I have one more post about Theodore Sturgeon and then it's back to the Great Houdini.
One of the stories by Sturgeon that we read in our weird fiction book club is "Microcosmic God," originally in Astounding Science-Fiction in April 1941. It's a compact and well-told story. I would call it novella- or novelette-length. In that, Sturgeon treated his readers well and avoided the bloat. An author of today would have turned it into a mega-novel or even a whole series. "Microcosmic God" has been reprinted again and again. I read it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One (1970). I also read the comic book version adapted by Arnold Drake and drawn by Adolfo Buylla, published in Starstream: Adventures in Science Fiction in 1976.
We decided in our group that the Neoterics in "Microcosmic God" are a kind of artificial intelligence, or AI. I wonder if they were the first example of AI in science fiction. There were of course intelligent machines before Sturgeon's Neoterics. But was any one of those designed specifically to solve problems too great for the human mind, or at least on a convenient time scale? I don't know. Or: maybe not. Anyway, I think Theodore Sturgeon deserves credit for being the first or one of the first science fiction authors to foresee the real-world development of problem-solving artificial intelligence. At the end of "Microscopic God," we are left with the question: what will the Neoterics do (to us) once they emerge from their impenetrable bubble? We can have the same kind of question about our own AI. I think I would take my chances with the former--after all, they are living beings--versus our soulless machines, which are or may be, truth be told, created and promoted by equally soulless human beings.
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| A two-page spread from Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941, with a Piranesi-like illustration by Charles Schneeman (1912-1972). |
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