Sublime

Theodore Sturgeon, born in 1918, had originally been named Edward Hamilton Waldo, but he adopted his step-father’s name. Like Fred Pohl, Jack Williamson, Lester del Rey, and others, Ted had a difficult childhood and a limited education.

Sturgeon’s Law is usually put a little less decorously: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of experiments in molecular biology, 90 percent of poetry, 90 percent of philosophy books, 90 percent of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics—and so forth—is crap.

It was then under the editorship of Raymond A. Palmer, a four-foot-tall hunchback with a most lively and unorthodox mind. In later years, he created, virtually single-handed, the flying saucer craze and he took to publishing magazines on pseudoscience. He died in 1977 at the age of sixty-seven. I never met him in person, but he was the first editor