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 &#...

Authors had created monsters before, many whose names became synonyms for terror, but none of them had been treated with such objectivity or presented with such incredible mastery of style [as Theodore Sturgeon's monster in It]. "Styles" would have been the better term, for the author was a virtuoso, possessing an absolute pitch for the cadence of words, altering the mood and beat of his phraseology with the deliberateness of background music in a moving picture. (p. 230)

In [Venus Plus X], Sturgeon makes subtle use of various conventions of the science-fiction genre and of social conventions, particularly sexual conventions. The well-nigh-perfect society of the Ledom, a new form of "humanity," is explained as a consequence of their hermaphroditic sexuality. Everybody is equipped with both male and female sexual organs. Impregnation is a mutual affair. With the lack of sexual differentiation goes, it is assumed, a corresponding lack of other dichotomies…...

There seems to be a certain incredulity in the title and in the author's preface of Sturgeon Is Alive and Well …, so perhaps it's not surprising that one of the most powerful stories in it is that of a man trying to fight his way out of a bungled suicide attempt. Appropriately, it is the last story. There are twelve stories all told, of which three may be familiar to you…. The others all appeared in men's magazines, and sometimes show it—by the time I finished the b...