1954, 55 pages

I have developed an interest in classical hard science-fiction written around the time that American emasculation was in full swing, from the disillusionment following WWI circa 1920, through to the masculine apocalypse of the 1960s. Through most of this period the American man had but a dim sense—if at all—that his gonads were being snipped away by Uncle Sham, who turned out to be a transvestite, don’t you know.

Theodore Sturgeon was one of our most insightful speculative-fiction pioneers, who is famous for having coined the saying, “Ninety-five percent of everything is crap!”

In The Golden Helix Sturgeon explores a possible seeding of the closest habitable planet. Three mated pairs of starfarers are sent 23 light years off to infuse an already established colony with new blood. This ‘shot in the dark,’ ‘no return to sender,’ type of colonization is made possible be a type of medically induced deep sleep, realistically rendered by the author. Six very different personalities are included. The anchor psyche, the alpha female, does not revive, is dead in her coffin, which is what they call their sleep apparatus. She is, however, pregnant, giving birth to six children from beneath a golden helix that is somehow present.

The surviving colonists find themselves on a virgin planet, to which they have been diverted by an advanced race of beings. They are not at their destination. What begins then is an exercise in devolution, in which each new birth is of a more primitive type of child. Set a thousand years in our future, humanity has already evolved, so the first step was devolving to what is our level, then downward toward our apish ancestors. The prescient observation made by the author, primarily through dialogue, is that, although the men were indispensable in dealing with a hostile environment, when the environment began to change the very nature of humanity, it was the men who balked. It was the women—more vested in their biology, more easily enslaved by the cycle of life—who took on a leading role as soon as their environment ceased to be a threat to the species, and remained hostile only to the individual will.

Overall it is astonishing that something written in 1954 is so much more infused with a realistic assessment of human nature than that which is found on the shelves of today’s book store.