<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Writer Theodore Sturgeon (February 26, 1918– May 8, 1985) is best known for his compelling stories of love and hate in the science fiction genre. He was born Edward Hamilton Waldo in Staten Island, New York, but changed his name when his mother married a man named William Sturgeon.

He started out writing mimetic stories for McClure's Syndicate in the thirties, but he soon began selling to Astounding and other SF magazines. He gained a reputation with such stories as "Killdozer," "Microcosmic God," and the horrific "Bianca's Hands." In 1953, he published "The World Well Lost," one of the first SF stories to deal seriously and positively with homosexuality. By today's standards it is tame and perhaps somewhat condescending, but then it was so shocking that many readers erroneously assumed that its author had to be gay.

Sturgeon was mainly a short story writer (the continuing publication of his collected stories by North Atlantic Books has reached ten volumes), but he also wrote novels. His best known book, More than Human (1950), is a fix-up telling of the next evolutionary step, Homo gestalt. Venus Plus X (1960) counterpointed a hermaphroditic utopia with sharply observed scenes of contemporary sexual mores. The posthumously published Godbody is a tour de force, a tale of a new messiah told in five different narratorial voices.

Sturgeon also wrote several scripts for Star Trek, most notably "Amok Time," which introduced Pon farr, the idea that Vulcans go into sexual heat once every seven years, thereby launching a thousand works of fan fiction. A Sturgeon script that was not televised proposed the Prime Directive.

Many writers, such as Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany, have been influenced by Sturgeon. Kurt Vonnegut derived the name of his hapless SF writer, Kilgore Trout from Sturgeon's, although Trout, with his brilliant SF ideas and utter lack of prose and characterization skills, can be seen as Sturgeon's opposite. Sturgeon is also known for Sturgeon's Revelation: "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

External Links

The Theodore Sturgeon Page

The Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust (provides information on reprinted stories)

Internet Speculative Fiction Database