Many of his speeches are preserved only in obscure fanzines, and his essays are widely dispersed-his non-fiction writings are long overdue for collection. He also wrote essays and was a popular speaker at conventions and at colleges.

His early career as a reviewer in the 1950s and '60s (especially his essay on 'Sturgeon's Law') won him the assignment of SF reviewer for the New York Times throughout the early 1970s. Sturgeon's bohemian, Romantic lifestyle, his charismatic personality, and his decades-long commitment to the education and improvement of young writers made him a central figure in the field for more than four decades. To date, the body of that work of his has received too little attention from students of the field, given its importance. While his novels The Dreaming Jewels (1950), More Than Human (1953), The Cosmic Rape (1958), Venus Plus X (1960), Some of Your Blood (1961), and Godbody (1986) are significant contributions to the field, as are several minor collaborative works such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), perhaps his major impact was achieved through his short fiction, more than 150 stories in all.

He became the center of a circle of younger writers in New York in the late 1940s which devoted itself to discussions of the craft of writing SF and interpenetrated with the Futurians (Blish, Knight, Merril, et al.) and (as Delany has pointed out in his essay on Sturgeon in Starboard Wine), he introduced the idea of revision into a field dominated by the pulp magazine practice of writing fast and selling (for the most part) first-draft material. In the early 1940s in New York, Sturgeon founded a literary agency that was bought by another SF fan, Scott Meredith, and became part of the foundation of that famous agency.

Sturgeon's commitment to stylistic excellence and the craft of writing made him an immediate influence on others even with his earliest works, perhaps most significantly on the young Bradbury (who contributed a glowing introduction to the first collection of Sturgeon's work, Without Sorcery ). Sturgeon's first sales were to Unknown and Astounding, in 1939, and although he wrote many stories in other genres, his career was principally in SF and fantasy.

He was recognized at the time of his death as one of the most important and influential writers in the history of modern SF by such diverse writers as Samuel R. On May 8, 1985, Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo, on February 26, 1918) died at the age of 67.

Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon