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called "harmony and/or contrast." This versatility has led some critics to call him a "mannered" writer. James Blish, however, praised Sturgeon's skill at changing manners, at adopting or casting off a style according to the demands of the story.
Sturgeon's sensuous imagery may be the only constant element in his prose. Its tactile quality comes from his effect of touching the object of his description with his discerning eyes and ears as well as with his sensitive fingerswith his most cultivated sensibilities. His details are always alive with the feel of a facial expression, the sound of a person's voice, the movement of people and things, the fiber, the pulse and coloring of a setting. His consummate sense of texture controls all his best imagery. Whether he is shaping sounds, places, or actions, he perceives the unexpected, the unnoticed, the unobvious, the unlooked-for. (. . .)
Occasionally, even a few of Sturgeon's staunchest admirers among the critics blanch at his audacity. They feel uneasy when he sets out to slay latter-day dragons, the perpetuators of benighted social attitudes. They become especially upset when he strikes his blows combating rigid sexual taboos. If their nervousness, this dis-ease, blurs their view of Sturgeon's art as a bold fabulator and social critic, it may be because his subject is distasteful and disturbing to them. And if they do suffer a temporary occlusion, their incapacity stops them from seeing beyond the issue of sex per se to recognize that Sturgeon deals with the whole spectrum of human intercourse (in its broadest sense) in which the physical and spiritual aspects are inseparable, interdependent. Sometimes, therefore, the critics have failed Sturgeon in direct proportion to the breadth (or more properly, the limitations) of their own attitudes and sensibilities, to the extent that they have viewed sex as an end unto itself rather than, like Sturgeon, as an elementa vital elementin a complex compound in the chemistry or composition of human relationships.
Lahna Diskin, Theodore Sturgeon (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1981), pp. 15, 17
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Lucy Menger
In The Cosmic Rape, Sturgeon shows man through his own innate capacities outdoing the "network of force-beams" described in "The Stars Are the Styx." Where the force-beam network was only similar to "the synaptic paths of a giant brain," the Human-Medusa hive

 
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