But he continued all the same to plow the fields of genre, whether he did so because he couldn't publish elsewhere or because he loved the feel of speculative fiction, which gave his rampaging talent tools to work with. It is not the fault of that genre that, in the end, those tools -- that field, those editors, these readers -- cramped a great talent until he became silent; he wrote very few stories after the 1950s. It is not the fault of science fiction that Sturgeon tore himself to bits in its teeth. But he did. And it is our great good luck that his rage to express himself generated so many tales whose emotional rightness pierces through the veils of circumspection, moving us all the more through the upwelling pressure of the almost said. You could almost hear the wail.

It was the wail of a man with universes to say, and no tongue. But fortune really was with us, as most of "Selected Stories" demonstrates. Every once in a while Sturgeon found his tongue -- and it happened frequently enough to make up the contents of one big book like this, and probably a couple more. His best stories about sex, like "The Sex Opposite" or "The Skills of Xanadu" -- where liberated, seemingly primitive villagers trick a visitor from another planet into carrying back to his totalitarian state the seeds of Sturgeonesque rebellion -- are as full of hidden dynamite as those great Hollywood romantic comedies made when literal obedience to the Hayes Code didn't clear the air of sex but rather charged it with the stuff. (A movie like Howard Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby," in which Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn never actually kiss, is perhaps as erotically charged a film as it's possible for a viewer to experience without bursting.)

So the emotions were, occasionally, fed into stories that could sustain them. This is perhaps clearest in the climax of "The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff," which argues with palpable intensity that men and women are unnaturally isolated from one another; that the normal forms of human social interaction are forms of bondage; that when humans open themselves to one another and to the world, it is not just love that they feel, though human beings are only truly human when loving. What they feel is an instinctive equilibrium of joining, a balancing of the entire human species in something like a dance. This is what governs the actions of the alien couple (the Widget and the Wadget, to give them their names) who, disguised as boardinghouse proprietors, test their boarders nearly to destruction by forcing them to be honest about themselves. Honesty, Sturgeon suggests, is almost intolerably difficult for the unaided human to achieve; and absolutely necessary, if we are to gain the universe. And the heart of being honest is to share love, as one of the awakened protagonists eventually understands:

That's what Bitty and Sam [which is what Widget and Wadget call themselves on Earth] gave us -- a synaptic reflex like the equilibrium mechanisms, but bigger -- much bigger. A human being is an element in a whole culture, and the culture itself is alive ... I suppose the species could be called, as a whole, a living thing.

We may doubt that Sturgeon's passionate longing to share is the answer, as he thought it was, to all our woes upon this planet, but there is no gainsaying the deep urgency of his plea. Over and above the pleasures of his storytelling -- for he could tell a rattling yarn when it suited his deeper needs to do so -- it is why he should be read today. These stories, taken together, brief us about species togetherness; they plead to us: Do not shut down. Do not become less than human. Do not become a solitude.

Please, says Sturgeon, staring up at the cameras.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"