The true technician is indeed the form-changer, transforming simple materials into near limitless proliferations and a variety of forms. Sturgeon can do this with words and with narrative lines, and he often creates protagonists who possess a similar fecundity of inventiveness and controlled variation. These mad scientists of Sturgeon's, who are usually quite sane, loving, and gentle men, are his images for the technician and craftsman that is he himself as artist. James Kidder, the protagonist in … "Microcosmic God," is an invention capable of incredible proliferation and variation who finally turns his inventive skills to the basic problem of how to increase the rate of proliferation itself…. Kidder does this by inventing a small intelligent species of his own who rush through their life cycles generation after generation at a phenomenal rate from the human point of view, hence producing evolutionary "progress" from which Kidder can benefit. A similar technical inventiveness in literary matters seems to be the property of Theodore Sturgeon, when he is not suffering from writer's block.
Nearly thirty years later, Sturgeon invented another "mad scientist" character who is somewhat like Kidder, in … "Slow Sculpture" (1970). Like Kidder, the doctor in "Slow Sculpture" cannot be called doctor since he is a mechanical and electrical engineer and lawyer by training; Kidder could not be called doctor because he never would waste the time to do a degree, which demonstrates Sturgeon's feelings about the discrepancy between real craft and credentials. But whereas Kidder was shy and chose to isolate himself from the world in order to do his invention, the inventor of the advanced cancer cure in the later story is portrayed with much more depth of character as an "angry, frightened man." This fear lasts until he can make the meaningful human contact that will give coherence and significance to his inventions. The later story is a love story…. (p. 177)
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