Science & Tech Quote by Theodore Sturgeon

There is a quiet provocation in Sturgeon’s phrasing: “the very first stories” is both brag and corrective, a claim staked against a genre that spent decades imagining faster-than-light travel while treating queer desire as either unspeakable or unthinkable. He’s not just asserting precedence; he’s naming a gap in science fiction’s self-mythology. The genre loves to see itself as radical, future-facing, humane. Sturgeon points out that its future had a closet.

The specificity of the titles matters. The World Well Lost sounds like a pastoral elegy, a paradise mislaid; Affair With a Green Monkey carries the pulp whiff of the alien and the taboo. Together they telegraph his strategy: smuggle human intimacy through speculative metaphor, then force readers to notice what they’ve been trained to avert their eyes from. Science fiction often uses “the alien” to talk about otherness at a safe remove; Sturgeon flips that device into a moral test. If you can empathize with tentacled outsiders, why balk at two men?

Context sharpens the edge. Mid-century American publishing, especially in the magazines where Sturgeon worked, rewarded novelty but policed sexuality. So the quote is also a survival story about craft: how to write what you mean when you can’t say it plainly, how to place a bomb inside a beautiful sentence. That he frames it as invention reveals another subtext: representation isn’t an “issue” bolted onto art. It’s a frontier the genre chose not to explore until someone insisted it belonged on the map.