Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985) was a US writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, who was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2000. At the height of his popularity in the 1950s, Sturgeon was among the most anthologized English-language authors alive. He won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. Sturgeon’s best-known novel may be More Than Human (1953), winner of the International Fantasy Award. Moving beyond fiction, Sturgeon wrote more than one hundred book reviews and the screenplays for the highly regarded Star Trek episodes “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time,” which are noted for their invention of several conventions of Vulcan culture, such as the Vulcan hand symbol, the Vulcan salutation “Live long and prosper,” and pon farr, the Vulcan mating ritual.
Sturgeon’s relationship to the world of science fiction was at times fraught during his career. His best work fit no particular category and he sometimes used story structures more familiar to mainstream literary readers. For example, even though he had work published in Astounding Science Fiction, Sturgeon felt more comfortable submitting work to the magazine Unknown than Astounding, because Astounding had a more restrictive remit. Although Sturgeon contributed to and helped shape John W. Campbell’s “Golden Age of Science Fiction,” he was much less comfortable in that mode than writers like A. E. van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, or Isaac Asimov. Sturgeon was much more of an influence on and precursor to writers like Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany (and, later, the Humanists of the 1990s). Sturgeon’s work could be overly sentimental at times, and he sometimes relied too heavily on exploring the angst of teenagers, but he also managed to plumb the depths of great passion and empathy for his characters—in a way uncommon to science fiction at the time.
Unknown folded and Sturgeon left the field for a brief time, after which his work caught on with newer markets like Galaxy Science Fiction, which published most of his best post-1950 fiction. Increasingly, Sturgeon felt free to write on more “adult” themes, including the then-taboo subject of homosexuality. Sex in all of its permutations interested Sturgeon intensely. (At one point, too, Sturgeon took to nudism; the writer and editor Thomas Monteleone first encountered Sturgeon, a literary hero, in this mode when he visited Sturgeon’s apartment to conduct an interview.)
The lyrical “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1959) pushed back against a romanticized, can-do vision of travel to the moon, while engaging in another kind of (deeper and more profound) romanticism. In one sense, “The Man Who Lost the Sea” renovates a particular astronaut trope in science fiction. But it also has elements in common with the stories by Delany and Knight in this volume that more sharply undercut Golden Age science fiction assumptions.
This story was also Arthur C. Clarke’s favorite. In the introduction to The Ultimate Egoist, Volume I: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (1994), Clarke wrote, “[It was] a small masterpiece…the one which had the greatest impact on me, for personal as well as literary reasons. I too lost the sea for many years, and only rediscovered it in later life…I can’t even reread it without the skin crawling on the back of my neck.”