Showing posts with label Kurt Vonnegut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kurt Vonnegut. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

SSW: John D. MacDonald, Kurt Vonnegut, "Oliver Wyman" (Olive & Wyman Holmes), Cyril Hume, Leon Ware: COSMOPOLITAN, July 1958, edited by John J. O'Connell; fiction editor Kathryn Bourne

 From the FictionMags Index, the fiction content:

illustration for "Fast Loose Money"
Unsurprisingly, the juxtaposi0n of unfamiliar-seeming MacDonald and Vonnegut stories in this late '50s issue of Cosmopolitan, still a more-0r-less not-gender-specific magazine at this point, was what caught my eye...as it happens, I had read the Vonnegut, but about forty years ago while first going through his collection Welcome to the Monkey House, among better short stories by him but few as unironic and heartfelt; the MacDonald was collected in his 1966 volume End of the Tiger and Other Stories (which I haven't yet read), apparently under JDM's preferred title "The Fast Loose Money" rather than the article-free version that Cosmo gave it. It, too, isn't the most memorable of MacDonald stories, but it's more than clever enough, and while the protagonist and his old war-buddy and partner in crime aren't quite the true "mean furniture" MacDonald would refer to in his work, extremely unsavory people who won't shrink from violence to get their ends, they aren't far from it, not particularly noble at all. In fact, their WW2 service in the US Army, in the Quartermasters Corps in India, was essentially one long set of scams, which has allowed for a civilian life of considerable comfort, driven in part by continued skimming in the small businesses they run, initiated with their GI nest eggs. Well-drawn characterization of the two married couples at the heart of the story (as is typical of MacDonald), and a deft resolution to the various plot turns (likewise). Bob Byrne, writing in the Black Gate blog, notes that MacDonald spent some WW2 Army time in the procurement service setting he describes here, and didn't love it, before reassignment to the OSS (Byrne also breaks down every detail of the story, so you might want to read "The Fast Loose Money", in the book or in the magazine issue online, before reading Byrne's article). 

The Vonnegut story, "The Manned Missiles", has very little that's surreal nor particularly ironic about it, in telling a simple near-future (for 1958) science fiction story in the form of a Russian father's exchange of letters, his translated into English by his student son, with those of the US father of another cosmonaut/astronaut, both with sons who died in an accident while in single-person craft in orbit, the American sent to try to determine what sort of observation/surveillance the Soviet was up to. A graceful and humane account, which reminded me a bit of the likes of Edmond Hamilton's "What's It Like Out There?" in slightly less melodramatic terms. Vonnegut's note in his introduction to Welcome to the Monkey House, that the large-circulation slick-paper magazines would take stories about almost anything, as long as they celebrated the Middle Class, doesn't quite apply here, as this one has a somewhat more universal appeal (I'd say, even given that both fathers are clearly of their respective countries' essential middle class...as I have been of mine).

"Oliver Wyman" (the married writing team of Olive and Wyman Holmes) has another epistolary story which follows, but one of an utterly different stripe, a comic piece about a young woman with dreams of becoming an investing "angel" in a mildly distant cousin's Broadway production...if only she can pry some of her trust fund from her starchy, disapproving Bostonian aunt. The cousin, a young man who (as it turns out) fled the stultifying effect of Beacon Hill family, initially for a financial-industry job but soon becoming a producer, is not sure he wants anything to do with supportive young Kathy, much less the family money or its stern guardians. Amusing, if slight. Wyman Holmes was very briefly a professional actor, in one of Clare Boothe Luce's less successful B'way productions, Kiss the Boys Goodbye; Olive and Wyman, formerly Harvard students together, married during the short run of the play, and went on to at least a mildly productive writing career together. Wyman presumably knew from blue-blood Bostonian families, as likely the son of Henry Wyman Holmes, the founding Dean, in 1920, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Olive Holmes seems to have been a dance student and perhaps briefly a professional dancer, who would eventually edit a volume of Henry Taylor Parker's dance columns for The Boston Evening Transcript titled Motion Arrested (Wesleyan University Press/Harper & Row 1982), among other work solo and with her husband, including what look like culture studies for the likes of the US Information Agency. Was Cosmopolitan almost as clandestinely tied up with the 1950s CIA as, say, The Paris Review?
illustration for "El Greco and Mrs. London"
Cyril Hume had an interesting career...and seemingly one of many starts and stops, including an abbreviated hitch in the US Army, followed by some time at Yale (possibly without graduating, as online biographies disagree about this), though a dark fantasy story he placed with The Yale Review in 1930, "Forrester", would be included the O. Henry Awards volume for 1931 (his work was given the arguable plaudit of a limited edition collection, issued after his first with a regular press run, by Doubleday/Doran in 1932, Myself and the Young Bowman and Other Fantasies). He soon made his way to Hollywood, where he would script (either completely or through adaptation) a number of crime dramas and fantastica among other work for film and eventually television, including several in the Tarzan film series, the film Ransom! (later remade, without exclamation point, with Mel Gibson in the Glenn Ford role), and writing the script, from another writer's treatment (which in turn owed something to The Tempest), for the notable sf film Forbidden Planet. "El Greco and Mrs. London" is almost a casually tossed-off story by a writer who clearly knows what he's doing, and probably has more than a little in common with his protagonist, an artist of some talent but little application who is somewhat bitterly teaching painting to an adult education class in a small high school. Some sharp observation of the kinds of students this kind of class could attract, as well as of the degree of self-loathing the instructor can turn outward, only to find that he's actually falling for a talented young widow among his students. Hume would die rather young, not too long after this story's publication, in 1966.

Finally, for the purposes of this SSW entry (though I might read Finlay McDermid's novella for a later one), we turn to Leon Ware's "Sea Barrier", easily the worst of the short stories in this issue. Ware picked up an Edgar Award in 1966 for best young-readers' novel, The Mystery of 22 East, like this story one with a nautical setting, and if this story had been less simple-minded, I might be more willing to go dig up that or other work. This story posits, as one might in the late '50s with less likelihood of deserved mockery than today, that All Men Must Go Risk Their Lives in some pursuit, and All Women Will Do Better When They Just Accept This, No Matter How Little They Understand It Or Ever Will. Basically, a youngish lawyer and father of small children spends most of his weekends essentially stunt-sailing; his wife grows vexed at how little she and the kids see of him between work and his obsession with his hobby; she notes, a bit fretfully, his obvious itch to return to the wind in his face, and she learns, finally, from some shared wisdom from another "sailing widow" as both await their husbands' return (or worse) from at best a stupid attempt at a sailing run in a hurricane. But what are you going to do, Boys with Responsibilities will still be Boys, and that's All Men, and All Us Women just have to take it, and love them for it (and No Women clearly Ever Need Risk Nor Adventure in their lives, not even a little!  Says so right here!). Reductionist propaganda for irresponsibility and selfishness Rules OK. Remember, All Men are like this and All Women are like that. Hacks of various sorts still run these lines today, of course.

Meanwhile, here's this (touched on in the discussion of the Holmeses, above--see also in the comments below, for a bit more about Olive Holmes): In the July 1958 COSMO, in the editorial/in this issue column "What Goes on at Cosmopolitan" as signed by Associate Editor Harriet La Barre, this is the last item:

Write-where-you-are Twosome
Television buys a startling number of Cosmopolitan stories. But not the short story “Yankee Angel,” page 89. Any TV producer would run screaming from it; but everyone else will love it.

Oliver Wyman, who wrote the story, is really a couple of other people: the husband-and-wife writing team of Olive Holmes and Wyman Holmes. This Boston-born pair met at Harvard, where John Mason Brown was trying to teach them how to write plays. In the strange game of becoming a writer, Wyman first became a Broadway actor and was playing in Clare Boothe Luce’s “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” when he married Olive. The show promptly folded; no connection.

Unlike lots of writers of our acquaintance who can write only in a particular room or setting, this team can write anywhere—even in their two-room shack on a ten-acre island off the Maine coast. If too many guests turn up by motorboat, they retreat to a nearby tent and keep batting it out while sitting on an Army cot, their typewriter on an orange crate. Cosmopolitan, so far, has published four Oliver Wyman stories, mostly about the rich and stubborn Yankees that this Boston pair knows to a fare-thee-well.

—H. La B.




























































For more of today's Short Story Wednesday reviews, 

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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Avram Davidson, Rosel George Brown, Fredric Brown, Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth, Eric Frank Russell, et al; columns by Asimov, Bester, Moskowitz: FANTASTIC August 1960, edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1961, edited by Robert P. Mills: Short Story Wednesday

Off the shelf--from six decades ago, and featuring some of the more-admired stories of Vonnegut and Bloch, and "rare" stories by similarly notable writers...

Fantastic [v9 #8, August 1960] (35¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Albert Nuetzell)  edited by Cele Goldsmith












































































The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v21 #4, No. 125, October 1961] (40¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Chesley Bonestell)  edited by Robert P. Mills

As is utterly, perhaps tiresomely obvious to those who've been reading my blog entries over the years, that along with loving such magazines as Lewis Lapham's Harper's, particularly after its revamp and re-energization in 1983 (and how much The Atlantic had been on a downward slide since I first picked it up in 1978, one it hasn't ever reversed--for that matter, it was a better magazine in the '60s...), and Our Generation, the Montreal-based anarchist and libertarian socialist journal (even if I ended up contributing to Social Anarchism out of Baltimore instead--OG already had Noam Chomsky and Janet Biehl and George Woodcock and Murray Bookchin--as well as The Progressive in my early writing career, before both OG and SA folded), and loving fiction magazines and slightly more eclectic literary magazines (was even very briefly editor-in-chief of Hawai'i Review at the dawn of my arguably pro writing and editorial efforts, in 1983), particularly the likes of Ontario Review and The Paris Review and Short Story International, the crime fiction magazines (particularly The New Black Mask but also the veterans), the sf magazines, and the odd western or other specialized title that might come my way...with all of that, the fantasy and horror fiction magazines have had a special place in my heart, and in 1977 I voraciously fell upon The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949-date) and Fantastic (1952-1980, incorporated to a notable degree into its older stablemate Amazing Stories, at that time, and briefly revived since). I had learned of their existence in the previous-publication credits in various anthologies I'd read since about age 9, though even earlier I was beginning to seek out horror anthologies and the eclectic anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock. New issues off the stands of both F&SF and Fantastic were a joy, along with such others as the little magazine Whispers and the companion Doubleday anthology series it spawned (or the companion Doubleday series Shadows) and such annuals as Gerald Page's The Year's Best Horror Fiction or Terry Carr's new Year's Finest Fantasy, and all the back issues I could dig up (not too tough even then, though not as easy as in these days of web marketing). With the folding of Fantastic, one magazine or another would tend to "take its spot" on newsstands and otherwise, whether it was Twilight Zone Magazine (and its short-lived companion Night Cry), the reasonably hardy late 1980s revival of Weird Tales (still rumored to be a going concern, though the recent death of the most recent editor and publisher, Marvin Kaye, probably means this revival has ceased completely) or the slick if rather busy-looking Realms of Fantasy, while F&SF has soldiered on.

So, for today's consideration, two relatively random, reasonably contemporaneous back issues I happened to be moving from one spot to another...one being the first publication site for Kurt Vonnegut's most popular single short story, and notable that it didn't find a home with The Saturday Evening Post or Esquire (or Esquire's offspring, Playboy and its imitators), but apparently it wasn't stroking their fur quite the right way. Shirley Jackson had placed four stories with F&SF and one with Fantastic in the 1950s, stories that likewise should've been snapped up by Redbook or The New Yorker, but apparently were the Wrong kind of strange for the less-adventurous post-Harold Ross TNY or even the more literary women's magazines (though Redbook was pitching itself at young married couples for most of the '50s)...the fantasy magazines, and their founding editors Anthony Boucher and Howard Browne, took the stories even if they weren't quite fantasy. Not the only time they would make that exception for their fantasy/sf titles.  (Boucher and his co-founding editor J. Francis McComas would both take her first story for the magazine, "Bulletin" in 1954, but from her next and most famous F&SF offer "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" [1955] her appearances in the magazine were in Boucher solo issues. That Boucher and Browne were also notable crime-fiction writers among other interests, not least seeking prestige for their magazines, might also have made it more attractive than solely commercial good sense to pick up the Jacksons.)

"Harrison Bergeron" isn't the most subtle of Vonnegut's stories, which probably helps to explain its relative popularity, but it is rather funny while pounding its point into the ground with more urgency than slyness. As you might know, it's the allegory of a rebel in a society that hopes to make all persons equal in every manner by, for example, constantly piping a cacophony of noises into the ears of the musically talented, and hobbling the good dancers. More, apparently, a mockery of anti-intellectualism and rigidly-imposed conformity than of egalitarianism, it can also stroke those who feel their greatness (however actually limited) stymied by the jealousy and backstabbing of the ants around them. And it leads off this, the 17th Anniversary issue, part of a trend for the year-marking F&SF issues to be "All-Star" affairs (also, in later years, issues with which the cover price needed to be raised would also be All-Star issues). And, like a number of the stories in these two issues, it is rather short, almost a vignette.

Robert P. Mills was at least as much a sophisticate in his editorial tastes as Boucher, or, rather, didn't feel he needed to obviously cater to a relative lack of sophistication in the fantasy/sf magazine readership (Boucher would, in his book review columns for F&SF itself, make reference to how the likes of Mark Van Doren's fantasies might well go over the heads of the magazine's readership, unlike those of, say, Ray Bradbury.) Mills was also not the writer that Boucher was, nor quite the artistic polymath (Boucher was also expert in at least one musical field, opera, in which he conducted a weekly program for Pacifica Radio from the station/network's foundation till his death), but if he was quite as willing to limit his magazines' horizons as Boucher was, he wouldn't advertise the fact so baldly. The story Mills would publish in his F&SF that was even more famous than the Vonnegut would be Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon", the first published form of what Keyes would expand into a novel, famously adapted for television and film and discussed in George Kelley's Friday Books entry this past week. Before taking over F&SF from the retiring Boucher, Mills had edited the companion magazine Venture Science Fiction, which had picked up the banner from the slightly fading Galaxy magazine and Damon Knight's short term as editor of If: World of Science Fiction as the US sf magazine most likely to feature what Harlan Ellison would later tag "dangerous visions", and stories that dealt relatively frankly for the time in sexual matters and other taboo topics, albeit its leaning toward sometimes grim adventure fiction also saw it get some light mockery for being a magazine about manful suffering, in the post-Hemingway, Maileresque mode. While editing Venture, he continued to assist Boucher at F&SF, and Frederic Dannay as managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (even through the transition in early 1958 due to EQMM's sale to B. G. Davis. leaving Ziff-Davis to found Davis Publications, for which EQMM would be a bedrock title), and apparently served as the uncredited editor of the last two other crime fiction magazines published by Mercury Press, Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine (merged with Bestseller in 1959) and Bestseller Mystery Magazine (folded 1962), both officially edited by publisher Joseph Ferman (Ferman would also, apparently for appearances' sake, take the "official" editorial title at F&SF for the first several months after his college-aged son Edward Ferman succeeded  Avram Davidson as the editor of F&SF, after Davidson would succeed Mills; Mills went on to be primarily a literary agent, and apparently a bit more than that for James Baldwin in terms of taking care of practical matters for the writer, for the rest of Mills's professional life.)

Leading off this issue of Fantastic, after a typically chatty and not terribly deep (if more self-revealing than usual, describing his own personal utopia, yacht-based) editorial by "editorial director" Norman Lobsenz (tasked, apparently, with making sure the young and not too experienced editor Cele Goldsmith, later to marry and sign herself, eventually, as Cele Goldsmith Lalli, didn't make any serious mistakes at her legacy--and mostly Just legacy--Ziff-Davis magazines), Robert Bloch's "The World Timer" is a novelet with Bloch in jokey mode, generally amiable even when the jokes don't land, in which he would frequently (though not always) write in the work published by the Ziff-Davis magazines going back to the late '30s (most famously, his "Lefty Feep" series of stories)...Isaac Asimov, in reading the Ray Palmer-edited issue of Amazing Stories that featured Asimov's first published story, noted that the only story he thought better than his own modest effort was Bloch's "The Strange Flight of Richard Clayton" (as Asimov noted in the course of introducing the Bloch story's inclusion in Asimov et al.'s retro best-of-the-year anthology devoted to fiction first published in 1939). But Bloch at the heart of this story is getting at some serious points about psychiatry, which he'd been studying to a great degree throughout the '50s while writing some of the most famous crime-fiction work of his career (including, unsurprisingly, 1959's Psycho); beyond the comedy of humors naming of his psychiatrist protagonist "Morton Placebo", and the pharmaceutical time-travel/psychedelics as warping objective reality plot used in the story, Bloch shares his concerns with the seedier and less responsible behavior in the profession, and considered this as a result one of his best stories for the purposes of his sf- and fantasy-heavy volume The Best of Robert Bloch (Ballantine 1976)(a couple of years later, he published with Ballantine/Del Rey a companion best-of devoted to his horror and suspense fiction).

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Cele Goldsmith, who had been initially hired at Ziff-Davis as a secretary and quickly handed the task of editing a short-lived magazine for finding Pen Pals, had also been tasked with helping Howard Browne and then Paul Fairman with traffic around the fiction magazines Ziff-Davis was still publishing, though with less enthusiasm than they had previously, expensive-hobby magazines (stereo equipment, boating, electronics, photography) becoming the publisher's bread and butter (leading to cofounder B. G. Davis leaving the company to strike out on his own with Davis Publications); Browne eventually and Fairman throughout his (rather dire) editorship took a factory approach to filling Fantastic and Amazing Stories, Fairman relying on a quintet of young writers (Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett, Milton Lesser before legally changing his name to Stephen Marlowe, and Henry Slesar) for most of what he published in the magazines (including a brief run of wish-fulfillment fantasy magazine Dream World)--get it in Wednesday and make sure it Won't Cause Trouble, and you get a paycheck--if it's good, all the better, but that was secondary (Fairman famously didn't bother to read what he bought from his quintet). Goldsmith at this point was combing through the unsolicited manuscripts, the "slush pile", which is how, among other rather good work, Kate Wilhelm's first published story was in Fantastic in 1956. So, when Fairman resigned in '58 (and oddly enough was soon working as Assistant Editor at the Davis Publications Ellery Queen's), William Ziff and company offered young Goldsmith actual editorship of Fantastic and Amazing, with a penny/word budget for the fiction and other content, gave Lobsenz the task of keeping an eye on her and writing the "editorials" and usually conducting the letter column, and blurbing the contents, while Goldsmith tried to learn as fast as she could about fantasy and sf, and how to properly edit a magazine. One of her self-assigned projects was to lure Fritz Leiber out of one of his periodic bouts of crippling alcoholism and get him back to writing, squeezing her budget for at least 2c/word for his contributions and those of a few others, and publishing the first stories of  a remarkable number of new talents; she never won the Hugo Award for best magazine (her two magazines would compete with each other, splitting vote totals), but she did get a special award at one World Convention, for her work at improving the Ziff-Davis magazines.  When ZD found a buyer for Fantastic (the brief period of it being titled Fantastic Science Fiction, with the notion that sf sold better in magazines than fantasy did, was followed [beginning two issues after the August issue discussed here] by a longer run as Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, a rather more accurate title), and Amazing Stories (or, in the same Goldsmith/Lalli years, Amazing Stories: Fact and Science Fiction), they sold the magazines out from under her rather abruptly, and she was redeployed to ZD's bridal magazines, where she soon became the dominant and most admired editor in that specialized fashion/planning field for the rest of a lengthy career. (While ZD's Popular Electronics and Electronics World magazines ended up being the most obvious progenitors of Ziff-Davis's ultimate fate as a brand of computer information publisher and web/cable tv producer.)

But Leiber wasn't the only veteran writer Goldsmith/Lalli was interested in taking work from, even if the Leiber story, "Rats of Limbo" (not yet reprinted anywhere, as far as I know) reads like the transcript of a surreal nightmare for its brief run, with its protagonist in Limbo but tormented, in a fashion reminiscent of Sisyphus's punishment, by among others the specter of Robert E. Lee and a bevy of rats. Fredric Brown also has a similar vignette in the issue, "The House", which Brown scholar Jack Seabrook reminds me was included in Brown's most widely distributed collection, Nightmares and Geezenstacks (Bantam 1961), and two other Brown retrospectives since; it's an enigmatic and highly symbolic account of a traversal of a house that might symbolize a metaphor or psychodrama of a life coming to its end, but resists easy interpretation. It definitely reads as if it resonates more deeply with Brown than Leiber's, which can be seen as a kind of jest in comparison, does with him (look to the plays for voices by Leiber such as "The Secret Songs" and  "247 Talking Statues, Etc." for similarly obviously deeply-felt work). The kind of enigmatic fiction that Goldsmith Lalli was more open to than more seasoned editors, less receptive to non-linear narratives than old hands...though Mills and particularly his F&SF successor Davidson would be more open than many of their colleagues to this kind of story as well, with the result their magazines helped spark "the New Wave" along with the British magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and such anthology series as Damon Knight's Orbit and Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker's Quark in later years. 

More to come...

For more (and, at the moment, more complete!) Wednesday Short Story entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Thursday, January 17, 2019

FFB: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF THEODORE STURGEON edited and annotated by Paul Williams and Noël Sturgeon (13 volumes plus a 1993 chapbook, North Atlantic Books, 1995-2010)

Theodore Sturgeon was by all accounts a confounding personality, genial, personally irresponsible, questioning many of the more basic matters of human relations, perception and emotion, and a man who could certainly write a sentence...and then be hung up by how badly he'd done so for years-long writer's blocks. And yet managed to be very prolific over a long if troubled career. Kurt Vonnegut based Kilgore Trout on him (as the name makes clear), while also admitting that much of what Trout was was also Vonnegut himself. Ray Bradbury was his most assiduous student; Bradbury learned much of his early craft from imitating Sturgeon's work, as well as getting more hands-on instruction from Leigh Brackett and others, and Bradbury deviating from that early tutelage didn't necessarily improve his work. He was a brilliant writer, as Vonnegut, Bradbury and the others tapped to write introductions and afterwords to the volumes of this massive effort to collect all his short fiction, some of it otherwise "lost" in a more profound way than we usually mean this, attest to, each in turn: Samuel R. Delany, Jonathan Lethem, Peter Beagle, Connie Willis, Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Wolfe, Harlan Ellison, Philip Klass (aka "William Tenn"), David Hartwell, Larry McCaffery, Spider Robinson, Debbie Notkin, James Gunn and, because the project's original editor was the late, pioneering music journalist and magazine publisher Paul Williams, David Crosby, whose introduction is the slightest, unsurprisingly, if no less heartfelt. Among those who didn't survive to see even the initial volumes of the project  in print, Robert Heinlein's memory of the times he was proud to be able to help out Sturgeon are included, as was Isaac Asimov's recollection of how gutted he was by Sturgeon's fiction, first as a reader and also as a writer who knew he wasn't ever going to be able to match it. 

 And then we're into each volume, assembled as closely as possible as a chronological assembly of the fiction in the order it was written, with a few of the most obscure items recovered and added out of order in later volumes. Along with Williams's copious notes and running biographical account of Sturgeon's life and that of his family and contemporaries. (Williams was the grievously impaired survivor of an accident while bicycling in the latter years of assembling this series, after his similar assembly of the short work of Philip K. Dick, and Sturgeon's daughter Noël picked up the gauntlet when he could no longer continue.) The fiction ranges from slight early attempts and minor work sprinkled in throughout Sturgeon's career, to some of the most fully-realized literary art by anyone writing sf and fantasy in the middle decades of the previous century. There's a reason Graham Greene's entry came in second to Sturgeon's story "Bianca's Hands" in a contest the UK magazine Argosy sponsored in 1947, and not because Greene wasn't trying, with his "The Second Death"...just as there was a less-good reason that Sturgeon's disturbing story had failed to sell for nearly a decade before sending it along to the Argosy contest. Sturgeon was "the finest conscious artist science fiction [has] ever produced," James Blish once wrote in one of his critical pieces, and North Atlantic was quick to cite that in their catalog blurbing, as well, and while others have rivaled him, few have had more extensive influence coupled with the excellence of their best work. He wrote brilliant horror fiction, fantasy and science fiction and less copiously in other fields, including similarly impressive work in western fiction and good work in crime fiction and contemporary/mimetic fiction. His occasional ghosted books included two of "Ellery Queen"'s novels and the famous literary hoax novel Betty and Ian Ballantine chose to publish in the wake of Jean Shepherd's large-scale practical joke on the "bestseller list" devisers, in employing his radio listeners in creating demand and "bestseller" status for a nonexistent historical novel, I, Libertine, published as by "Frederick R. Ewing" after a marathon overnight writing session to rush the book out, the final pages written by Betty Ballantine after Sturgeon simply needed to collapse on the couch. Ballantine Books also published a number of his better books, in first edition and reprints. 
Sturgeon's novels were often not up to the best of his short work; published after his first, 1950's impressive The Dreaming Jewels, his most famous novel, More Than Human, is essentially a working-together (or "fix-up") of three novellas, one of them lending its title to Volume VI of this series, "Baby is Three"...and they weren't always treated well by their publishers...Dell Books chose to package the slight expansion of the novella "To Marry Medusa" as The Cosmic Rape (1958), among the more unintentionally (we can hope) terrible commercial decisions ever made on behalf of a new book by an important writer...oddly enough, subsequent publishers opted to go for the original title. His next sf novel had the only slightly better title, if less objectionable, Venus Plus X (1959); it would be his last science fiction novel, with the weak exception of his novelization of the film Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961); the same year saw his rationalized-vampire psychological suspense novel Some of Your Blood, and aside from the ghosted "Queen"s, another film novelization, from the western The Rare Breed, and the long-worked-over final fantasy novel Godbody, published posthumously in 1986, he would publish no more book-length fiction, though another project which had been in (apparently limited) progress for decades, expanding from his story "When You Care, When You Love", was left unfinished at his death. The story had been published in the first special author-tribute issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with the Edmund Emshwiller cover painting for that issue (September 1962) reprinted as the cover of Volume VII, above. 


But he continued, albeit with the sporadic blocks noted above, to contribute good to brilliant short fiction throughout his career, as well as contributing a range of nonfiction writing and devoting a fair amount of time in his last years to teaching in writing workshops...one of my lasting regrets is not being able to afford to attend, assuming I would've been admitted to, one held on Kauai when I was living on Oahu in 1984; the impressive if relatively underpublished writer Elizabeth Engstrom began publishing after her attendance at the same workshop, which might even have been Sturgeon's last. His book reviews, which appeared in even more unlikely places than his fiction would, including National Review (he was not a Conservative) and Hustler (the latter during Paul Krassner's comparatively ambitious editorship of that skin magazine), were often criticized themselves for his stated inability to dislike any book.  Other essays of his were usually less controversial thus...it was in his first regular book-review column in the magazine Venture that he first put into print his Sturgeon's Estimate, that 90% of any artistic body of literature is mediocre or worse...often cited as Sturgeon's Law, and that  90% of everything is crap. 

A pamphlet issued in 1993 by Paul Williams as a fundraiser and heads-up that the Sturgeon Project was beginning, and he would be seeking a publisher for the Complete Stories volumes; Argyll was how he dubbed his stepfather, the source of the Sturgeon name for a boy who had been born Edward Hamilton Waldo, and whose mother had his name changed after she married  this uptight and at least borderline abusive, as Sturgeon recalls him, new father-figure. Apparently written in 1965, and unpublished till this 1993 item.


 The Ultimate Egoist: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 1 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-182-1, Feb ’95 [Dec ’94], $25.00, 387pp, hc, cover by Jacek Yerka) Collection of 46 stories and one poem, nine of them previously unpublished “trunk” stories (literally). This is the first of thirteen volumes and covers Sturgeon’s work through 1940. A marvelous project. [--Locus magazine editor and publisher Charles N. Brown] Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams, with forewords by Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Gene Wolfe. Order from North Atlantic Books, PO Box 12327, Berkeley CA 94712.
  • v · Editor’s Note · Paul Williams · pr
  • ix · About Theodore Sturgeon · Ray Bradbury · fw Without Sorcery, Prime Press, 1948
  • xii · About Theodore Sturgeon · Arthur C. Clarke · fw *
  • xiv · About Theodore Sturgeon · Gene Wolfe · fw *
  • 3 · Heavy Insurance · ss Milwaukee Journal Jul 16 ’38
  • 6 · The Heart · ss Other Worlds Science Stories May ’55
  • 10 · Cellmate · ss Weird Tales Jan ’47
  • 23 · Fluffy · ss Weird Tales Mar ’47
  • 31 · Alter Ego · ss *
  • 35 · Mailed Through a Porthole · ss *
  • 40 · A Noose of Light · ss *
  • 50 · Strangers on a Train · ss *
  • 55 · Accidentally on Porpoise · ss *
  • 70 · The Right Line · ss *
  • 83 · Golden Day · ss Milwaukee Journal Mar 4 ’39
  • 86 · Permit Me My Gesture · ss Milwaukee Journal Mar 10 ’39
  • 89 · Watch My Smoke · ss Milwaukee Journal Mar 13 ’39
  • 92 · The Other Cheek · ss Milwaukee Journal Apr 10 ’39
  • 95 · Extraordinary Seaman · ss Milwaukee Journal Jun ’39
  • 104 · One Sick Kid · ss Milwaukee Journal Apr 29 ’39
  • 107 · His Good Angel · ss Milwaukee Journal May 12 ’39
  • 110 · Some People Forget · ss Milwaukee Journal May 30 ’39
  • 113 · A God in a Garden · ss Unknown Oct ’39
  • 133 · Fit for a King · ss Milwaukee Journal Jun 10 ’39
  • 136 · Ex-Bachelor Extract · ss Milwaukee Journal Jun 17 ’39
  • 139 · East Is East · ss Milwaukee Journal Jun 24 ’39
  • 142 · Three People · ss *
  • 145 · Eyes of Blue · ss Milwaukee Journal Jul 1 ’39
  • 148 · Ether Breather [Ether Breather] · ss Astounding Sep ’39
  • 163 · Her Choice · ss Milwaukee Journal Jul 8 ’39
  • 166 · Cajun Providence · ss Milwaukee Journal Jul 15 ’39
  • 169 · Strike Three · ss *
  • 172 · Contact! · ss Milwaukee Journal Aug 5 ’39
  • 175 · The Call · ss Milwaukee Journal Aug 19 ’39
  • 178 · Helix the Cat · nv Astounding, ed. Harry Harrison, Random House, 1973
  • 204 · To Shorten Sail · ss Milwaukee Journal Sep 9 ’39
  • 207 · Thanksgiving Again · ss *
  • 217 · Bianca’s Hands · ss Argosy (UK) May ’47
  • 226 · Derm Fool · ss Unknown Mar ’40
  • 242 · He Shuttles · ss Unknown Apr ’40
  • 262 · Turkish Delight · ss Milwaukee Journal Nov 18 ’39
  • 265 · Niobe · ss *
  • 270 · Mahout · ss Milwaukee Journal Jan 22 ’40
  • 273 · The Long Arm · ss Milwaukee Journal Feb 5 ’40
  • 276 · The Man on the Steps · ss Milwaukee Journal Feb 22 ’40
  • 279 · Punctuational Advice · ss Milwaukee Journal Feb 29 ’40
  • 282 · Place of Honor · ss Milwaukee Journal Mar 18 ’40
  • 285 · The Ultimate Egoist · nv Unknown Feb ’41
  • 303 · It · nv Unknown Aug ’40
  • 328 · Butyl and the Breather [Ether Breather] · nv Astounding Oct ’40
  • 351 · Back Words: Story Notes · Paul Williams · ms *
  • 387 · Look About You · pm Unknown Jan ’40
As with at least a few of the other geniuses in the fantastic-fiction field, notably Fritz Leiber and Joanna Russ (and acolyte Bradbury), it's notable the number of rather brilliant horror stories cluster here in the earliest career of Sturgeon, with the proportion of horror fiction to attenuate by mid-career ..."Fluffy", "Bianca's Hands", "It", and then "Cellmate" and "He Shuttles" a notch less superb. "The Ultimate Egoist" being a fine humorous dark fantasy, plagiarized by at least one comic-book story I read as a child.  The largely sailing-related vignettes from newspaper syndication (Sturgeon was a merchant mariner) are promising but not, on balance, much more than interesting. 

Microcosmic God: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 2 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-213-5, Jan ’96 [Dec ’95], $25.00, 372pp, hc, cover by Jacek Yerka) Collection of 17 stories, two previously unpublished. This is the second of thirteen volumes and covers Sturgeon’s work from 1940 to 1943. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams. There is a foreword by Samuel R. Delany.
  • vi · Editor’s Note · Paul Williams · pr
  • vii · Theodore Sturgeon · Samuel R. Delany · fw * [Theodore Sturgeon]
  • 3 · Cargo · nv Unknown Nov ’40
  • 32 · Shottle Bop · nv Unknown Feb ’41
  • 59 · Yesterday Was Monday · ss Unknown Jun ’41
  • 77 · Brat · ss Unknown Dec ’41
  • 95 · The Anonymous · nv *
  • 123 · Two Sidecars · ss *
  • 127 · Microcosmic God · nv Astounding Apr ’41
  • 157 · The Haunt · ss Unknown Apr ’41
  • 175 · Completely Automatic · ss Astounding Feb ’41
  • 194 · Poker Face · ss Astounding Mar ’41
  • 206 · Nightmare Island [as by E. Waldo Hunter] · nv Unknown Jun ’41
  • 235 · The Purple Light [as by E. Hunter Waldo] · ss Astounding Jun ’41
  • 241 · Artnan Process · nv Astounding Jun ’41
  • 265 · Biddiver · nv Astounding Aug ’41
  • 289 · The Golden Egg · nv Unknown Aug ’41
  • 309 · Two Percent Inspiration · ss Astounding Oct ’41
  • 329 · The Jumper · Theodore Sturgeon & James H. Beard · ss Unknown Aug ’42; Beard is not credited in this edition.
  • 347 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · bi
  • 369 · Microcosmic God (Unfinished Early draft) · uw *



Killdozer!: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 3 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-227-5, Nov ’96 [Oct ’96], $25.00, 367pp, hc, cover by Paul Orban) Collection of 15 stories, four previously unpublished, and two not previously collected. This is the third of thirteen volumes and covers Sturgeon’s work from 1941 to 1946. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams. There is a foreword by Robert Silverberg, and an afterword by Robert A. Heinlein (excerpted from the 1985 introduction to Godbody).
  • ix · Foreword · Robert Silverberg · fw
  • 1 · Blabbermouth · nv Amazing Feb ’47
  • 26 · Medusa · nv Astounding Feb ’42
  • 48 · Ghost of a Chance [aka “The Green-Eyed Monster”] · ss Unknown Jun ’43
  • 65 · The Bones · Theodore Sturgeon & James H. Beard · ss Unknown Aug ’43
  • 84 · The Hag Séleen · Theodore Sturgeon & James H. Beard · nv Unknown Dec ’42
  • 104 · Killdozer! · na Aliens 4, Avon, 1959; revised from Astounding Nov ’44.
  • 177 · Abreaction · ss Weird Tales Jul ’48
  • 190 · Poor Yorick · ss *
  • 194 · Crossfire · vi *
  • 197 · Noon Gun · ss Playboy Sep ’63
  • 211 · Bulldozer Is a Noun · ss *
  • 227 · August Sixth, 1945 · pl Astounding Dec ’45
  • 231 · The Chromium Helmet · nv Astounding Jun ’46
  • 283 · Memorial · ss Astounding Apr ’46
  • 297 · Mewhu’s Jet · nv Astounding Nov ’46
  • 335 · Story Notes (including the original ending of “Killdozer!” and the unpublished alternate ending of “Mewhu’s Jet”) · Paul Williams · bi
  • 361 · Afterword [from the 1985 introduction to Godbody] · Robert A. Heinlein · aw
As would happen with the next volume, the initial cover for Thunder and Roses was deemed insufficiently decorative:
Cover and book design by Paula Morrison--though ISFDB wonders if the artist credit is simply omitted, as Morrison designed the entire series. I wonder if this cover illustration wasn't, like the next volume's also-replaced initial cover image, by Hal Robins.


And was replaced:
The new cover painting, titled "Sun Spots", is by Jacek Yerka (1999)

Thunder and Roses: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 4 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-252-6, Nov ’97, $25.00, 380pp, hc) Collection of 15 stories, one previously unpublished, and three not previously collected. This is the fourth of thirteen volumes and covers Sturgeon’s work from 1946 to 1947. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams. The foreword by James Gunn originally appeared in Star Trek: The Joy Machine by Sturgeon & Gunn (1996). 
  • ix · Foreword · James Gunn · fw Star Trek: The Joy Machine, James Gunn & Theodore Sturgeon, Pocket, 1996
  • 1 · Maturity · na Astounding Feb ’47
  • 60 · Tiny and the Monster · nv Astounding May ’47
  • 97 · The Sky Was Full of Ships · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Jun ’47
  • 109 · Largo · ss Fantastic Adventures Jul ’47
  • 125 · Thunder and Roses · ss Astounding Nov ’47
  • 150 · It Wasn’t Syzygy [“The Deadly Ratio”] · nv Weird Tales Jan ’48
  • 179 · The Blue Letter · ss *
  • 183 · Wham Bop! · ss The Varsity Nov ’47
  • 197 · Well Spiced · ss Zane Grey’s Western Magazine Feb ’48
  • 214 · Hurricane Trio · nv Galaxy Apr ’55
  • 245 · That Low · vi Famous Fantastic Mysteries Oct ’48
  • 250 · Memory · nv Thrilling Wonder Stories Aug ’48
  • 273 · There Is No Defense · nv Astounding Feb ’48
  • 321 · The Professor’s Teddy Bear · ss Weird Tales Mar ’48
  • 332 · A Way Home · ss Amazing Apr/May ’53
  • 340 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · bi
  • 359 · The original second half of “Maturity” · ex *
This 1957 UK-only collection shouldn't be confused with the series volume detailed above:


Apparently the first edition cover illustration for this one also was given another look by North Atlantic and judged too much like amateur cartooning, however intentionally primitive/"outsider" it was intended to be:
Cover art by Hal Robins; Cover and book design by Paula Morrison

 And was replaced:
The Perfect Host: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 5 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-284-4, Nov ’98 [Oct ’98], $27.50, 386pp, hc, second edition cover by Michael Dashow) Collection of 17 stories, two previously unpublished, and seven not previously collected. Foreword by Larry McCaffery. This is the fifth of thirteen volumes, and covers Sturgeon’s work from 1947 to 1949. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams. 
  • ix · Foreword · Larry McCaffery · fw
  • 1 · Quietly · ss *
  • 18 · The Music · vi E Pluribus Unicorn, Abelard, 1953
  • 20 · Unite and Conquer · nv Astounding Oct ’48
  • 63 · The Love of Heaven · ss Astounding Nov ’48
  • 78 · Till Death Do Us Join · ss Shock Jul ’48
  • 92 · The Perfect Host · nv Weird Tales Nov ’48
  • 141 · The Martian and the Moron · nv Weird Tales Mar ’49
  • 167 · Die, Maestro, Die! · nv Dime Detective Magazine May ’49
  • 201 · The Dark Goddess · ss *
  • 215 · Scars · ss Zane Grey’s Western Magazine May ’49
  • 223 · Messenger · ss Thrilling Wonder Stories Feb ’49
  • 235 · Minority Report · ss Astounding Jun ’49
  • 257 · Prodigy · ss Astounding Apr ’49
  • 269 · Farewell to Eden · ss Invasion from Mars, edited by Don Ward, though credited to Orson Welles, Dell, 1949 (Ward ghost-edited for several celebrities in the 1940s at Dell, including Alfred Hitchcock)
  • 283 · One Foot and the Grave · nv Weird Tales Sep ’49
  • 324 · What Dead Men Tell · nv Astounding Nov ’49
  • 353 · The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast · ss The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) Fll ’49
  • 362 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · ms


Baby Is Three: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 6 Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books 1-55643-319-0, Nov ’99, $30.00, 424pp, hc, cover by Richard M. Powers) Collection of 11 stories, plus two autobiographical essays in an appendix. Foreword by David Crosby. This is the sixth of thirteen volumes, and covers Sturgeon’s work from 1950 to 1953. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams.
  • · Editor’s Note · Paul Williams · pr
  • ix · Foreword · David Crosby · fw
  • 1 · Shadow, Shadow, on the Wall · ss Imagination Feb ’51
  • 11 · The Stars Are the Styx · nv Galaxy Oct ’50
  • 54 · Rule of Three · nv Galaxy Jan ’51
  • 92 · Make Room for Me · nv Fantastic Adventures May ’51
  • 119 · Special Aptitude [aka “Last Laugh”] · ss Other Worlds Science Stories Mar ’51
  • 137 · The Traveling Crag · nv Fantastic Adventures Jul ’51
  • 171 · Excalibur and the Atom · na Fantastic Adventures Aug ’51
  • 238 · The Incubi of Parallel X · na Planet Stories Sep ’51
  • 293 · Never Underestimate... · ss If Mar ’52
  • 312 · The Sex Opposite · nv Fantastic Fll ’52
  • 340 · Baby Is Three · na Galaxy Oct ’52
  • 401 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · bi
  • · Appendix: Two Autobiographical Essays
  • 416 · Author, Author · bg The Fanscient Spr ’50
  • The Men Behind Fantastic Adventures:
    421 · Theodore Sturgeon · bg Fantastic Adventures Aug ’51

A Saucer of Loneliness: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VII Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic 1-55643-350-6, Oct 2000, $30.00, 388 + ix, hc, cover by Ed Emshwiller) Collection of 12 stories. The foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. discusses the connection between his character Kilgore Trout and Sturgeon. This is the seventh of thirteen volumes, and covers work written from 1952 to 1953. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams.
  • ix · Foreword · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · fw
  • 1 · A Saucer of Loneliness · ss Galaxy Feb ’53
  • 15 · The Touch of Your Hand · na Galaxy Sep ’53
  • 61 · The World Well Lost · ss Universe Jun ’53
  • 81 · ...And My Fear Is Great... · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jul ’53
  • 145 · The Wages of Synergy · nv Startling Stories Aug ’53
  • 195 · The Dark Room · nv Fantastic Jul/Aug ’53
  • 237 · Talent · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep ’53
  • 247 · A Way of Thinking · nv Amazing Oct/Nov ’53
  • 277 · The Silken-Swift · nv F&SF Nov ’53
  • 297 · The Clinic · ss Star Science Fiction Stories #2, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1953
  • 311 · Mr. Costello, Hero · nv Galaxy Dec ’53
  • 339 · The Education of Drusilla Strange · nv Galaxy Mar ’54
  • 375 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · bi

Bright Segment: The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume VIII Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic 1-55643-398-0, May 2002, $35.00, 408pp, hc) Collection of 11 stories. This eighth volume covers work written from 1953 to 1955, plus two earlier short-short stories not found until recently. Foreword by "William Tenn" (Philip Klass). Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams.
  • ix · Foreword · William Tenn · fw
  • 1 · Cactus Dance · nv Luke Short’s Western Magazine Oct/Dec ’54
  • 27 · The Golden Helix · na Thrilling Wonder Stories Sum ’54
  • 85 · Extrapolation [aka “Beware the Fury”] · nv Fantastic Apr ’54
  • 115 · Granny Won’t Knit · na Galaxy May ’54
  • 175 · To Here and the Easel · na Star Short Novels, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1954
  • 229 · When You’re Smiling · nv Galaxy Jan ’55
  • 259 · Bulkhead [aka “Who?”] · nv Galaxy Mar ’55
  • 291 · The Riddle of Ragnarok · nv Fantastic Universe Jun ’55
  • 311 · Twink · ss Galaxy Aug ’55
  • 329 · Bright Segment · nv Caviar, Ballantine, 1955
  • 355 · So Near the Darkness · nv Fantastic Universe Nov ’55
  • 389 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · ms
  • 403 · Clockwise · vi Calling All Boys Sep ’46
  • 405 · Smpke! · vi Calling All Boys Dec ’46-Jan ’47
And Now the News...: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume IX Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic 1-55643-460-X, Nov 2003, $35.00, 377 + xiv, hc) Collection of 15 stories, five not previously collected. Foreword by David G. Hartwell. This volume covers work written from 1955 to 1957. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams; includes the revelation that two stories were collaborations with Robert A. Heinlein: “The Other Man” and “And Now the News...”
  • ix · Foreword · David G. Hartwell · fw
  • 1 · “Won’t You Walk...” · nv Astounding Jan ’56
  • 31 · New York Vignette · ss F&SF Oct/Nov ’99
  • 35 · The Half-Way Tree Murder · ss The Saint Detective Magazine Mar ’56
  • 51 · The Skills of Xanadu · nv Galaxy Jul ’56
  • 81 · The Claustrophile · nv Galaxy Aug ’56
  • 113 · Dead Dames Don’t Dial · ss The Saint Detective Magazine Aug ’56
  • 131 · Fear Is a Business · ss F&SF Aug ’56
  • 151 · The Other Man · na Galaxy Sep ’56 (with Robert Heinlein)
  • 205 · The Waiting Thing Inside · Theodore Sturgeon & Don Ward · ss EQMM Sep ’56
  • 223 · The Deadly Innocent · Theodore Sturgeon & Don Ward · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Nov ’56
  • 239 · And Now the News... · ss F&SF Dec ’56 (with Robert Heinlein)
  • 261 · The Girl Had Guts · nv Venture Jan ’57
  • 287 · The Other Celia · ss Galaxy Mar ’57
  • 305 · Affair with a Green Monkey · ss Venture May ’57
  • 317 · The Pod and the Barrier · na Galaxy Sep ’57
  • 359 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · ms

The Nail and the Oracle: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume XI Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic 1-55643-661-0, Jul 2007, $35.00, xxxii+256pp, hc) Collection of 12 stories. Foreword by Harlan Ellison, who collaborated on one of the stories. This volume covers work written from 1957 to 1970. Edited and with extensive story notes by Paul Williams. North Atlantic Books 
  • · Editor’s Note · Paul Williams · pr
  • ix · Abiding with Sturgeon: Mistral in the Bijou · Harlan Ellison · ar Interzone Jun, 2007 ; revised.
  • 1 · Ride In, Ride Out · Theodore Sturgeon & Don Ward · nv Sturgeon’s West, Doubleday, 1973
  • 25 · Assault and Little Sister · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Jul ’61
  • 43 · When You Care, When You Love · nv F&SF Sep ’62
  • 85 · Holdup à la Carte · ss EQMM Feb ’64
  • 95 · How to Forget Baseball · nv Sports Illustrated Dec 21 ’64
  • 117 · The Nail and the Oracle · nv Playboy Oct ’65
  • 137 · If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister? · na Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967
  • 181 · Runesmith · Harlan Ellison & Theodore Sturgeon · ss F&SF May ’70
  • 199 · Jorry’s Gap · ss Adam Oct ’69
  • 211 · Brownshoes · ss Adam May ’69
  • 223 · It Was Nothing—Really! · ss Knight Nov ’69
  • 237 · Take Care of Joey · ss Knight Jan ’71
  • 247 · Story Notes · Paul Williams · bi


  • Slow Sculpture, Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
  • Theodore Sturgeon; edited by Noël Sturgeon
  • Date: 2009-10-20
  • ISBN: 978-1-55643-834-9 [1-55643-834-6]
  • Publisher: North Atlantic Books
  • Price: $35.00
  • Pages: xi+299
  • Cover: Slow Sculpture, Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon by Paula Morrison
  • Notes: $43.00 in Canada. The copyright page contains complete Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data including both the ISBN (978-1-55643-661-1) and the LCCN (2009031693). "Cover photo collage and book design by Paula Morrison" stated on the copyright page. Noël Sturgeon takes over editorship of the series from Paul Williams starting with this volume, and credited as such on the title page. Even so, a short bio of Paul Williams is printed on the back flap of the dustjacket.

  • Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
  • Theodore Sturgeon; edited by Noël Sturgeon
  • Date: 2010-09-28
  • ISBN: 978-1-55643-934-6 [1-55643-934-2]
  • Publisher: North Atlantic Books
  • Price: $35.00
  • Pages: xviii+375
  • Cover: Case and the Dreamer, Volume XIII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon by Paula Morrison
    • Notes: Final volume in "The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon" series. The copyright page contains complete Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data including both the ISBN (978-1-55643-934-6) and the LCCN (2010019205). "Cover and book design by Paula Morrison" stated on the copyright page.
For more of today's books and more, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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