unn is an American novelist, short story writer, editor, non-fiction writer,
dramatist and scriptwiter who writes in the science fiction genre. His novel The
Immortal(1962) was made into a television series; other works include Alternate
Worlds(1975), an illustrated history of science fiction, and Isaac Asimov:
Foundations of Science Fiction(1982). His 1986 Star Trek novel, The Joy Machine
is dedicated to and based on an idea by Sturgeon; it includes a bibliography and
reminiscence. Gunn, who had known Sturgeon since the arly 1950s, conducted seminars
in science fiction at the University of Kansas: Sturgeon was a regular instructor at
these seminars. In the following except from Gunn's article in Fantasy Review
Vol 8, No 5, May 1985, page 7, he shares some of his personal memories of Sturgeon.
I did not know Ted as well as others had known him, who met him as a young man in New
York in the early days of his self-discovery as a writer. My first contact with him was
the result of a telephone call from Horace Gold. Horace said he would buy my short
novel Breaking Point if I would let Ted cut it by a third. I has such admiration
for the author of most [of] the stories I liked best in Astounding and
Later I met him occasionally at science-fiction conventions, most notably in Philadelphia
in 1953, when I heard him announce Sturgeon's Law (ninety percent of everything is
crud) and sing Strange Fruit. But I got to know him best in his later
years, when he was not doing much writing any more, when he answered my appeal to help
with the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction - my decade-long
effort to teach the teachers of science fiction.
Ted arrived for the second Institute (as did Fred Pohl); only Gordon Dickson had a longer
tenure, and Ted came last year when Gordon could not come. Last year Ted was watching
his health, wearing a monitor on his wrist to check his pulse and having some difficulty
with hills, and that was frightening, because Ted had seemed always so wiry and
inexhaustible that we all thought he would go on for ever.
Ted would arrive and immediately begin to charm everyone around him. Ted cared about people,
anybody, everybody. One student enrolled in the Institute only because Ted would be
there, and within hours she had poured out to him to him the intimate tragedies of her
life. Ted was like that; he didn't so much invite intimacy as draw it into him with every
breath, the breath that must have become so difficult for him at the end. People wanted
to do things for Ted, just as he was willing to do anything for them. They would meet him at
the airport, write to him, seek him out. One fan came to the Institute just to sit with his
wife's young child (and later returned to participate in the Institute). Another, when his
wife (whom he always called "Lady Jayne") could not afford to come took up a collection
to fly her to the Institute as a surprise.
Ted loved to come to Lawrence. So did Jayne. They told me so often and were willing to do
anything they could to help the Institute, to keep it going. I always wondered whether he
loved to go anywhere he could find people to talk to, people to bring into his magic circle,
but it may have been the special kind of people who came to the Institute that drew him.
They were involved people, teachers most of them, and special teachers at that, because they
were willing to experiment, and Ted knew that through teachers he could influence thousands of
young minds.
He wanted the teachers to understand what he thought was important. That was writing. He
wanted them to love words, the way he did. He wanted them to love the right words and the
right way to put them together, and he wanted them to pass the loves of his life along
to their students. One evening he would talk almost entirely about his discovery of
what he called "metric prose", the author's conscious choice of a particular poetic foot
for passages in which the author wanted to achieve special effects. But he always insisted
(I can hear him now in his intense, musical voice) that the reader must never become
conscious of the technique or the game is lost.
He would spend another evening discussing style and reading a particular favorite or two
among his own work. But he would spend most of the time reading the English translation
of a French author who told the same ridiculous story in dozens of different styles. Ted
chortling over each discovery, as if he were enjoying it for the first time, and then
leafing further into the slender volume to come upon another. Once he forgot the book and
wrote some examples of his own; they were far more interesting because he was a far better
writer, but I never could convince him of that. He liked his French author because it showed
that somebody else had discovered, before he had thought of it, a beautiful way to reveal
the power of words and style.
Ted loved finding new writers or admiring the work of older writers. He fell in love with
them and his love overflowed into the reviews he wrote for The New York Times and other
journals. He may not have been the best critic in the field, because he hated to give a work a
bad review, but he was the best-loved critic. Dozens of important authors will never forget the
encouragement he gave them.
Ted also wanted people to live, which meant to not be afraid to enjoy life and to be eternally
curious, as he was. Fred Pohl says that every novel is about "how to be more like me." That
certainly was true of Ted's stories, which had more of himself in them than might be said about
the work of any other author I know, but it was also true of his life. In that too, he said
"how to be more like me." Each summer we would ask our guest writers to give a public lecture,
and Ted would tell the audience to "ask the next question," for which a fan had made up a symbol
for him as a medallion he wore around his neck: a "Q" with an arrow horizontally through it. And
he would always end with the statement that "you must never stop asking the next question, because
if you do that, you're dead." I hope Ted, wherever his questing intelligence has come to rest,
is still asking the next question.
If there is a great deal in this reminiscence about love, it is for a good reason. Ted loved
life, loved people, and loved writing. He particularly loved outsiders, the unfortunate, the
despised, the downtrodden. The superhuman gestalt in More Than Human was made up of outcasts,
the refuse of traditional society. For good reason. Most of his fiction involved those kind of
characters because they were his special people.
He believed that we should love everybody, but particulary the unloved and those who placed
themselves beyond scorn or beneath contempt, often by their practices or appetites. His
favorite title among his own works was "If All Men Where Brothers Would You Let One Marry
Your Sister?"
One of the insights that came to me in the early days of the Institute was that many
science-fiction authors (maybe all of them) can be differentiated by what they think
is the single change that will solve the world's problems: "everything would be
wonderful, if only..." Isaac Asimov might complete it "... people behaved
rationally"; Robert Heinlein "...the incompetent people let the competent people
solve the problems"; A E van Vogt, "...people could use their hidden powers." For
Ted it had to be "...people loved each other."
If there is an afterlife, Ted now must be afloat in a sea of love. If there isn't,
he left much behind, both in people whose life he touched and the books and stories
that destilled his message into fiction that continues to ask the next question.
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