TERRA SF 473 - Theodore Sturgeon : Die Venus-Kristalle

Theodore Sturgeon : Die Venus-Kristalle
Terra SF 473, 05.08.1966
Originalzusammenstellung
Aus dem Amerikanischem von Eduard Lukschandl
Titelbild : Karl Stephan

enthält die Stories
Die Normwidrige (Prodigy, 1949)
Das Pokerspiel (Poker face, 1941)
Die präparierten Raumfahrer (Medusa, 1942)
Die Suche nach dem Tod (What dead men tell, 1949)
Die Venuskristalle (Last laugh, 1951)

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) ist einer der ganz großen Kurzgeschichtenautoren. Die SFE sagt über ihn :

Sturgeon won both the Hugo and Nebula for one of his infrequent later stories, "Slow Sculpture" (February 1970 Galaxy Science Fiction), but his latter career was not happy, thought the continued publication of stories from the years of his prime helped maintain an appropriate sense of very considerable stature. His influence upon writers like Harlan Ellison and Samuel R Delany was seminal, and in his life and work he was a powerful and generally liberating influence in post-World War Two American sf. Though his mannerisms were sometimes self-indulgent, though his excesses of sympathy for tortured adolescents sometimes gave off a sense of self-pity, and though his technical experiments were perhaps less substantial than their exuberance made them seem, his very faults illuminated the stresses of being an American author writing for pay in an alienated era and in the solitude of his craft. Out of that solitude, he remained, all the same, occasionally capable of a story as strong, immeasurably complex, word-perfect and deeply fixative to the reader's memory as "The Man Who Lost the Sea" (October 1959 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), a tale which – along with everything else – is a tone-perfect eulogy to the world and ambitions of the traditional American sf he knew so well.

SFE-Eintrag

Von Theodore Sturgeon ist viel ins Deutsche übersetzt worden und ich kann nur jede einzelne Story-Sammlung empfehlen. Auch die hier vorliegende enthält herrliche Geschichten, von der ich jede einzelne empfehlen kann. Sturgeons hier vorliegende Geschichten bleiben innerhalb des SF-Genres, Ausflüge in die Fantasy oder den Horror kommen nicht vor. Ich will hier gar nicht auf die einzelnen Geschichten eingehen (um nicht zu spoilern) und stattdessen ein weiteres Zitat aus der SFE bringen, das meine Meinung zu Sturgeons Stories präzise rüberbringt :

Sturgeon's short stories read like instruction manuals for finding the new world.

Die Kurzgeschichten von Theodore Sturgeon sind in einer 13-bändigen Werkausgabe erschienen, die meines Wissens noch nicht ins Deutsche übertragen wurde. Wer sich ins Sturgeon einlesen will, der sei auf das eBook And now the News ... verwiesen, in dem "five previously uncollected stories along with five well-known works, two co-written with genre legend Robert A. Heinlein" enthalten sind.