“Microcosmic God,” Ted Sturgeon, Circus Aesthetics, And Samuel Delany’s Editing Method
SCIENCE FICTION
Here’s another short post while I’m deep in the swamp.
Talking about some current event I’ve now forgotten, my son compared it to the Simpsons episode where Lisa is growing a tiny civilization in a bowl. So I thought I’d get him a copy of the short story “Microcosmic God” that inspired that episode.
I’ve got all the Ted Sturgeon short stories, in a multi-volume set I mostly picked up before I really knew anything about Sturgeon. My suspicion was that a short fiction writer would have to be pretty good for a publishing house to put out an ambitious series like that. It’s quite a few volumes, and each one has a long introduction and a bunch of historical background on the stories.
I took a look at the second volume, not having seen it in a while. It has “Microcosmic God,” a story that is humanistic and philosophical, but also exciting to read. And I think this volume is worth getting just for that story, but you also get another winner called “Shottle Bop.” It has one of my favorite story plots, where a guy goes into a dusty old shop and buys some piece of junk that turns out to be haunted, or connected to the supernatural in some way. (I assume the other stories are good too; I just haven’t read them yet.)
The introduction in this volume is by Samuel Delany, a science fiction writer whose fans tend to ooze and gush. I have a few Delany volumes on my Guilt Trip Shelves, as a result of these gushfests, but as yet I haven’t made it past his astounding essays.
Delany’s introduction here is ostensibly about Sturgeon, but the subject encourages him to venture outward from Ted to larger issues about fiction. Sturgeon caused a big fooferaw in SF circles when he admitted publicly to having edited and revised one of his stories. Digging into this topic years a later, Delany gives us his own writing/rewriting method, and some thoughts about how science/genre fiction and straight fiction ought to be compared, if we want to be serious about it.
His working method:
A personal example, if it will help: My basic working method has been (at least up until the time of word processors) not extraordinary for an SF author making a living by writing. I instituted it with my first SF novel and, with minor variations, it remains my working method today: I write a longhand draft; from this I make a rough typescript, specifying, expanding, toothbrushing out redundancies, excising unnecessary adjectives and phrases, clarifying parallels as I go. From this I make a polished typescript, in which I can catch any missed details as well as do any doctoring necessary on those details thrown out of sync between the first and second layers. In my personal vocabulary this tri-layered process is my “first draft.” Anything beyond this is “revision.” And should that revision run over a sentence or two, it goes through the same tri-layered process. It is a highly utilitarian method: it makes for prose that stays in print. (Word processors have simply expanded the tri-layered process into a ten-or-more layered one.)
On what he calls “paraliterary” fiction:
One of the great paradoxes to me has always been that the general flaws one finds in commercial fiction are invariably in the line of plot and structure: The progression of incident in the vast majority of paraliterary fictions is simply and wholly unbelievable. Having done or felt A, it is simply unbelievable that character X would proceed to do B or C. What makes this paradoxical is simply that the explicitly stated esthetic of the writers of these stories is one that holds up craft over art, that says that surface is of a wholly secondary importance as to craft—which, by this esthetic is wholly a matter of a well-structured, well-motivated plot. If craft—specifically the structuring of believable fictions—can be learned, why can so few commercial writers learn it? Equally paradoxical is the fact that without exception, every truly memorable commercial writer, from Chandler and Hammett to Bradbury and Vance, Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester and—yes—Sturgeon is memorable because of a specific writerly surface that is so easily called “style.”
I didn’t see this next bit coming: the context here was Delany saying that SF borrows from the aesthetic of the three-ring circus, and that is one of its strengths:
(the circus was the first art to insist openly that more must go on in the performance space than can possibly be seen at once) than it is to the staid divisions of the theater (backstage, stage, and audience), which, since Shakespeare, has constrained our view of “Literature.” For it is precisely in the circus space that the virtuoso gesture is held out to tempt novices to trip over themselves in the rush to achieve it; whereupon they become victims of a derision far sharper and crueler than that which greets the clowns, who first lured them from their seats and into the ring with their parodic versions of all the splendor passing and twirling, roaring and soaring.
Delany may come across as a little defensive, if you’re not a science fiction fan. I don’t consider myself a fan of the genre, but I’ve read a fair amount of it, and I own a lot more— because much of it is among my favorite fiction writing. And you can find Delany elsewhere making it clear that he was a voracious reader of more conventional literature. For these reasons, I assume Delany’s analysis is correct until I find strong evidence to the contrary.
If you consider yourself a science fiction fan, you should pick up this volume. The Delany essay is required reading.
Sturgeon famously said that 90% of science fiction is crap, but that’s because 90% of everything is crap. I recommend you look this quote up, because the second you leave this essay behind, you’ll be misquoting him. I’m not claiming my use of it is anything more than relatively accurate. I’ve seen the quote with the word “crud” instead of “crap,” and nothing quoted as often as Sturgeon’s will lodge correctly in our collective memory.
Another Sturgeon tidbit someone will comment about if I don’t mention it— he was the inspiration for Vonnegut’s recurring Kilgore Trout character.
Sturgeon and Delany are a couple of big big writers that you will be missing out on if you snobbishly avoid science fiction. Go ahead and avoid it, if you can find a better reason than snobbery.
Sturgeon was amazing- all those stories and a few novels, besides. He set an extremely high standard for all the SF writers that came after him.
I admit it, I am a Delany gusher. And an SF fan, at least of some of it. I thought it was interesting that you said you don’t consider yourself a fan of the genre... "but I’ve read a fair amount of it, and I own a lot more— because much of it is among my favorite fiction writing." But I get it, in the way, that I am not a fan either in some sense (I don't go to conventions, etc.)
In your short story posts I haven't seen much SF and was kind of wondering if such masters of the short form as Harlan Ellison were going to turn up in your next post on stories of 3,000 + words... part of what I like about Sturgeon is he was part of that old school SF where psychism and the supernatural could be a part of his stories without getting talked down to as not being "hard" SF.
Anyway, I trust that when you get round to reading Dhalgren, Babel-17, Neveryona and the other books on your Delany Guilt shelf, you'll enjoy them. He is much better at the long form than the short, though his early novels also benefited from being on the shorter side. I think SF and Fantasty have suffered from a glut of too-long epics and trilogies. Sometimes what you need is just a short novel.
This glitch mini-album by Kim Cascone was inspired by Dhalgren.
https://silentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/anti-correlation