There seems to be a certain incredulity in the title and in the author's preface of Sturgeon Is Alive and Well …, so perhaps it's not surprising that one of the most powerful stories in it is that of a man trying to fight his way out of a bungled suicide attempt. Appropriately, it is the last story.

There are twelve stories all told, of which three may be familiar to you…. The others all appeared in men's magazines, and sometimes show it—by the time I finished the book I was a little tired of the heroine who lies down for the hero a few hours after they've met.

Of the nine probably unfamiliar tales, five, including "Suicide," are straight mainstream stories and very good ones; it's well past high time that editors allowed Sturgeon to show his potentials in this field. Another, "Crate," is a shipwreck-and-survival story to which the science-fiction trappings are nearly superfluous (and it's also very good). "Uncle Fremmis," about a man who can thump people's worn-out thinking patterns back into alignment as he would thump a misbehaving old radio, is on the borderline between fantasy and science fiction, as is the marvelous prime mover of "Brownshoes"; only "The Patterns of Dorne" is pure-quill science fiction, as seen through the unique Sturgeon eye…. "To Here and the Easel," which is about a stuck painter whose blockage takes the form of identification with a character in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, is a fine, free-wheeling tour de force of what can be either pure fantasy or abnormal psychology, as you will.

There is not a dud in the lot. My favorite, by a whisker, is "It Was Nothing—Really!"…, but possibly my preference for it may be because it is outright comic, whereas all the other stories are either intense or grim…. It is also uncharacteristic in another way: of all the stories, it is the one which least exploits the Sturgeon Eye, which sees better than any other writer's eye in our field that people become truly themselves (or fail to) primarily through their relationships with other people; the recluse, the conformist, or the man self-trapped in an obsession or an ideal image of himself is living a pseudo-life which is, whether he knows it or not, a private hell.

Almost all the stories in this volume dramatize one facet or another of this observation, which greatly broadens Sturgeon's earlier preoccupation with the various forms of love; he has grown a great deal during his six years of silence. Of them all, the one which makes the point most openly is "The Girl Who Knew What They Meant," but it is almost omnipresent.

I see that I have made the book look blatantly moralistic, and it is; but I seriously doubt that that will bother any grown-up reader. The stories are almost all good as tales told for their own sakes, they are without exception technically adroit, and the fact that they are also About Something is the rarest and most treasurable of fictional qualities. (pp. 22-3)