Great Tales

1944

Edward Hamilton Waldo changed his name at the age of 11 and is known to science fiction fans as Ted Sturgeon. He was born in 1918, so this year (here in 2018) I have been celebrating 100 years of Ted Sturgeon by looking back at some of his stories.

Killdozer comic

Sturgeon's 1944 novella "Killdozer!" was the inspiration for a 1974 TV movie. I remember advertisements for that movie, but I never saw it (review). I lived another 44 years not realizing that Ted Sturgeon was in any way connected to that movie. There was also a comic (review) that was based on Sturgeon's story.

cover by Karen Nelson

Here in 2018 I finally read "Killdozer!" in my copy of Great Tales of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Here is what it says on the inner flap, "... Killdozer! tells what happens when a mutant energy force with intelligence and a will to destroy is liberated ...".

The introduction to Great Tales was written by Isaac Asimov and it is called "The Age of Campbell". Asimov described how John Campbell dominated science fiction during the 1940s and how he had taught dozens of writers that "... science fiction was not about adventure primarily but about science. It was not about mad scientists, but about hard working thinkers."

"The Wages of Synergy"

After all of his highfalutin words in the introduction, Asimov did not say anything about Sturgeon. Apparently Sturgeon went through a rough period in the early 40s and he actually worked for a time operating a bulldozer.

Standard advice is "write what you know", but really now, are there any science fiction fans who want to read about bulldozer clutches?

In the Ekcolir Reality

The Dead Hand of Campbell

source

Upon looking at the text of "Killdozer", I noticed that it has three parts. The first page, 7 paragraphs, is entirely in italics and it is easy for me to imagine that it was either written by Campbell or lifted by Sturgeon from old stories such as Campbell's 1932 "The Last Evolution". I can picture a scene with Campbell handing Surgeon a sheet of paper with those 7 paragraphs and asking Sturgeon to write a story based on Campbell's idea. I wonder if a young Campbell had nightmares about monsters under his bed and those frights set the tone for his science fiction.

source

7 paragraphs
Imagine an ancient technologically-advanced alien civilization that created "electron-beings" that were "spawned in mighty machines". Those artificial lifeforms "became the people's masters" and "great were the battles that followed". Eventually, it was discovered that the great war could be ended by using neutronium as an insulator that could trap and imprison the enemy, the "mental life-medium".

Cthulhu

Then the bulk of the story begins. A construction crew is using a bulldozer to dig up some old stone ruins, the stones shift and, "... something whooshed out of the black hole where the rocks had been. Something like a fog..." Suddenly the bulldozer throws off its driver and starts running itself and killing off members of the construction crew.

Who goes there?

The third part of the story is the ending, the final page. Again, I suspect it was written by Campbell. That last page is a confused mess, but I think it was Campbell's attempt to put an end to the alien being that turned the bulldozer into a killing machine.

Exode saga

Did the evil alien force migrate from the bulldozer into the IRBM that is mentioned on the last page of the story? Should we assume that the alien being took control of the experimental rocket and tried to continue its mayhem? I don't know. 

Alternatively, was it well meaning Earthlings who deployed the missile in an attempt to explode the fuel drums and dynamite stores on the island and make certain that the evil alien force was stopped? 

Anyhow, apparently the page limit had been reached and the story had to be ended, so Campbell ended it.

In the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Arnold Kohn
and Frank Freas.

Exode

"Killdozer" is of interest to me because I've recently included an ancient alien artifact in the Exode saga. The problem I face is that for my story I want an alien artifact that can both 1) be quickly recognized as being of alien origin and then 2) just as quickly have its existence be expunged from the record.

I must confess that I have been struggling with this question for my story: exactly how many people must die in order to erase physical evidence of the artifact from Earth? Is even one death too many? 

This is usually the place in my own stories where I arrange for the person who must be killed to be duplicated and sent off to Observer Base.

Ya, my stories have lower body counts than a Ted Sturgeon story such as "Killdozer!".

source

Related Reading
Fictional Chemistry
Helix 1954
Host
Baby is 2018
Straitjacket
Star Trek 50
Baby is Three
Sturgeon's Law

Next: the 500th cover image

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Helix 1954

Original cover art by Tony Gleeson
and Jack Coggins

"The Golden Helix", a science fiction story by Theodore Sturgeon was first published in 1954 (download here). Since Sturgeon was born 100 years ago in 1918, I'm looking back at his writing from the perspective of 2018.

In this story, humans don't have faster-than-light space travel technology, but they can send colonists to nearby exoplanets by placing them into suspended animation for the long voyage. The destination for our six colonists is an exoplanet less than 10 light-years from Earth, a world that will have to be terraformed so as to acquire an atmosphere that will be breathable by humans. The story takes place in Sturgeon's imagined future after it has become normal for humans to give birth to litters of 6 or more babies. Yikes! What hath God evolution wrought?

analysis by Ivory

After their long sleep, the colonists arrive at a destination that is strange and unexpected; a world 217 light-years from Earth. They expected to arrive in a new star system, awaken and find themselves in orbit around a planet. However, they quickly discover that they are already on the surface of a verdant planet when they awake.

I'm not a fan of the narrative method used here by Sturgeon. While reading the first few pages of the story, I often found it difficult to understand what Sturgeon was trying to tell us. I suppose he wanted readers to share in the confusion experienced by the colonists after having arrived at a strange new world under unexpected conditions. We are forced to ask: what is going on? A puzzle.

First Contact

editorial blurb

Eventually readers collect enough clues so that the puzzle presented to us by Sturgeon at the start of "The Golden Helix" can be solved. While the colonists from Earth "slept" for several decades, their ship was "collected" by an alien spaceship (which is a type of gigantic spaceship that can travel faster than light).

Why collected? Think of Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates collecting butterflies or Charles Robert Darwin collecting beetles. Could you explain the purpose of their collections to a butterfly or a beetle?

2001

After being collected by the aliens, the colony ship from Earth was sliced into pieces, room by room, and deposited on a planet with air suitable for humans. In the Sci Fi film 2001 we had the mysterious black monolith, but here, we get a mysterious golden helix. The closest we come to getting a description of the mysterious aliens is during a strange scene in which the 5 mystified colonists step out into the jungle, see the alien spaceship hovering overhead and experience some sort of incomprehensible first contact with the aliens. Ya... there is a whole big bunch of mystery and mystification dumped into our laps by Sturgeon.

Lacking any other cognitive alternative, some of the colonists are tempted to describe the aliens as "angels". These angel-like aliens are so far advanced beyond we primitive humans and their motives and actions so far outside our range of experience that we can't even begin to understand them or have a productive exchange of information with them.

colony ship

In this hi tek^TM future of Humanity, the spaceship from Earth has gizmos like fusion-powered motors, but the library of the spaceship is stocked with "film reels" that can be read by the colonists. When the colonists wake up, they notice that all of the film reels in their library have been read and not re-wound. There were strange goings on during the voyage!

interior art by Virgil Finlay

The aliens managed to impregnate one of the six colonists during the voyage, so the first thing that the other 5 colonists must do upon wakening is see to the birth of a litter of babies. Luckily, the newborns are put into automated incubators and we don't even have to hear them cry. Sturgeon does not mention them again until they are toddlers.

source

The woman who became pregnant during the voyage dies while giving birth, but the other 5 colonists find a filmed recording that she made, describing her telepathic contact with the aliens during the course of her pregnancy.

The colonists find that the planet they have been taken to is about 35,000,000 years old (measured by radioactive dating), but it has highly evolved forms of life and seems quite Earth-like. The colonists call their new world Verdis.

Verdis is some sort of biology laboratory, used by the aliens to process the life forms that they collect. The colonists quickly realize that their bodies are rapidly adapting (or, being adapted) to the biosphere of Verdis. Soon, the toxins and poisons from life forms on Verdis begin to lose their toxicity. Even more startling, the colonists regress from the "recently evolved" human ability to birth litters of young. The second colonist who gives birth on Verdis has a small litter of only 3 babies. The third woman who gives birth produces only one baby.

in the Ekcolir Reality

Devolution?
What is going on? Sturgeon never bothers to explain anything, but from the perspective of 2018, I have to assume that the aliens have some kind of advanced nanotechnology that is at work inside the bodies of the colonists, altering genes and changing the molecular components of their bodies. Certainly it is NOT natural selection that is driving the biological changes that the colonists experience.

The descendants of the colonists quickly change into new forms of life that take over the planet, displacing the creatures that were present when the human colonists first arrived. At the very end of Sturgeon's story, the collected spaceship of yet another primitive (human-like) space-faring species is brought to Verdis by the angelic aliens, and another cycle of "processing" of this newly-collected bird-like alien species begins.

source

I suppose we are not supposed to fully understand exactly what has happened to these hapless human colonists and their descendants. Could a laboratory rat understand the experiments conducted on it by humans? The last paragraph of the story suggests that the super-advanced angel-like aliens constantly move from galaxy to galaxy, collecting creatures like we humans, taking them to artificial laboratory planets like Verdis where their genes can be explored, tested, recombined and reduced to "spores" that can, in turn, be seeded onto new planets.

It is easy for me to view "The Golden Helix" as a kind of literary sequel to "Sentinel of Eternity" by Clarke.

Related Reading: Annihilation

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Next: Star Trip

Fictional Chemistry

Original cover art by Walter Popp

Theodore Sturgeon was born in 1918, so I'm starting my 2018 retro-reading with his 1953 science fiction story, "The Wages of Synergy". You can download the August 1953 issue of Startling Stories from this webpage.

The hook
"The Wages of Synergy" begins with a woman who is trying to not make too much noise while having sex. She is just "she", but Sturgeon tells us that the guy is Karl. Poor Karl dies and becomes a dead weight that "she" throws off. "She" runs in horror from dead Karl, leaves the hotel, slinks off into the city. The teaser above the story tells us "Prue had a fatal fascination for important men..." Ya, "she" is Prue.

Biochemistry
Dr. Killilea is a chemist with a conscience. He worked long and hard in the laboratory, struggling against nature and obsessively trying to reveal the mysterious hidden biochemical details of sexual climax. Then, with his elusive goal finally in sight: ruin. Realizing that his research was leading to a secret too potent for mere mortals (discovery of a molecule that is "the most ghastly substance this earth has ever known"), Dr. Killilea abandoned his work.

interior artwork for "The Wages of Synergy"

And even worse than the loss of his career, Dr. Killilea also lost the love of his life, Miss Prue. Now he sits in bars, drinking, and waiting for dear Miss Prue to walk into his gin joint.

Eventually we learn that Miss Prue is Dr. Killilea's wife. She is avoiding Killilea ("Killy") because she now believes that she is lethal and Killilea would die from "the love death" if she went back home to live with Killilea.

Original cover art by Edward Valigursky
and Edmund Emshwiller.

Pregnant with Possibility
A story about how Prue is desperately avoiding her husband (Killy) might actually make sense if Prue had been bioengineered to cause her body to produce some chemical (a potent inhibitor of a neurotransmitter receptor in the brain stem) that will kill any man who Prue comes in contact with during sex. But, sadly, that's not the story. I like to imagine that this was the story when the analogue of Sturgeon wrote science fiction in the Ekcolir Reality.

La petite mort
Dr. Killilea's area of scientific expertise is steroid hormone chemistry. The only steroid hormone mentioned by name in the story is progesterone, but, sadly, the story is not really about progesterone. Killy became so engrossed in his chemistry research that he ignored Prue, so Prue left him.

The dastardly hypogun!

After Prue ran off, Killilea awoke from his obsessive scientific pursuit and realized the great danger that could come from his chemistry work, so he gave it up. At the point in time where "The Wages of Synergy" begins, Killilea has spent the past 18 months searching for Prue. He finds her soon after the death of Karl, a famous writer. According to reports in the newspapers, Karl died of heart failure, but Prue insists that she killed him.

And Prue insists that Karl was only the most recent dude to die in her bed. Four months earlier she had killed Roger Landey, a famous philosophy professor. And before that, a round little man who she calls "Koala". So, in order to return to wedded bliss with Prue, Dr. Killilea must prove (scientifically) that he will not die the next time that they have sex together.

progesterone

Now wearing his private investigator hat, Killilea investigates the cuddly "Koala" and learns that he was actually the crafty Pretorio, a famous scientist who had been the head of the Ethical Science Board. Also, Karl Monck and Landey had both been members of the ES Board before their deaths. The plot thickens!

prize-winning biochemist in an alternate Reality

I'm a sucker for any Sci Fi story that dabbles in biochemistry, but some topics should probably be left for trained scientists such as Isaac Asimov. Sturgeon was a high school dropout, and nobody should expect him to have anything coherent to say about hormones and their role in the human body.

Daddy Issue
Sturgeon's father was a business man, and inserted into "The Wages of Synergy" and even into the Ethical Science Board is a rich business man who enjoys using his money to control and manipulate people. Our hero, the nerdy "Killy" is tempted to punch this slimy business man in the nose, but the prudent Prue restrains Killy and it is discovered that the rich dirty dealing murderous business man isn't such a bad guy after all. Right.

"the most ghastly substance
this earth has ever known"
in the Ekcolir Reality
Original cover by Rudolph Belarski.

Sturgeon's Law
Right in the middle of "The Wages of Synergy", Sturgeon has a character (Dr. Egmont) say, "...four-fifths of the stories in science fiction magazines are anti-scienctific." Egmont believes that with the deaths of Pretorio, Monck and Landey the Ethical Science Board has been crippled, destroying the world's best chance of developing a way to systematically judge the consequences of new scientific advances on Humanity. Without a functioning Ethical Science Board, the anti-science forces will soon dominate the world!

Suddenly, Killilea realizes that someone else completed his chemistry work and is now using "the most ghastly substance this earth has ever known" to kill important men like Monck and Landey. But Killilea is baffled: who could have completed his chemistry work? He had always worked alone, and he is certain that he had been working VERY far off the beaten path (as any good Sci Fi scientist should, right?) on matters that nobody else should have been able to duplicate.

1976: peak orgasm (data from the Ngram Viewer)

November 1934 Astounding Stories

Progesterone
"The Wages of Synergy" reminds me of a story called "The Hormone" by Milton Kaletsky. In turn, "The Hormone" reminds me of the Star Trek episode "Wink of an Eye" in which Scalosians are "accelerated" and moving much faster than humans. In "The Hormone", an Earthly scientist isolates the hormone "cortin" from the adrenal gland and uses it to "accelerate" himself.

illustration for "The Hormone"
by Marco Marchioni

Ted Sturgeon would have been in his own personal "golden age" of science fiction right when "The Hormone" was published in 1934.

That 1934 issue of Astounding is notable for several reasons, particularly in that it has the story "Twilight", which influenced Arthur C. Clark with its look into the far future of Humanity.

It is also amusing that part of Ed Smith's Skylark Saga is in this issue of Astounding. Smith began the Skylark stories in 1928 with the casual discovery of a nuclear power source and the quick invention of an interstellar spaceship in the hero's workshop. In "The Hormone", the versatile Dr. Arnold Breve (shown in the image to the left), now working as an endocrinologist (after having already found a cure for polio), isolates the hormone cortin and begins experimenting with it by injecting large amounts into his own body. What could go wrong? Dr. Breve finds his life processes vastly accelerated and he quickly dies of old age.

The progesterone death!

Detective Killy
In "The Wages of Synergy", Dr. Killilea, the nerdy scientist, must quickly change careers and become a private investigator. Who could possibly have gone ahead and completed the chemical work that Killilea began and abandoned?

Sturgeon's description of the "most ghastly substance this earth has ever known" makes it sound like a chemical inhibitor of orgasm. Killilea realizes that the inhibitor is able to alter the function of the brain stem, triggering heart failure.

Look at the black-and-white image above from "The Hormone". The fancy glass-work looks like some kind of Urey-Muller apparatus. Fancy glass-work is the secret to the mystery of who completed Dr. Killilea's little chemistry project. You'll have to read the story to learn Sturgeon's solution to the mystery.

In the Ekcolir Reality: Progesterone Planet.

Sad to say, you might not enjoy Sturgeon's "solution" to the mystery. I've never been a fan of conventional mystery stories, particularly those that involve an "evil" mastermind who is vastly more clever than everyone else, but who can be brought down because of his overly-complex schemes.

"...some works, such as Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, foreground the way in which they participate in multiple genres simultaneously." -Brian S. Matzke

1953
In 1953, Isaac Asimov published his Sci Fi mystery, "The Caves of Steel". Science fiction fans are likely to know Asimov's famous characters from that story such as the robot Daneel. When Asimov wanted to create a science fiction murder mystery, he wrote a story about robots. When Sturgeon wrote "The Wages of Synergy" he crafted a murder mystery about death by orgasm.

1953

If only Nixon could go to China, I suppose Sturgeon may have been the only Sci Fi writer who could write about death by orgasm in 1953.

However, things were changing. In 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was published.

Chemical Castration

1938

One of the strangest parts of "The Wages of Synergy" is when a non-scientist character in the story decides to take control of the hero's behavior by injecting him with some progesterone. The amount injected must be tiny, but we are assured that it will inhibit the hero from having sex with his wife.

This brings to mind the attempted "chemical castration" of Alan Turing, and his conviction for "gross indecency" which was finally over-turned by an amnesty in 2017.

Double fun in the Ekcolir Reality.

There are progesterone receptors in the brain, but the idea that a tiny amount of progesterone could inhibit male sexual behavior for a week (as described in Sturgeon's fiction) is absurd.

So, if science fiction fans are not going to get anything but absurd fantasy science in "The Wages of Synergy", what is the attraction? Right in the middle of the story, the Startling Stories editor inserted a blurb, praising the story for giving readers more than just cardboard characters who get moved around willy-nilly. I understand what this means, but I don't agree that Sturgeon avoided willy-nilliness in this story.

and now, a word from our sponsor editor....

Rudytown

Lost in Space
It is a common trick of writers to start in the middle of a story, without telling readers anything about the setting. The reader has to solve a little puzzle: where am I? In "The Wages of Synergy", Sturgeon avoids telling us anything about where the story takes place.

Yes, there are some vague clues: we are in an unnamed land where someone speaking British English is recognized instantly as a foreigner. We are in an unnamed city with no streets, but anyone in town can quickly get across town when the plot calls for it.

The center of the universe: Rudy's.

There are many drinking holes in this city, places where Killy spends 18 months searching for his wife. One of these, Rudy's, is the Nexus of the Universe. Rudy's has a teleporter in the back office, so anyone who is needed on stage in the next scene can appear just when they are needed.

No cardboard characters
in the Ekcolir Reality.
Original cover art by Earle Bergey
and ? (see this)

Rudy's is where all the Superscientists hang out. Everyone knows this except Killy, because he's just a socially inept nerd who never joined the cool kid's club, the Ethical Science Board. Prue knows that Rudy's is the place to go if you want to meet and seduce more Superscientists.

The only problem with Rudy's is that Jules Croy hangs out there. Nobody likes Croy. His only distinguishing feature is that he has lots of money. Prue does not like Croy. Egmont really does not like Croy and calls him a "damned jackal, a corpse-eater". So when Egmont sees Killy speaking to Croy at Rudy's, Egmont immediately decides that Killy is also a skunk.

However, Killy is able to make Egmont calm down and soon it is revealed that Croy is the obvious suspect in this murder mystery. Except, how could a non-scientist like Croy ever have made the deadly drug that kills men who have an orgasm?

source

Croy describes himself as having been diagnosed with "Haroun al-Raschid pattern", meaning that he likes to secretly spend and invest his money just to create drama and intrigue. He got more than he expected and ended up helping an "evil" mastermind commit murder.

H. L. Gold in Galaxy, Jan. 1952

A sequel in the Ekcolir Reality
original cover art by Rudolph Belarski

H-bombs get mention in "The Wages of Synergy" among several discussions of morals and ethics, but we never learn why the "evil" mastermind was playing around with the hormonal love death. We get a casual suggestion of "maybe he snapped". I get the feeling that Sturgeon was writing to specifications, and when he reached the word limit, he stopped writing.

Prue
Beyond the silly pseudo-endocrinology, running through "The Wages of Synergy" is the romance between Killy and Prue, which takes us back to the teaser at the top of the story. "Prue had a fatal fascination for important men..." She ends up in bed with Killilea, Pretorio, Monck and Landey because from her perspective they are all similar men: her type of guy.

1949

Obsession
Still, we must wonder why it took a third man dying in her bed before Prue finally noticed that something was amiss and decided she should curb her obsessive odyssey of sleeping her way through the ranks of the Ethical Science Board.

"The Wages of Synergy" is about obsessive people who single-mindedly pursue their muses. In the end, the "evil" mastermind dies, injected with the poison he had intended to use to kill Killy. The ending suggests that Killy and Prue survive their personal obsessions and live together happily ever after.

I put evil in quotes because Sturgeon suggests that it is really only the synergy of everyone's individual obsessions in "The Wages of Synergy" that creates a problem.

I feel like there should be a sequel to "The Wages of Synergy"... does obsession ever really end? What new mischief can Killy and Prue get into?

 

by Telly Sturgeon

Related reading:

- my comments on Sturgeon's short stories "The Perfect Host" and 'Rule of Three'

- commentary about Theodore Sturgeon's short stories by Lahna F. Diskin

- more commentary on "The Wages of Synergy" without the progesterone

- orgasms and telepathy

- Sturgeon's 1954 story "The Golden Helix"

- "The Skylaugh of Space" by Milton Kaletsky

Next: The X-Files Season 11, Episode 1

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Baby is 2018

A sedronite joins the party.
Original cover art by Edmund Emshwiller.
Special thanks to Miranda Hedman
(www.mirish.deviantart.com) for the DeviantArt
stock photograph "Black Cat 9 - stock"
used to create the blue sedronite.

Continuing the tradition of a special New Year wikifiction blog post and tweet, here is a science fiction themed image to welcome in 2018 (see the image to the right on this page).

The AR Simulator
I like to imagine that in a past Reality, the Asimov Reality, alien beings from other worlds were not restricted from showing themselves on Earth. The cover illustration of Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1952 by Edmund Emshwiller included depictions of Sci Fi writers such as Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was born in 1918, so 2018 will be a year to celebrate his science fiction stories. That October 1952 issue of Galaxy included the story "Baby is Three", probably the first story written by Sturgeon that I ever read.

special for 2017

Inside the Asimov Reality Simulator of Eternity, maybe a crazy party scene like that shown to the right (and above, on this page) could actually happen in the year 2018!

Related Reading: Celebrating Theodore Sturgeon
The Golden Helix  - Killdozer! -  Twink
 - The Perfect Host
Next: retro-reading Sturgeon's 1953 story, "The Wages of Synergy"

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Specials
for 2016
for 2017