It is not always possible to point to specific stories as precedents for Sturgeon's shorter fiction. One might say instead that the pulp science fiction and fantasy of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s provided him with a set of literary conventions which he frequently transformed into effective metaphors for his abiding concern with the themes of loneliness and love. "To Here and the Easel," on the other hand, owes some clear debts. Its basic plot and much of its style derive from Orlando Furioso. Sturgeon might also have been aware of a 1941 novel, The Castle of Iron (1941), by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, which might have suggested the basic literary conceit of juxtaposing a modern man with the romantic world of Ariosto. But as James Blish has noted, while de Camp and Pratt write a purely comic adventure story, Sturgeon uses the gimmick for...