Weekly Short Story: Shottle Bop by Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon is another one of those great old science fiction writers of the twentieth century like Robert Sheckley who is often overlooked but has produced a number of great stories.  Shottle Bop is one of his earliest, originally published in 1941 and reproduced in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941).  Maybe you're wondering about the meaning of the story's title...sounds a bit nonsensical, doesn't it?  It's an example of "Spoonerism", where the first consonants of two consecutive words are exchanged...I remember that funny old Homer Price series I read as a kid where the sheriff was constantly doing this: so do I, unintentionally of course as I have a tendency to trip over my own tongue sometimes...

Shottle Bop is set in the "current" time around 1941 as a general "loser" character is wondering around the mid-to-lower west side of Manhattan and comes across a strange store with the sign "We Sell Bottles...with things in them".  Intrigued, he goes inside and encounters the cantankerous owner, who seems to already know all about him and his lack of character, liberally insulting him.  He is offered a bottle with some liquid in it, no charge, and told that it will bring him success...but he'd better use it wisely.  Yeah, as if that will happen with this guy.  Anyway, the big loser, who is the unnamed first-person narrator of this story, does just that...and starts to notice the world around him changing to one filled with ghosts.  Of course, instead of using his new ability to "see dead people" for the betterment of others, our hero decides to take advantage of it to set up a lucrative "psychic" business and then lords his sudden affluence over his hoodlum buddies.  You know this is not going to turn out well, but what I didn't expect was the ending...after all, the protagonist is telling the story from the vantage point of looking back on it...

Shottle Bop might have been a good Twilight Zone episode, but in retrospect it's more like a Stephen King horror story with its vivid and disturbing imagery, probably unfit for early 1960's television.  In any event, I liked it chiefly because it set up the narrator as an antihero with all sorts of personality defects...and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for literature like this: The Catcher in the Rye comes to mind.  Theodore Sturgeon has a few more good short stories, and I'm sure his name will come up again on this blog in the not-so-distant future...

Weekly Short Stories: 1941 Sci-Fi, Part 1

I've just begun going over the science fiction anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 3 (1941).  This series, which covers short science fiction spanning from 1939 through 1963, has some very interesting commentary, both in the preface and before each story, by editors Isaac Asimov...himself a renowned sci-fi writer...and Martin H. Greenberg.  Used copies of the series are still available...Amazon probably has them all (as do I). And now I'll discuss the first four tales appearing in the 1941 book...

MECHANICAL MICE by Maurice A. Hugl
Barman, a tinkerer and friend of the narrator, keeps coming up with incredibly innovative inventions.  One day he comes clean and reveals to his buddy that he has only truly invented one thing: a time machine that allows him to see off into the future and, from that vantage point, study future technology and copy it back in the present.  This is all well and good for his "inventions" that serve a discernible function, but his last one, which he has been working on for a long time, is a box of sorts with complex machinery that he knows nothing about...other than he discovered it off in the distant future and brought its design back.  Eventually, though, the thing turns itself on and insidiously begins its original task...which had Barman been aware of he never would have built it in the first place.  Although Barman's invention may not have been original, this story idea was...alternately funny and very scary...

SHOTTLE BOP by Theordore Sturgeon
I actually reviewed this very story a year ago...you can read it by clicking on the following link: [Shottle Bop]. Sturgeon was an excellent science fiction short story writer and he was responsible for the horror tale It from the 1940 anthology.  When I think of the hoodlum character who narrated Shottle Bop, I'm reminded of that unforgettable narrator and character Henry Hill from the movie Goodfellas, played by vodka-drinking and cigarette-quitting actor Ray Liotta.  And I loved that annoying, insulting shopkeeper...

THE ROCKET OF 1955 by Cyril Kornbluth
Kornbluth was a promising young science fiction writer who penned this story in his teens.  Sadly, he had a heart condition early on and died at age 35 one day in 1958 while shoveling snow after a storm.  The Rocket of 1955 is the ultimate space hoax...maybe moon hoax believer Stephen Curry should read it between basketball games.  It's also one of the shortest short stories in the entire series...very intense and to the point!

EVOLUTION'S END by Robert Arthur
Back when I was in the tenth grade in high school, I wrote a short story for my English class that I thought I was being very original with...it involved a view that human history was cyclic in nature and that there was a real, historical basis for the creation myth.  Since then I've come across three other stories, including a Twilight Zone episode and this one by Robert Arthur, that have used the exact same idea.  Still, I was interested in this tale's characters...always a sign of good writing...that is, until I began to analyze the different names.  Then I suddenly realized what the author was up to and I sighed to myself in disappointment. Robert Arthur, through the super-brainy character Master Dmu Dran, discusses the nature of evolution and comes up with some interesting perspectives.  Worth looking into...

Next week: more short science fiction from 1941.  By the way, these stories are so old that there's a good chance some of them are now in the public domain and available to read on the Internet...copying and pasting story titles into a search engine might produce good results...