My parents met and socialized with Theodore Sturgeon at the University of Kansas before they were married–they claim to have the only copy of Venus on the Half-Shell (written by Phil José Farmer pseudonymously) signed by the real Kilgore Trout. EDIT: My father wrote to correct me: they got Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut, signed by Sturgeon as Trout. I grew up on Sturgeon stories. Memory fades, but I think my first Sturgeon was “Microcosmic God,” which was either actually read to me as a bedtime story, or was put in my hands by my parents as something to read myself to sleep with. In college I wrote a comparative literature paper on the treatment of the mentally disabled by Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick.
This week’s story in Strange Horizons is a Theodore Sturgeon reprint. And I can tell you, because I just got off the phone with them, that my parents are totally geeking out about their son’s name appearing next to Theodore Sturgeon’s on a table of contents. My mother insists she is going to print out the page and frame it. I’m pretty happy with this turn of events also. I told my dad, “This is the nicest thing that doesn’t really mean anything at all that’s happened to me in a while.” So thanks for the unexpected gift, SH! As a Sturgeon fan, this is a clipping for my archives:
