“The Professor’s Teddy Bear”
Theodore Sturgeon
Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1948
Currently available in Thunder and Roses Volume IV: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
ebook $8.99

Things have been extra hectic this last week or two, and I’ve missed several  birthdays that I wanted to post about.  I’ll do some posts about the authors I wanted to discuss over the next few weeks. Today is Theodore Sturgeon’s birthday, and I didn’t want to miss it. Sturgeon (1918-1985) was born on February 26. He was one of the first sf authors I read as a teenager, and some of his short stories left a big impressions.

A few weeks ago there was a discussion about “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” on Twitter.  It had been years since I read that story, so I reread it.

I found the bear to be a little grisly. (I couldn’t resist.)

I’ll show myself out.

It’s the tale of a little boy who has a very special teddy bear, one that drinks blood.  It can also get the boy to do t hings to other people in the future. The boy grows up to be a professor, but he has no memory of the bear. The bear can get the boy to control what the professor does.  The things he does aren’t nice. This is a horror story. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll let you read it.

On a related note, we’ve had a couple of used book stores open here, where for a few years we didn’t have any.  One has an excellent selection of vintage paperbacks. I was going to do an acquisitions post, but time has been tight and it hasn’t happened.  One of the things they had was a set of Sturgeon paperbacks.  I didn’t get all of them, at least not yet, but here are the ones I did.

All of them are duplicates except Godbody, To Marry Medusa, and Venus Plus X. Some of the editions are different from the copies I have. There are a few other collections I didn’t buy because they are so old and brittle they were on the verge of falling apart. Since I had copies of them, I left them for another trip. I’ve been dipping into them a little and reacquainting myself with some stories I read when I was a teenager. I’m looking forward to rereading The Dreaming Jewels.

If you’ve got a favorite Sturgeon story or novel, let us know in the comments.