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merge and that cytoplasm as well as nucleoplasm, exchanges. After they separate, both cells quickly undergo fission twice (resulting in eight organisms). Although syzygy is not a reproductive process, besides allowing genetic mixing it triggers reproduction through two generations.
    Looking at the range and power of this communion as it is presented again and again throughout Sturgeon’s work, certainly I see love as one of its most important forms. Yet what has always struck me
vis-á-vis
Sturgeon’s assertion is how much larger than love—love in any form I can recognize it—this communion is always turning out to be. It is almost always moving toward the larger-than-life, the cosmic, the mystical. In a number of places in Sturgeon’s work—
More Than Human, The Cosmic Rape
—it comes to be one with evolution itself.
    Dealing with such an awesome communion, Sturgeon might well want to keep himself oriented toward love. It would be rather heady, if not horrifying, to explore that communion without such a fixed point to home on—though a few times Sturgeon has given us a portrait of this communion with the orientation toward hate (“Die, Maestro, Die!” and “Mr. Costello, Hero”), and these are among his most powerful stories. Certainly the relationships presented in “Bianca’s Hands” and “Bright Segment” begin as love; but although neither ever loses the name, both, by the end of their respective tales,have developed into something far more terrifying. Yet the intensity of effect, finally, allies that dark version to the brighter one of such tales as, say, “The (Widget), the (Wadget), and Boff’ or “Make Room for Me.”
    Artists outgrow their terminology (not to mention their metaphors), and Sturgeon would soon leave syzygy behind—first as a word, then as a concept. But for the reader, the image of merging cells, fused in some imponderable union, closer than sex, with many aspects of sex about it but ultimately a replacement for sex among the essentially asexual, is a microstructure rich enough to begin organizing around it readings of the larger and more varied communions Sturgeon presents in one form or another in almost every tale.
    Sturgeon wanted a world that worked differently from the one we live in; and that difference was that it had a place for love and logic both. What seemed to bolster him and give him personal patience and also artistic perseverance was his apprehension of the interconnectedness of all life’s varied and variegated aspects.
    For all the brilliance of its accomplishment, Sturgeon’s career was by no means smooth or easy. He had three marriages (the second was annulled), two more long-term relationships, and seven children. Financially, there were times when he approached the level of middle class comfort, but not many. And his writing was broken by several extended periods when he could not write at all—even so much as a letter. Such periods were financially disastrous and deeply painful to the man—even as they troubled his readers. Because Sturgeon was as popular as he was, at the merest mention of a story or book idea from him, editors would rush into print with an announcement of a book or a story forthcoming, that finally would never appear. (The long, late tale “When You Care, When You Love” was trumpeted as the first section of a novel—never finished. And a tale called “Tandy’s Story” that appeared in
Galaxy
in 1961 was supposed to be one of a series, one named for each of his children—never completed.)
    There’s a story that Sturgeon has told about himself and that others have repeated.
    In the early fifties, during the midst of one of Sturgeon’s severalblocked periods,
Galaxy
editor Horace L. Gold finally broke through it. Sturgeon had explained to Gold that he was worrying so much about the terrifying oppression and fear emanating from Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was investigating “un-American” activity and destroying lives and