Slow Sculpture: Volume XII: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon
Language: English
Pages: 312
ISBN: 1556438346
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Theodore Sturgeon was a model for his friend Kurt Vonnegut’s legendary character Kilgore Trout, and his work was an acknowledged influence on important younger writers from Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg to Stephen King and Octavia Butler. His work has long been deeply appreciated for its sardonic sensibility, dazzling wordplay, conceptual brilliance, memorable characters, and unsparing treatment of social issues such as sex, war, and marginalized members of society. Sturgeon also authored several episodes of the original Star Trek TV series and originated the Vulcan phrase “Live long and prosper.”
This twelfth volume of North Atlantic’s ambitious series reprinting his complete short stories includes classic works such as the award-winning title story, which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1971, as well as “Case and the Dreamer,” a well-crafted tale of an encounter with a trans-spatial being that is also a meditation on love, and “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff,” a creative exploration of the human ability to achieve self-realization in response to crisis. The book includes a new Foreword, an illuminating section of Story Notes, and a comprehensive index for the entire series.
into a man’s mind, piece together questions from the unused lumber stored there, and from it build shapes he couldn’t bear to look at. How many terrible questions have I locked away? And has she broken the lock? He said, “Don’t … ask me that.… Why did you ask me that?” “Well, why ever not?” “You’re a … you can read my mind.” “Can I?” “Say something!” he shouted. The paper bag stopped whispering. He thought she noticed it. “Am I reading your mind,” she asked reasonably, “if I see you walk in
but she said quietly, “Don’t.” And caught, he had to shake a rueful head and relax. He asked a straight question, gesturing at the corridor. “If I walk down there, will I ever come out alive?” And she gave him what sounded like a straight answer: “That is entirely up to you.” She made an ‘after you’ gesture, and he sighed and went down the corridor; thinking several things on several levels: That is one hell of a lot of woman, and What’s she got that’s so special? because he had seen many a
Wylie’s novels is a tremendous description of a forest fire and how the animals run away from it, the foxes and the rabbits running shoulder to shoulder, the owls flying in the daytime to get ahead of the flames. Then there’s this beetle, lumbering along on the ground. The beetle comes to a burned patch, the edge of twenty acres of hell. It stops, it wiggles its feelers, it turns to the side and begins to walk around the fire—” He laughed again. “That’s the special thing Cleveland Wheeler has,
always looking for more things to do for her. They went out for an evening to some friend’s house, she from shopping, he from whatever it was he was working on then, so they had both cars. He followed her on the way home and had to watch her lose control and spin out. She died in his arms.” “Oh, Jesus.” “Mister Lucky. Listen: a week later he turned a corner downtown and found himself looking at a bank robbery. He caught a stray bullet—grazed the back of his neck. He had seven months to lie
you never noticed—wouldn’t shake hands with anyone?” “I presumed it was because he had an obsession with germs.” “It was because his normal body temperature was a hundred and seven.” Wheeler touched one of his own hands with the other and said nothing. When Karl felt that the wedge of silence was thick enough he asked lightly, “Well, boss, where do we go from here?” Cleveland Wheeler turned away from the corpse and to Karl slowly, as if diverting his mind with an effort. “What did you call