Unfortunately (or fortunately, it is sometimes one, sometimes the other) the time limit to do so it about half-an-hour. The reasons for this being set up that way are valid, but a bit much to go into here....
Just go ahead and post the corrections you'd make, and not worry about it; that's the best way to handle such a thing....
Thanks mate!
I'll just repost the review, and, perhaps, one of you kind mods could delete the old post? Thanks!
Case and the Dreamer - Theodore Sturgeon
(Review 2.0)
“Ask the next question.”
This was Theodore Sturgeon's motto, and the driving force behind much of his work. It is also the meaning of the silver “Q” with an arrow through it that he wore on a necklace around his neck. He loved to ask questions, questions that, once asked, would reveal thought provoking and sometimes shocking answers. Each question asked unearths another layer, and each question answered reveals more questions.
In Case and the Dreamer, a collection of three short stories, Sturgeon asks questions about love. The first story, the title story, asks questions dealing with interspecies, alien love. The second story, If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister, the best story of the three, asks, “Is there a kind of love so heinous that it could turn an entire planet into a pariah?” And the final story, When You Care, When You Love, is a surprisingly timely story about love and human cloning. When You Care, When You Love is the least interesting of these. To tell you the truth, I didn't get much out of it at all. For this reason, this review will solely focus on the first two stories.
Case and the Dreamer tells the story of a man and woman who find themselves marooned on a strange alien world. It is told mainly in flashback, from the point of view of the man, Case, who died but is brought back to life by a holographic being. Case remembers his time with Janifer, the woman, and their tumultuous stay on the alien planetoid. The two formed a powerful relationship, and yet he was never able to say the simple words that Jan wanted to hear: I love you. Their lives were plagued by a strange presence that haunted and tormented them, getting more violent and devious as time went on. In the present, Case learns the identity of this alien entity, and discovers what it wanted all along. Case is an interesting name for such a character. A case is properly used when it is tightly closed to hold something inside. But to use the contents, it must be opened, and they must be exposed to the possible dangers of the world. Case, the character, was holding something inside, his emotions, and by not letting them out, by not truly confiding in his love, he inadvertently unleashes a vengeful force.
If All Men Were Brothers is by far the most interesting story of the three. It was originally written for Harlen Ellison's ground breaking anthology, Dangerous Visions. In his introduction, Ellison states that Ted Sturgeon saved his life - recently and literally. Ellison had entered into an extremely unhealthy, 45-day long marriage, and was barely clinging on to the last threads of his wits end. Sturgeon wrote Ellison a letter, a letter that saved Ellison's life. At one point in the letter, Sturgeon says, “There is no lack of love in the world, but there is a profound shortage in places to put it. I don't know why it is, but most people who, like yourself, have an inherent ability to claw their way up the sheerest rock faces around, have little of it or have so equipped themselves with spikes and steel hooks that you can't see it. When it shows up in such a man - like it does in you - when it lights him up, it should be revered and cared for.” And this, as Ellison puts it, “demonstrates the most obvious characteristic of Sturgeon's work - love.”
In this story, Sturgeon writes about a kind of "love" that, even today, continues to make people sick, disgusted and angry. A kind of "love" that is immoral and biologically apprehensible. He writes about incest; an entire planet where this heinous act is not only encouraged, it is simply the way of life. Sturgeon was an author who liked to push buttons, but he didn't do so just to shock or to lazily draw attention to himself. Sturgeon did so to get his readers to ask the next question. Why is incest so terrible? Let's agree that it is morally wrong. Okay, so incestuous sex leads to a shallowing of the genre pool, and offspring with birth defects and brain damage. Yes, it can. But aren't these problems also associated with children birthed from “normal” sexual intercourse? When incest is brought up, why do people always turn to child birth as a problem? Don't "normal" sexually active people have sex without the desire to procreate? Don't we also force dogs and cattle into incestuous sexual relations to obtain desired physical traits? Why has incest become such a taboo subject? What if such an existence was - gasp - beneficial? Are we so afraid of some things that we won't even take the time to try to evaluate them? I bet some of you reading this right now are feeling a little bothered that I am even mentioning these questions.
Here, Sturgeon is not condoning the act of incest, but he is asking us to examine in a deeper way the things that repulse us, to get to the true heart of the matter. It is only now, in the 21st Century, that homosexuals are beginning to enjoy the same kinds of freedoms and privileges that heterosexuals do. Only a few decades ago, homosexuality was labeled as a mental defect, a disease, something to be cured. A couple hundred years ago, Africans were treated as animals, a sub-human species. Woman weren't granted the right to vote until the 1960s! If no one ever asked the question, and then asked the next question, and continued to ask the questions until the right answers were revealed, where would we be today? Sturgeon was an author who always asked the next question, and I can see publishers sweating it out in apprehension. “This is supposed to be science fiction!” they might have said, meaning, "where are the spaceships and Martians?" And this is science fiction, in its purist and most perfect form. This is speculative fiction that examines the essence of humanity, of life and of love, and does so in ways unbridled by the power of a boundless imagination.
