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second place—the vindication, the reputation: the story is “Bianca’s Hands” [in
The Ultimate Egoist
, Volume I of The Complete Stories]) does not speak of well-mannered fiction as the times defined—although the story is beautifully wrought, and any nineteen-year-old (Sturgeon was nineteen when he wrote it) could be justly proud of it. “Die, Maestro, Die!,” with its guitarist’s amputated fingers (a passing obsession for Sturgeon? Compare this with the extraordinary self-mutilation scene involving the guitar-playing protagonist from
The Dreaming Jewels
[1950]) is not a polite tale at all. And while this second volume of stories contains a goodly number of Sturgeon stories that were particularly popular in their day (“Microcosmic God,” “Shottle Bop,” and “Poker Face” are all tales that came in for special praise whenthey first appeared—as did “Killdozer!”, the story that will open the subsequent Volume III), the delight of this volume is that it contains so many stories that today’s reader is bound to find even richer and
more
rewarding. Nor are “The Sex Opposite,” “It Wasn’t Syzygy,” “The Other Celia,” “Bright Segment,” “A Way of Thinking,” or “Mr. Costello, Hero” well-mannered stories by anybody’s standards. And
these
are the tales in which a modern reader begins to encounter the unsurpassed, the incomparable, the magnificent Sturgeon.
    The long-time Sturgeon reader has no doubt been patiently waiting through all this historical retrieval with a question. We ask it now: What are we to do with Sturgeon’s frequently quoted assertion, “All my work is about love”? Well, I take the assertion seriously—but in the manner that I take seriously the innumerable strategies devised over the centuries by innumerable artists to reach into the centers of their own creativity. Such a statement may well represent Sturgeon’s own key to working. But there is no necessity for it to be my key into the work. Where do I go for such a key? Where I go for the key into any other writer’s work: to the text—and, because in science fiction there is such lively reader response, to the readers … with a large margin for caution, translation, and evaluation.
    Some six years before Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
(1961) supplied the term
grok
to the counterculture for a brief currency, Sturgeon’s SF novel
More Than Human
gave a word to a circle of young readers (which included me) meant to combine aspects of blending and meshing:
blesh
. Perhaps it was simply because of my age, but
grok
—especially after someone (James Blish?) noted that its meaning was practically identical to the then-current meaning (it changes yearly) of the jazz term
dig
—somehow never entered my vocabulary.
    Blesh
did.
    I still have to stop myself, now and then, from writing it down in the flow of the most formal nonfiction. And forty-five years after the publication of the novel in which it first appeared, a few friends of mine still use the term in conversation.
    But I think this sound-image, bleshing, this order of
communitas
always on the verge of communion, expresses an inchoate need in the American psyche; as well, it relates to a gallery of images that recur through Sturgeon’s texts. And the other single word—the biological image that the Sturgeon reader (and apparently for a while Sturgeon as well) most easily groups that gallery of images around as a metaphorical center—is, of course, the word denied in the title of one tale, explained in the text of another, and referred to in passing in any number of others: “syzygy.”
    Sturgeon himself describes it for one-celled organisms in “It Wasn’t Syzygy”: “Two of these organisms let their nuclei flow together for a time. Then they separate and go their ways again. It isn’t a reproductive process at all. It’s merely a way in which each may gain a part of the other.” For biological accuracy, we can add that the cell walls