The true technician is indeed the form-changer, transforming simple materials into near limitless proliferations and a variety of forms. Sturgeon can do this with words and with narrative lines, and he often creates protagonists who possess a similar fecundity of inventiveness and controlled variation. These mad scientists of Sturgeon's, who are usually quite sane, loving, and gentle men, are his images for the technician and craftsman that is he himself as artist. James Kidder, the protagonist in … "Microcosmic God," is an invention capable of incredible proliferation and variation who finally turns his inventive skills to the basic problem of how to increase the rate of proliferation itself…. Kidder does this by inventing a small intelligent species of his own who rush through their life cycles generation after generation at a phenomenal rate from the human point of view, hence producing evolutionary "progress" from which Kidder can benefit. A similar technical inventiveness in literary matters seems to be the property of Theodore Sturgeon, when he is not suffering from writer's block.

Nearly thirty years later, Sturgeon invented another "mad scientist" character who is somewhat like Kidder, in … "Slow Sculpture" (1970). Like Kidder, the doctor in "Slow Sculpture" cannot be called doctor since he is a mechanical and electrical engineer and lawyer by training; Kidder could not be called doctor because he never would waste the time to do a degree, which demonstrates Sturgeon's feelings about the discrepancy between real craft and credentials. But whereas Kidder was shy and chose to isolate himself from the world in order to do his invention, the inventor of the advanced cancer cure in the later story is portrayed with much more depth of character as an "angry, frightened man." This fear lasts until he can make the meaningful human contact that will give coherence and significance to his inventions. The later story is a love story…. (p. 177)

Sturgeon is enough of a craftsman, stylist, and rhetor to know that he must have something important to say. The major thing he has to say (at least in his two longer fictions of the fifties) concerns not just loneliness and love—his well-known stated themes—but rather the nature of change and newness itself. And like the best of stylists, what he has to say (some comment on the origins of newness) is integrated amazingly well with the considerations of style, or how he says it that has drawn so much attention to his career. In other words, wherever we look at Sturgeon's work—either at the protean form-changing of his craft or at his ideas which he chooses to belittle for the sake of art—we see related images. And these images have to do with the nature of change itself and with the origin of new images themselves. (p. 178)

[A] question that might be asked and one that Sturgeon does ask in his fiction is whether or not such a description of a continually growing universe is sufficient.

When Sturgeon puzzles over this conundrum, he aligns himself … with at least a two-century old tradition in Western thought of worrying about what causes things to become what they become. More Than Human and The Cosmic Rape treat this problem in detail and suggest unexplored possibilities. (p. 179)

Sturgeon's notion of an "ethos," which is central to the ending of More Than Human, challenges the notion of "accident" by suggesting a firm and prevailing anthropocentric focus to change. Lately, Sturgeon has defined specifically for us what he sees the meaning of the concept of "ethos" or ethics to be: "… morals are distinguished from ethics in that the latter is a structure of thought which is directed toward the survival of the species." The species he refers to may or may not be limited to some form of humanity, and that is a key issue to resolve. His two longish fictions of the fifties offer alternative answers to the question of the origin of "newness" in human development. (pp. 179-80)

The apparent answer that can be inferred from the ending of More Than Human is that new human growth will develop from within the human community itself…. But Sturgeon does seem to leave the lines of speciation rather fuzzy as must be the case in any evolutionary change…. Sturgeon writes about the evolutionary development from homo sapiens to homo gestalt as though it were a continuum with such a complexity of flow that almost no clear speciation can be discerned along the flow…. The ethos that Hip and Sturgeon want Gerry to subscribe to is not limited to either homo sapiens or homo gestalt. The immediate context is "humanity," but the larger context requires identification with forces much less definite than human forces. (p. 180)

[Even] though in this novel "newness" seems to come from evolutionary development within the system of earth's ecology, the system is stretched to such a vast, sublime extent that the images for the ethos hardly seem anthropocentric. When the "heart leaps up," it is just as apt to be the heart of a wild creature as the heart of a man. And by implication man is a "monster" when he is only a man. (p. 181)

[Although] the development of homo gestalt takes place within the context of humanity the length and extent of the flow of that development as well as the sinister infrequency of actual new appearances seem less, or perhaps more, than anthropocentric. Sturgeon's title, More Than Human, makes a clear statement about the structure of thought that constitutes the ethos of the story. Growth leads toward the survival of the human species, but within the context of a very broad definition of species indeed. More Than Human never takes its reader's thoughts off the surface of the earth …, but it nevertheless is not anthropocentric in its ethos. The survival of the species is more than human.

Whereas the answer in More Than Human is that new growth will come from within the human community even though slowly, The Cosmic Rape … paints startling images for new creation coming to earth from far beyond the solar system…. [The] Medusa of The Cosmic Rape is very much alive and possesses the ability to move and to transmit thought rapidly through much of the universe; and it is this living, non-human "creature" that introduces the "newness" in the book. The implication is not only that there are a variety of species in existence, but that matter itself "out there" is teeming with life and bent on change and development. (p. 182)

Sturgeon's images for the marriage of humanity with the living universe lose all human orientation and become wildly fanciful—in the best Coleridgean sense of rich inventiveness that somehow loses its human, moral center. It would seem that all question of an anthropocentric "ethos" serving as the foundation for new development becomes irrelevant for Sturgeon at the climax of this story as his imagination, or fancy, responds to the image possibilities of a living universe. This climax doesn't make much of a human narrative; but it is beautiful, wild, image writing. (p. 183)

[The] point of change itself (as in More Than Human) is clothed in mystery and obscurity. Sturgeon's notion of cause again does not seem to be anthropocentric or rational. Newness seems to be infrequent, unlikely, and from our human point of view somewhat akin to what we call accident. An important change in this story comes at the moment of conception when the medusan sperm unites with the human ovum to create the new super-species, and it is not insignificant that Sturgeon's image for creation in this passage is both lyric and mysterious. His fancy may fly to strange creatures, but Sturgeon realizes also that there is almost infinite mystery and uncertainty associated with the creation of new individuals through usual human sexuality. His fancy does not have to range to the rim of the universe to image the strangeness of new development…. (pp. 183-84)

The tone of The Cosmic Rape [reads] almost as comic passages. It is as though the more fanciful newness Sturgeon tries to create the more comic his tone becomes. And much else in the later novel is funny—the droll little machines that are medusan inspired and that move rapidly to change the human race. In fact, the fanciful machines and strange creatures in much of science fiction can be read as comic. The non-anthropocentric sense of newness, imaged so well by Sturgeon here, goes hand in hand with an ironic, comic tone because of its absurdity. To put it another way, because there is such a disparity between the images for bursting fecundity that come to mind and our anthropocentric expectations that there should be a human order to the universe, the comic tone can act as a defense against the enormity of that disparity. Sturgeon, in particular, since he toys with the notion of what is human and what is more than human in these stories, uses this tone in this way. But it is also a tone that characterizes much of science fiction as a genre as well. The anthropocentrism is strongly present in the genre, especially in the fantasy tendencies of the genre which indicate that humans have a profound need to conceive of a relatively closed universe in which human forces act from within the repertoire of human emotions and human needs; but the bursting proliferation and fecundity of an open universe are also a major element in the speculations of science fiction. The conflict between these two tendencies often produces the comic effect of a [Dan] Gurlick metamorphosing rapidly from one strange species to another. (p. 184)

Sturgeon's protean sense of play, that is his style, can perhaps be more fully understood now after seeing that playfulness can be a very serious idea indeed—an idea that allows some balance between the longing for anthropocentrism and perhaps even the cessation of change on the one hand and the realizations of an open universe on the other. Sturgeon's style, in short, allows him the flexibility not to have to dwell for long at either pole of that opposition. He writes about people and love and loneliness …; but he lets us know that there are many more things in heaven and earth as well. And his style is the way both to convey and to endure this complexity. Finally, then, the style of proliferation and the content of love and concern are blended in Sturgeon's work. It is a truism in literary studies that style and content are related, but with Sturgeon the relationship goes beyond the truism and becomes intriguingly almost incestuous. His changes and his virtuosity are both his way of loving and his way of avoiding loneliness.

Obviously, Sturgeon the stylist and literary form-changer is the same Sturgeon who is the lover. Form and content in the overall effects of his work are one, and his continual interest in the nature of change and newness is closely related to his interest in style…. And yet, whether or not he actually does it consistently, a high ideal for Sturgeon as a writer is that he works "assiduously," not at ideas, but at writing images. The result is … a richly proliferating aping of nature that conveys finally the most valuable idea from nature: its complexity and continually changing newness…. The commonplace of at least a major portion of Sturgeon's literary life is that style and loving concern are counterparts of one another because it is the comprehension of all the complexity, done through style, that allows the most genuine love. Perhaps in a simpler, more anthropocentric universe love could be more single minded; and we might prefer that. But the comic tension of our complex universe arms us to love things as they are, and Sturgeon's complex literary fabrications contribute to the expression of this comic tension.

In another sense, the question raised in this article, because it is a question raised again and again by Sturgeon himself, is what is the final end of development. What is the definition of "maturity"? Significantly, his story by that title, first published in 1947, is also a love story. But the human love, which is deeply developed in the story, can neither explain nor control the tendency toward unlimited growth and fecundity. The young genius in the story, who is also a clever and protean stylist, in spite of or because of his initial hormone imbalance grows in wisdom to the point where the reader thinks that "maturity" or the final purpose in development might be defined. But Robin's answer is finally only that "Enough is maturity." Growth simply goes on and on until it is "enough," and then it stops. Such an ethos necessitates both continual protean form-changing to portray it as well as comic defense to endure it. (pp. 185-86)