Theodore Sturgeon famously said, "Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud." This is known as Sturgeon's Revelation. He was probably right.

Sturgeon and science fiction entered my consciousness together when I was in high school. The boy across the street loaned me a copy of E Pluribus Unicorn, which blew my young mind at the time. For quite a long while Sturgeon for me WAS science fiction.

But now, many decades later, I am confused. I dipped into Sturgeon's novella The Perfect Host thinking it was a piece of science fiction. But three-quarters of the way in, it seemed like it could have been written by Paul Auster. A month ago The New York Trilogy had my full attention. The purported detective novels were not behaving well — you know, the way your typical hard-boiled whodunits are supposed to. Crazy haywire things were going on in those novels but in a controlled sort of way. You just had to keep going and figure there would be some resolution down the line — or not.

It is exactly that way with The Perfect Host. If you know Theodore Sturgeon, you know you are in for something strange. But the odd thing is that Sturgeon, who wrote this book in the fifties, long before the Paul Auster stripe of postmodern fiction was being written, seems like he is in some ways a kind of early prototype of the postmodern novelist.

But then you come to the last quarter of the book, and you start to breathe easier. You say, Oh, yes. Now we're on familiar ground. Make no mistake, The Perfect Host begins on a very odd note with a naked woman jumping out of a hospital window in front of three witnesses. They all see her jump, but no one sees the woman land. There is no body. After that, the ingredients of this strange stew become more complex, with here a little magic realism, there a little now-you-see-now-you-don't, and toss in skewed perceptions everywhere. In fact, this book takes such a strange turn that Sturgeon has to step in – in his own persona – and put things on track. Come to think of it, isn't that what Paul Auster did in The New York Trilogy? Yes, these two writers are not so different after all. Of course, Auster is probably a more graceful writer, but he has nothing over on Sturgeon's fantastic imagination. I wonder . . . if this book had been marketed differently . . .

Nah, it's too far out. But it's a fine example of Sturgeon's writing and a quick read at that. ( )