The Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction seems to have sent out a press release today, because various editors began congratulating their authors, so I think it’s safe for me to announce that “The New Mother” is a finalist the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. SFSignal has a list of all the finalists. I found out I was a finalist on the same day I found out I had won the Tiptree Award, a surreal 24 hours in which I got a wave of wonderful news that I was unable to talk about publicly. I told my parents though, and they were perhaps even more excited that I’m a finalist for the Sturgeon Award than they were that I won the Tiptree. As I’ve mentioned before, they spent some time with Sturgeon when they were both in Lawrence, Kansas, and credit him with strengthening their then-nascent relationship. So it’s arguable that I owe Ted Sturgeon some credit for my existence, and it’s certain that I grew up reading him, often from copies of books signed with his “ask the next question” symbol memorialized on the Sturgeon Award permanent trophy. So this particular award has tremendous personal significance.
Tag: Theodore Sturgeon
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:
