I misplaced my Foundations book last weekend, so I read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God. I became familiar with Theodore Sturgeon through reading Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. Vonnegut has a fictional author named “Kilgore Trout” as a character in several of his novels. Kilgore sounds like Theodore, and Trout is a fish just as a sturgeon is a fish. Vonnegut and Sturgeon were friends and this is, presumably, why his fictional representation exists in Vonnegut novels. The fictional character is a brilliant, but ignored author who is always a moment away from greatness that is inevitably cut short through a series of extremely unfortunate events. Perhaps this mirrored Sturgeon’s own life?
Microcosmic God tells the story of an incredibly brilliant, reclusive inventor, Kidder, who, despite making many great inventions at a furious pace, is dissatisfied with his progress. To combat this, Kidder engineers miniature, human-like species that he keeps in little half-acre, enclosed, worlds on his own private island. These intelligent creations live entire lifetimes within months. He employs these communities to do scientific research on his behalf. They do several generations of scientific work every year to bring Kidder’s ideas to life. One would worry that these brilliant little people would surpass Kidder’s intelligence and do away with him, but Kidder has thought of everything. His creations were bred to breathe ammonia and find oxygen toxic, so escape from their little enclosed world is not an option. Kidder is viewed by his creations as a God. In the end, unfortunately, Kidder’s undoing is the outside human world. A banker whose greed has skyrocketed off of Kidder’s continuous stream of profitable inventions forces Kidder to enclose himself and his island under an invisible dome. A dome that presumably will come down after Kidder lives out his natural life and his little creations eventually figure out a way to take over Earth.
