BOOK REVIEW: THE DREAMING JEWELS by Theodore Sturgeon

The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't know enough about Sturgeon's writing to know if he realized just how weird this story is. As its central plot device, an eight-year-boy passes himself off as a female midget for ten years. Although an explanation is later offered, fantastic but in keeping with the story, nothing is made of this by those who are in on the deception.

The setting is a traveling carnival. The jewels are beings that fall from space with great regularity but disappear into earth's landscape. They are living beings who pass their lives unnoticed by humans, and yet are capable of affecting our lives in amazing ways. This is a good conceit, but Sturgeon literally talks it to death. Whenever an aspect of the story needs to be explained, you can expect several pages of dialog doing just that. And it's not very good dialog. It's awkward and stagey. The staginess works best with his villains, who are either ghoulish or sleazebags.

A film like Eyes Without a Face takes absurd, melodramatic elements and encloses them in its own, hermetically sealed world. If the writing had been better, and the story better told -- I guess, in other words, if it had been a better book -- The Dreaming Jewels could have achieved a similar effect.


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BOOK REVIEW: SOME OF YOUR BLOOD, by Theodore Sturgeon

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Theodore Sturgeon wrote some of the best and most formally inventive sf of its day. But remember, Sturgeon's Law states. "90% of everything is crap." This book is by no means crap, but it has a couple of stylistic choices that put it pretty far down on the Sturgeon list as far as I'm concerned.


Letters between doctors, transcripts of psychiatric sessions, journal entries -- these are Sturgeon's nod to Bram Stoker's epistolary construction of Dracula. And it all works well except for a long, narrative section that is supposed to be the patient, George, writing his life story in the third person. George turns out to be an excellent writer, a natural storyteller, and Sturgeon requests an enormous willing suspension of disbelief on the reader's part if we are to find this conceivably the work of the character. The exposition is necessary, and maybe there was really no other way to handle, but George is quite the stylist. What works much better is the psychiatrist's ability to take his story, detect the gaps and lies in it, and pull those from George using hypnosis, that tried and true technique certainly practiced more and with better success in fiction that anywhere else.


George drinks blood. I don't think that's a spoiler given the book's title and references to vampires all over the back cover. Further details, on the other hand, are genuinely creepy and convincing as pathology. George is not well. He is glad that his doctor is going to fix him up, but I doubt that he will be leaving the institution anytime soon. Or I would hope not.


Some of Your Blood is a quick read that effectively presents some really disgusting material in such clinical format that some of it takes a moment to really sink in. George is a kind of innocent, but one that you would want to keep locked up for life.


Sturgeon's other stylistic blunder is a prologue and epilogue in which he addresses the reader and frames the novel in what sounds like one of Boris Karloff's commentaries on Thriller, It's beneath him, or maybe i'm pretending that the novel doesn't have the pulpy origins it does.


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NOT A STUNT: SF(9) THEODORE STURGEON

Dear Mr. Sturgeon,

This letter is something of an apology. I confess I had never considered you a serious writer. It's not as though I had ever read one of your books, but to me you were just another writer with a dozen or more titles in the science fiction section. I could see that you had won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and that other sf writers frequently blurbed your books using the word "genius," but let's face it. All you guys have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards and you are always calling one another geniuses. Also, you are named after a big ugly fish.

But now I have read one of your books -- More Than Human, to be precise. I may hold off on the genius bit until I read a little more, but I confess I was impressed. The book has an interesting structure that makes for unusual, episodic plotting that comes together nicely in the end.

Congratulations all around.

You new BFF (Best FAN Forever)

Dee

I ended up not sending the above letter. I thought the end was a bit cute, and Theodore Sturgeon died in 1985. But I have found much to admire about the man. He does command an enormous amount of respect among fellow writers, and he is the author of Sturgeon's Law:

"Ninety percent of SF is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud."

More Than Human is one of those "next step in human evolution" novels, but rather than taking the grand, cosmological vision of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Sturgeon's novel has a much darker tone. The representatives of Homo Gestalt, those possibly destined to replace us mere homo sapiens, are a motley crew. There is the telekinetic girl from an abusive background, two young African American girls who transport themselves naked wherever they want to go, a baby that appears to have Downs syndrome but is actually the brains behind the whole thing, and an exceptional young boy who kills the woman who I think may have been his mother. These five form a single being who, lacking any social contract with others of its kind, also lacks any sense of morality.

But enough about More Than Human. Theodore Sturgeon shot to the top of my admired author list when I learned he was the author of Killdozer, the 1944 short story that is the basis for the 1974 film of the same name.

Over twenty years ago, I turned on the television one Saturday afternoon and caught all but the first few minutes of the movie that I later learned was called Killdozer. This event had, over the years, taken on a dreamlike quality for me. When I told friends that I had watched a movie that involved a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment possessed by an alien intelligence, I found no one inclined to believe me. When they asked who supposedly starred in this film, things only got worse. Killdozer stars Clint Walker, Carl Betz, and Robert Urich. That's right, an actor most people thought disappeared when they cancelled Cheyenne in 1962, the man who played the father on The Donna Reed Show, and the most uninteresting actor in the world, if you exclude his performance in Invitation to Hell, a made-for-tv movie from 1984 where Urich and Joanne Cassidy move into a suburb and are asked to join a country club that has on its premises an actual doorway to hell. Whereas over the years I have found others who have seen Killdozer, Invitation to Hell appears to have been a movie for my eyes only.

When I saw Killdozer I didn't even know its title until I could find that day's newspaper. And even then I knew only its title. If I stumbled across it now, I would have searched it out on Internet Movie Database by one of its star's names and known all about it within minutes. I would have learned that Theodore Sturgeon not only wrote the short story but was a coauthor of the teleplay. (It was a made-for-tv movie, probably hoping to cash in on the short heyday of mechanized horror prompted by Steven Spielberg's made-for-tv movie Duel. Jerry London, the director of Killdozer did not have a career that followed the same path as Spielberg's. His filmography includes 90 projects, all done for television, including such highlights as eight episodes of The Rockford Files, twenty episodes of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and two episodes of JAG. )

Killdozer also has its own Wikipedia entry, has provided the name for a rock band, and was once mentioned by both Conan O'Brien and Bevis and Butthead. It is also the title story in volume three of The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

So the wonders of technology have once again unwoven the rainbow, and Killdozer is no longer my closely held secret. At least it is not available on video. Amazon lists two out-of-print versions, an American VHS tape and a import DVD titled Killdozer le viol cosmique.

So answer this question, true or false:

Alan Rudolph's first film was titled Barn of the Naked Dead.

You should have the correct answer in about 30 seconds.