Shelfies #36: Tim Pratt

Most of my bookshelves are triple-stacked nightmares of sideways upside-down jumble, but I keep this one nice, right next to my desk where I write. It's home to my full run of The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, edited by Paul Williams and published by North Atlantic Books from 1994-2010. (Plus some pieces of Fiestaware I should probably dust more often.)

I never met Sturgeon (he died when I was eight years old), but he was a big influence on me from childhood on, when I found some crumbling collection in a relative's house (probably E Pluribus Unicorn). He was a science fiction writer whose interest in technology was primarily about the impact of that technology on people; he was a humanist, and he wrote really weird stuff ("The Professor's Teddy Bear" is a favorite, and it's exceedingly strange). He has absolutely been a role model for me as a short fiction writer. I was nominated for a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award once many years back, and even though I didn't win, it was a career highlight for me. 

I spent my teen and college years snatching up his collections wherever I could find them, and I still have most of those, too, on a different shelf; Caviar and Sturgeon Is Alive and Well are particular favorites. But there were gaps! Stories that appeared in magazines or anthologies and never got collected, and that I could never track down. I was resigned to reading only a fraction of his output. 

Then I found the paperback of volume one in 2000 at the late, lamented Logos bookshop in Santa Cruz California, shortly after I moved there from North Carolina. The book was five or six bucks, in a remainder bin! I was stunned. I'd never heard of the series, since in those days the internet was still a relatively primitive thing that couldn't be trusted to deliver my interests straight to my neocortex. (Of course, the internet can't be trusted to do that now, since AI is breaking everything; Sturgeon would have seen that coming. 90% of everything is crap, after all.) There were a couple of other volumes at Logos for cheap that day, too, and I snatched them up and read them, stories and intros and back matter and all.

For the next decade I slowly collected the other books in the series, and once I was a little less broke, I bought the new ones as they were published (that's why the last half a dozen are uniform hardcovers, while the others are a hodgepodge mismash of whatever I could find at used bookshops). 

The stories are collected chronologically (mostly; some lost early work was printed in later volumes after discovery). They cover stories produced from 1937 to 1983. That's FORTY-SIX-YEARS of short fiction, and Sturgeon was a prolific guy! I read the volumes as I acquired them, mostly in order, and it's really an amazing learning experience to watch a grand master develop from juvenilia through journeyman work to the peak of his powers (and then downhill a bit, but so it goes, and even the final works are interesting). 

There are so many pieces I still think about all the time. Sure, there's "Baby Is Three" and "Killdozer" and "Slow Sculpture" and "Saucer of Loneliness" and "When You Care, When You Love," but also "Brownshoes," "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff," "Need," "Die, Maestro, Die!", "To Here and the Easel," "Hurricane Trio"... the characters, the surprises, the speculation, the extrapolations, and always the eternal next question: what do these experiences do to the human heart? 

I'm not sure if Sturgeon is my favorite short story writer; we have Kelly Link in the world, after all, and Ted Chiang, and George Saunders. But Sturgeon certainly wrote more of my favorite stories than any other writer, and even 15 years after the 13th and final volume of this series was published, I still keep them close to hand, and often pick them up and reread choice bits. It's a way to remind myself of what the genre can do — and what I should be trying to do with my own work. 

Tim Pratt is a Hugo Award-winning SF and fantasy author and editor, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, Philip K. Dick, Sturgeon, Stoker, Mythopoeic, and Nebula Awards, among others. He is the author of more than 30 books, most recently kinky multiversal space opera The Knife and the Serpent. He's had stories reprinted in The Best American Short Stories AND the Best American Erotica. Tim is a senior editor and
occasional book reviewer at Locus. Since 2013 he's published a new story every month at www.patreon.com/timpratt, and he makes jokes on Bluesky @timpratt.org. He lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife and kid.

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