousy. And jealousy, it must be admitted, is the most certain symptom a writer can know to tell him of another author’s superiority. The worst thing you can say of a writer’s style is that it bored you; the most complimentary thing I can think to say of Sturgeon is that I hated his damned, efficient, witty guts. And yet because he had the thing for which I was looking, originality (always rare in the pulps), I was forced, in an agony of jealousy, to return again and again to his stories, to dissect, to pull apart, to re-examine the bones. Whether or not I ever really discovered Sturgeon’s secret is a moot question. It is pretty hard to dissect laughing gas with a scalpel. Wit and spontaneity are far too evasive, they are brilliant gaseous material all too soon exploded and vanished. You put your hand up, as to a pulsation of fireworks in a summer sky, cry “There!” and pull back, for even while you tried to touch the wonder it blew away.

Sturgeon has many of the attributes of a magnificent firecracker string, ending in a loud 12-incher. There are sparklers and wondrous snakes and Vesuvian cones of invention, humor and charm in his stories. And before essaying your journey through this book and its attendant wonders, it may well reward you to have your glands x-rayed. For it is evident that Mr. Sturgeon writes with his glands. And if you do not read with your glands functioning healthily, then this is no book for you.

Now, writing with the glands is a precarious occupation. Many a good writer has tripped over his gut, you might say, and plunged to a horrible death, vanishing in writhing messes of tripe, down within the maw of his black monstrously evil typewriter. This is not true of Sturgeon, for it is evident that his viscera, at midnight, cast a most incredible glow upon all nearby objects. In a world of mock-pomp and towering hypocrisy it is wonderful to find stories written not only with the large enwrinkled object above the eyes, but most particularly with the zestful ingredients of the peritoneal cavity.

Above all, Sturgeon seems to love writing, delighting in the swiftly paced and happy tale. True, some of the tales enclosed herein are not monuments of gaiety, but, perversely, are cold green edifices of fear. This book is to be recommended by those blackly unscrupulous physicians who wish to dispatch such violences of warmth and coldness to their patients that influenza is the inevitable result. The extremes of temperature herein are incredible. “It,” a very serious tale, an unsmiling mask of a story, was evidently written in a black refrigerator at two in the morning. “Brat,”
¹
on the other hand, was culled from a daisy field on a hot summer’s day. “Shottle Bop”
¹
and “The Ultimate Egoist” reside in some half-twilight, speckled here and there with flashes of sunshine, deepening into shadow at the last.