The Nail and the Oracle: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, Vol. 11 Book

The first thing I learned when reading this was that Harlan Ellison apparently trademarked his own name. I didn't know he had gone and done that so that was an interesting fact to know. We should all do that.

This volume winds up being the slimmest of the books released in the series so far and appears to cover a period where Sturgeon's writer's block was fairly intense and he was also involved in other ventures like TV script writing (he's written several "Star Trek" episodes) that took time away from short story writing. Thus this collection uncharacteristically covers about thirteen years, as opposed to the previous collections that maybe covered only a year or two (his most prolific years were not yet behind him though, as the next collections cram quite a bit of story into smaller gaps of time). The stories also seem to depict a man who is slightly falling past his prime writing years, at least temporarily. While there's nothing explicitly "bad" here, a number of them seem to lack the open hearted lyricism of the earlier stories, either zeroing in on conveying a point or working their way to a twist/clever ending without making any wider point. Interestingly around this period of his life he met one of his last companions, Wina Golden, whose influence was enough to inspire a number of stories that are often called "Wina Stories" because they were either taken from stray comments she made or anecdotes from her own life and while his new love might have given him plenty of ideas, the beating heart that often powers his best stories seems buried far below, faintly heard but not as easily felt.

The first thing that might strike you with this collection is that Ellison's introduction is among the longest things here. I started reading it late at night thinking it was like the other introductions that were a couple pages each and wound up staying up a half hour later than I anticipated because it goes on and on and on for around thirty pages. If you've read Ellison before its what you can typically expect from him, some exuberant passages, some searing honesty, some swaggering confidence, some boisterous tell-it-like-it-is and and an overall sense that he's attempting to convince you that he was Sturgeon's best friend of all time. It may not be too far off, as Sturgeon lived with Ellison for a period of time and no matter how much he's trying to show off, there's a very real sense on Ellison's part that he still acutely feels the loss of his good friend even twenty years later. But if nothing else its unmistakably Ellison, one of those bits where his fiery personality can't help but shine through.

Unfortunately the stories inside are just . . . okay. A lot of them don't take off, if they ever do, until right toward the end where Sturgeon wraps it all up with a short passage that can twist you and make you ache and remind just how darn good he was. One of Ellison's favorite stories from this period (at least according to a review of "Sturgeon is Alive and Well" he reprints that mostly criticizes the stories in there) is "Take Care of Joey", which like a lot of the stories gives you a "where is he going with this feeling" before pulling it all together with an ending both sad and searing and clever all at once. Most of the tales don't rise to that level of impact, even the "title" story "The Nail and the Oracle", about people trying to get a straight answer out of a brilliant computer, goes a long way to set up the scenario without really justifying the payoff we get, although he does sneak in a large point about thinking for yourself (part of his "ask the next question" creed).

Otherwise you get another Western ("Ride in, Ride Out", which is pretty much exactly what it does), a couple of mystery type stories ("Assault and Little Sister", which has a savage ending for Sturgeon and "Holdup a la Carte" which is much more charming), the rather bizarre "How to Forget Baseball" (an attempt to depict the sports of the future that sometimes comes across as how people see baseball now), and a couple stories where Sturgeon vaguely skirts Heinlein territory to tell us how the world should work ("It Was Nothing-Really!" and "Brownshoes", the latter an actually pretty good meditation on how much you might need to camouflage your true self if you want to save the world) but manages to keep the lecturing from the characters to a minimum even as if shows that Sturgeon was clearly starting to think we'd be doomed if people didn't start doing something about it (a concern that crops up more and more in his stories in this latter part of his life).

Meanwhile the two that are associated with Ellison don't do much for me at all. "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" was used for Ellison's "Dangerous Visions" collection and I think it tries so hard to shock through the depiction of incest as a welcome thing that it winds up nearly obscuring its main point, which is that we often accept things as wrong without really questioning why we think its wrong. But it is a welcome foray into SF for Sturgeon, which wasn't always common for him at this point. "Runesmith" was written with Ellison and is an interesting blend of their styles but the most entertaining portion of it is Ellison's recounting of the writing process in the story notes.

That leaves "When You Care, When You Love" as the story that sometimes feels closest to the Sturgeon of old emotionally, where you can see the struggle for the ache, as a woman tries to figure out to save someone she loves and comes up with a plan both crazy and desperate and loving. It doesn't feel as effortless as his best stories did but it also manages to show a flip side to a similar situation in CJ Cherryh's "Cyteen" in about a tenth of the space, showing how brilliantly economical he could be when he needed to.

So, a mixed bag overall but with enough purely good stuff to recommend it (or at least not recommend skipping it, though if you're dedicated enough to get all thirteen volumes of someone's complete stories, are you really going to consider leaving off a volume?) and in some sense it feels like one last pause of breath before the final outflowing of stories that would take us across the next two volumes and to the end of his life.