The Comics Journal

Sturgeon’s Vision

Theodore Sturgeon’s vision — meaning, in this instance, his ranging, multi-perceptive sympathy, instinctively democratic — was encapsulated, for this reader, in his story, “Microcosmic God.” I do not know the story’s original publication site — probably John W. Campbell’s magazine Astounding Science Fiction. But I first discovered it in a small volume which I regret to say has been out of my possession for many years. It appeared under the imprimatur of the original Americano Pocket Book series; symbolized by a tiny kangaroo. It was called simply The Pocket Book of Science Fiction. As I recall, its first appearance to my eyes was in the early ’40s: a decade and more before any astronauts visit to the moon; before the intermarriages of television with other communicative forms; before motion pictures like The Thing; It Came From Outer Space; The Day the Earth Stood Still, etcetera and etcetera, were even suppositions in Hollywood mentalities.

One must recall, however, that sci-fi of some sort — at least, the stuff of its popular myths — had proven marketable, not only in those semi-juvenile pulp magazines published by Ziff Davis and others. The sci-fi Pocket Book, remembered from my early teens, glowed and crackled — crudities notwithstanding — with the primitive antic freshness of questing speculation and chance discovery. Starting with “By the Waters of Babylon” — a prophetic tale of global disaster and distant grace notes of hope — in an indeterminate future, by Stephen Vincent Benet; and including John Collier’s dark, dark Edwardian fable, “Green Thoughts,” and Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master,” depicting a power struggle with a robot — a bracingly disorderly company has been provided.

Provided, that is, for the adventuresome reader, and for Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God.’ Like Kipling, Sturgeon introduces his yarn with a teasing coda (“This is a story of a man who had too much power…”) and proceeds (recall: I read this yarn in 1941) with a tale of attempted national extortion: with the threat of atomic annihilation as the lever. Sturgeon’s lucid, patient, relentless prose carries forward an account of high-stakes blackmail that climaxes in a prose montage of diverse humble humanity: all recalling to an elderly moviegoer Capra’s Meet John Doe. Reassuring one reader that Sturgeon’s best writing constitutes a pillar of American popular art, like Kipling — whose darkly moving, yet mischief-touched style with fantasy Sturgeon’s world sometimes recalls — Sturgeon presents the Unknown as infiltrating the earthy data of soldiering, seamanship, construction work (as well as numerous domestic idylls (“Brat”; “It”, etc.). “Cargo” — a masterpiece of mingling folklore with the escalating anxieties of an ancient ship in wartime waters, “boarded” by a fugitive horde of mermaids and mermen, fleeing the invasion of their ocean home: an evocation of ancient darknesses, meeting and mingled, to challenge the inky grandeur of Wagner’s music for Die Fliegende Hollander. In the pages of the new — and, alas, posthumous — Sturgeon story collection, Microcosmic God, the maiden voyage, for a wondrous excursion.

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