Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985)

"La letteratura di Theodore Sturgeon è questo: un invito ad affrontare l’invisibile, l’inumano e l’innominabile con coraggio, una stazione di servizio in mezzo al deserto, illuminata da una luce artificiale e insieme extraterrestre, dove chiunque può trovare rifugio e consolazione.
[...]
Quasi tutte le storie di Sturgeon iniziano con un abbandono, con una violenza o con una fuga attraverso i boschi o a bordo del camion di un circo viaggiante. C’è un dolore all’inizio di tutto, un show more rifiuto che un individuo deve sopportare da parte del suo gruppo di appartenenza. Dal rifiuto, quindi, alla solitudine, alla scoperta delle profondità abissali, si approda a una consapevolezza della propria unicità e del potere sconfinato dell’immaginazione. La fantascienza diventa così solo un pretesto formale per raccontare quella guerra nucleare che viene scatenata dall’isolamento."

La mente di Sturgeon è un cristallo sognante, La Biblioteca Essenziale di Terranullius
terranullius.it/terranullius/narrazioni/la-biblioteca-essenziale/835-la-biblioteca-essenziale-la-mente-di-sturgeon-e-un-cristallo-sognante show less

Brilliantly written. After I was done I reread it, and realized how each character is a real person, each shift in point-of-view reveals a different voice... which heightens the impact of the SF idea ever so effectively. Each character could have their own chapter in a novel; some could have their own entire novel.

But that's a bonus. Mostly the story is just as exciting as the cover art. Not Stephen King horror, or even Black Lagoon, but still horrifying. And beautiful.

The only thing that show more prevents me from giving it five stars is the ending. *I* think it panders. It's clever, and I can definitely see why some readers would love it. I would have loved it when I was a less experienced reader, tbh. But imo the ending should have been left ambiguous.

Read this story. Read it, think about it, enjoy it... and don't reveal my spoiler until afterwards, if at all. show less

I read this 1958 novel as part of a Book of the Month Club omnibus of Theodore Sturgeon works. It is a very intriguing tale of extraterrestrial invasion of Earth--about as different as could be from The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells which is still a template for that narrative type. The dynamic isn't so much one of territorial planetary exploitation as it is the organic subordination of the human species.

In terms of the overall plot and concept, I was reminded of books by Arthur C. show more Clarke, particularly Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Sturgeon's aliens are more fallible (in this feature tracking with Wells), and his humans richer and deeper than Clarke's. Sturgeon may in fact have been replying to the scenario in Childhood's End. He even wrote, "His first reaction was My God, it's full of people!" (157), making me strongly suspect that the iconic words of Clarke and Kubrick's astronaut Dave Bowman were continuing the dialogue with a deliberate riff on this moment--and a nod to Aleister Crowley. ("Every man and every woman is a star.")

The central characters of The Cosmic Rape are not particularly sympathetic. Chief among them is a drunken misanthropic vagrant, but there are also a sexual predator, a serial vandalizer, a sententious prude, a bullied child, and a pair of distracted and neglectful parents, among the humans whose individuality would be redeemed and validated--in an arc typical of this author--by the assault on humankind from an alien conqueror.

There are any number of "rapes" contemplated and attempted in the course of the story, on a scale from the quotidian to the cosmic. The story also uses events situated in a remote African tribal community to offer some curious reflections on religion and metaphysical belief. A shorter variant of this already brief novel was published as To Marry Medusa, and the alternate title also seems to have been used for The Cosmic Rape itself in some editions. show less

The Dreaming Jewels (also published elsewhere as The Synthetic Man) was Sturgeon's first novel. Written circa 1950, it is also set in mid-20th-century America, with an emerging substratum of non-human strangeness. "Yet--how many men walked the earth who were not men at all; how many trees, how many rabbits, flowers, amoebae, sea-worms, red-woods, eels and eagles grew and flowered, swam and hunted and stood among their prototypes with none knowing that they were an alien dream, having, apart show more from the dream, no history?" (181)

The comparisons I found myself making for this story were not to other pieces of science fiction, but rather to the horror genre. Without even engaging any extraterrestrial scenario, Sturgeon manages to evoke a cosmic indifference more effectively than H.P. Lovecraft ever did. And, by way of further contrast, he succeeds in making his characters both more detestable and admirable than any Lovecraftian people. Sturgeon had had plenty of experience in his short fiction at drawing vivid personalities, and it shows in this novel.

There is one element of the plot in the closing pages that I was not able to quite reason out: a happy twist for which I can imagine a justification, but which the text doesn't seem to square away as well as a reader might desire. The prose throughout is graceful and efficient, and The Dreaming Jewels is a speedy, pleasurable read. show less