Eros in the age of machines

Wed, 15 Nov 2000 09:43:00 +0000

Any reader who traverses the entirety of Theodore Sturgeon's "Selected Stories," now published, 15 years after his death, by the prestigious Vintage Books division of Random House, is almost certain to wonder just what happened here, once upon a time. There is greatness, and there is a tragedy. Why is it only now that these stories have come out of the dark? Why wasn't their author recognized long ago as an innovative and ambitious short story writer, one of the best America has produced? Why do so many of his stories shake themselves apart? Why do some of them tear us apart?

There's also a mystery here. Sturgeon's stories -- even when astutely selected, as in this volume; even when they're heartbreakingly fine, as most of these tales are -- give off a sense that something terrible must have happened long ago, almost certainly to Sturgeon himself. Which is not to say that Sturgeon was a writer who could not control his talent, or that the work in "Selected Stories" is anything like incompetent. Neither is the case, though some of the tales assembled here seem to run away from their author, and Sturgeon himself was certainly capable of spouting the awfullest flapdoodle, like some inebriated Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three in the airport lounge, and saith, "All you need is love, all you need is love, get me?, all you need is love," 'til the cows come home.

In defense of science fiction

Tue, 25 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Once upon a time -- about a century ago -- something happened in the world of books that, for a while, boded no ill. H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse and Edgar Rice Burroughs consciously invented (along with a lot of other writers like Robert Louis Stevenson or Bram Stoker who didn't have a clue) the kind of story we now think of when we think of popular genres: detective stories, science fiction, horror, superman adventures, etc. These writers, responding to insatiable demands for copy from the sharp editors who ran up-and-coming new magazines, created stories that could be repeated: Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan are nothing if they don't happen again and again. They created markets, and they created, only half unwittingly, the monster of the Demand for the Same.

In doing so, Wells and Doyle and their colleagues laid the foundations for the world of literature we live in now. In 1999, most of what most of us read is genre. Sometimes this is obvious -- science fiction, which is what I'm most concerned about, has for many decades now been stigmatized as a genre literature that adults needn't bother with. Sometimes the formula is not so obvious. Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre. They can be read in public by adults, not because they are particularly worth being read in public by adults, but because they carry no mark of Cain.

Salon.com > John Clute

Eros in the age of machines

In defense of science fiction