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Study 087 - The Professor's Teddy Bear (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-18 21:06:27
Edited:
2024-04-20 15:22:40
Imported:
2024-04
Tags:

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Content

Theodore Sturgeon's wholly original monster tale The Professor's Teddy Bear horrifies and mystifies. Good thing we've got Ken Hite along to help us decipher it!

BUY KEN'S BOOKS! Many are available directly from Pelgrane Press.

Special thanks to our reader, Greig Johnson!

Check out the Weird Tales issue in which this story first appeared.

Here's our episode on Sturgeon's swamp-creature story IT.

Other bear stories mentioned in this episode:

"The Third Bear" by Jeff VanderMeer

“Fur” by A.L. Barker

The Taste of Pomegranates” by D.K. Broster

And that Teddy Ruxpin tape referenced in the show.

Files

Comments

The Chet

Does the Catalysts of Death commentary imply the presence of more chrono-psychic parasite entities in the universe? This one seems confines to Jeremy and his bear, but perhaps there is a whole race of them out there?

Cole Caron

I’m curious about the cultural lineage of unstuck-in-time sci-fi/fantasy stories. All I wanted to do was compare the publication dates of this story and Slaughterhouse Five, but apparently I’ve stumbled into a huge topic like deep pit in a pitch-black room. This story bounces back and forth between its two time periods while seriously considering how an alien connection across space-time would effect both versions of the character. The weird alien intelligence as catalyst for this connection is what initially got me thinking about Slaughterhouse Five. That’s when Wikipedia decided to let me know that Kurt Vonnegut came up with the name “Kilgore Trout” by basing it off of the name of his friend Theodore Sturgeon. Something about this is fishy, and it’s not just the last names. (EDIT: this anecdote was actually mentioned in the first Sturgeon episode haha) You could draw a comparison between early pulp past-life regression stories like CAS’s “Ubbo-Sathla” or Howard’s “People of the Dark.” Ubbo-Sathla doesn’t return to the time period it starts in, so you can feel the protagonist slip backward through the lives of long-dead people. People of the Dark returns to its starting time period and the protagonist keeps some of the identity of his past life to solve the plot through pict-slaughtering action. Part of me wonders if this kind of story structure began as a twist on the time jumping that happens in Dracula-style epistolary fiction. Hopefully someone with enough energy for graduate school can write a thesis about this for me.

Ben A

I second Ken's recommendation of Vandermeer's The Third Bear. Man, though, that's another _very_ dark tale. Think of something along the lines of an anti-Beowulf, or at least what might have happened to the village had Beowulf never come to their rescue. As for The Professor's Teddy Bear, this is in my top five stories for Sturgeon. (Others include Microcosmic God, Saucer of Loneliness, and Slow Sculpture, the last of which I really recommend to anyone.) But (as I mentioned a few weeks ago to you, Chris), boy is this a bizarre and disquieting tale. Ken gets high praise for making linear sense out of it. The preying on a child, the sense of unmooring from time, the capricious breakdown of cause and effect, and the sheer desperation that seems to come from the parasitic bear (and later adult Jeremy) are I think what unsettle me the most. Elements like the mouth ears and the blood transfer are meant to have some ambiguity because these other elements are what were driving the dread in the reader. There's a David Lynch-like quality to tales like these, in that they're dreamlike but we're not sure what part is real and which is the dream (or nightmare). That Sturgeon also kinda predicted the '80s & onwards obsession with contamination by liquid in body horror--I'm thinking Cronenberg especially--is a stroke of terrible genius. Thank you (?) for covering this one!

Ben Gilbert

R. A. Lafferty wrote a story called Snuffles about a bear-like creature on another planet. He also wrote “Thieving Bear Planet” which I know nothing about.

Ziggy Bartdust

As someone who loves monsters in every form, and I mean EVERY form from going on road trips to Cryptid locations, to being heavy into Dinosaurs and Monsters from various Mythologys from Greek to Norse to Japanese Yokai, to loving Kaji Movies when I was a kid, to being in the Target Audience for Pokemon when they came out when I was 10... never have I come across a Monster so Unique, so Horrifying and so Uniquely Horrifying. Mr Sturgeon has gained my respect, and to think I used to just think of him as the Killdozer guy

Jason Thompson

Another random factoid: Theodore Sturgeon said “Dhalgren” was the greatest science fiction novel, so he wasn’t homophobic! 💪

Prince Prawn

Sturgeon studies in the collection section? The quality of works, as well as the alliteration strongly suggests, no, demands it!

Patrick Ziselberger

Since you spent some time talking about stylistic mid-century SF authors, I feel I have to mention someone you haven't covered: Avram Davidson. He is definitely a weird author, though he tends not to write horror. His stories are wryly funny or melancholy, although there are horrific moments. I'd recommend "The Golem," which was one of Leonard Nimoy's favorite stories (there's a recording of him reading it kicking around on youtube, I think) "Or All The Seas With Oysters," his most republished work, and "The Slovo Stove." If you can find "The Avram Davidson Treasury" which came out in '98, it collects his finest work.

Nickthulhu

Might be a little late to the party, but William Faulkner has a wonderful novella called "The Bear." It's not really known for being a "strange" story, but more of a symbolic tale about the replacement of the old, nature-centric world by the coming of industrial society. Yet, it can almost be taken as a strange tale because of the supernatural intelligence that Old Ben, the bear in the story, seems to posses. He has an odd ritual of rendezvousing with the hunters of the story every year when the season comes about, is said to regularly walk on two legs like a man, and only reveals himself to the young main character, Isaac, when he enters the woods without any remnants of the modern age, namely his watch, compass, and gun. It almost has a Blackwood's "The Willows" type feel to the story, but just in the sense that there is much going on in the subtext, yet it's hard to discern exactly what this is — giving it a supernatural underpinning. It should be known, however, that this story was part of a novel originally named Go Down Moses and became printed as its own novella after some time. Faulkner, unaware of this, said himself that part 4 of the story should have been thus removed to prevent confusion, since it mainly relates the novel Go Down Moses and will only cause bewilderment for the reader. He suggests to pass over it completely when reading "The Bear" and only take-in parts 1-3 and 5. I would suggest, if the guys or anybody wants to read this, getting the book Go Down Moses, which is a novel that is composed of seven related short stories, and doing as Faulkner says, read only parts 1-3 and 5 of "The Bear." I suggest this because there are a few stand-alone novellas of "The Bear" which leave out part 5 entirely for some reason, ending after part 3.

It's a Ghost.

As a fan of the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who, I wonder if the “teddy bear” came through the crack in the ceiling.

Jason Thompson

You should read “The Happy Breed” by John Sladek from Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. A nice (“nice”) AI apocalypse story.

KateSherrod

If you ever do another Weird Bear Month but can't quite fill it out, I think we'd let you get away with H. Beam Piper's Fuzzies as a kind of bear. I'm pretty sure they helped inspire the Ewoks... plus, charming as hell.

Aaron La Vene

I can easily say. This is one of the most terrifying creatures I have ever heard of. This has been a month of straight bangers. Fuzzy is easily the most perfect incarnation of a demonic horror I have ever heard of. Who would have thought. Bear month. Y’all wild for this and I love it

Aaron La Vene

“This can’t possibly exist in another medium.” Says person in universe where the most canonically stable and longest running 80s slasher is about a serial killer using voodoo to enter a child’s doll. Killing everyone from children to presidents culminating to having his own family of killer dolls, as well as an army of… himself….. And is still going to this day. In b4 - The Cult of Fuzzy

Anne Ominous

This story was terrifying! That Weird Tales issue reads like a Who's Who of the Weird: gonna gobble that up!

Jim Cannon

I only know Killdozer as a frequent punchline on MST3K, so I was amused to learn it came from Sturgeon. I wonder how it measures up to Stephen King's "Trucks."

Jim Cannon

I racked my feeble brain, but the only monster I can think of that comes close to Fuzzy is the character of Ti Malice, from George R.R. Martin's contributions to the Wild Cards mosaic novels. Ti Malice is... difficult to explain, without too much backstory, but I guess the simplest is thus: physically, he's the baby from Eraserhead, but he has mighty psychic powers, and can control minds and such. He will "ride" a person by sitting on their shoulder and inserting his tongue into their neck, an experience that (like many vampires) is ecstatic/euphoric for the victim, and then Ti Malice can control them but also share all the physical experiences the "mount" has. It gets pretty dark, as you might expect.

Jamie Brittain

Absolutely brilliant story, and an absolutely brilliant episode. Fuzzy made me think of some of the worst nightmares or fever dreams I've had - where strange, bodiless forces are compelling or controlling me in ways I don't understand, with arcane rules which within the dream are entirely logical and consistent, but collapse into incoherence on waking (or soon after). This story felt like someone recounting a nightmare with near perfect recall on the experience - but with those horrible gaps in external logic left exposed for all to see. The chat about childhood trauma chimed with me too. One of the hardest aspects of psychotherapy is trying to tune into events and feelings that occur before your own sense of self as a separate entity from the world is fully developed. Things happen to you that you don't understand and you cope with them at a much more primal level - devoid of language or logic. All you are perhaps aware of is that there *is* some form of external logic acting upon you - I guess personified in your parental figures - but a logic you have no hope of understanding in the moment. I've often wondered if nightmares - and perhaps cosmic horror and stories like this - are an attempt to articulate or understand or reconstruct those pre-verbal fears.

Steve

Who could fail to be delighted a Ken's glee with this story.

It's a Ghost.

Just a few thoughts. The monster suggesting that Jeremy would grow up to be “Seven feet tall and very fat," makes me wonder if the monster is from somewhere else where children regularly grow up to be that size. When Jeremy said, “A metempsychosis is a thing that happens when a person moves from one house to another,” the monster said in response, "Like when your daddy moved here from Monroe Street?”, which makes me wonder if his father moved to the house as a child and if the monster also fed off his “dreams.” The monster seems tied to the house, or the house itself seems to a big part of the equation. I wonder if Jeremy was also born in the house, and if he hadn’t defeated the monster whether it would have also fed off Catherine’s dreams.

Richard Horsman

Chad made a joke about Teddy bears being more like Dostoevsky bears, because of their horrible origin story. The thing is…those would still technically be Teddy bears, since “Fyodor” is the Russian version of “Theodore.”

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I'm always a bit surprised when one of our fine hosts asks, "Why is it doing that?" While I understand the frustration, isn't that the point? It does it because it does it. It's motivations (if it even *has* motivations) are inhuman and unknowable.

Stewart

Supporters of William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt's successor as President, decided that he also needed an animal mascot to compete with the Teddy Bear, and attempted to make the "Billy Possum" happened. The absence of a story called The Professor's Billy Possum (an the lack of Billy Possums available in stores) tells you how successful that was, but it did result in people mailing President Taft a whole lot of possums, sometimes dead, sometimes living.

Drix

If y'all are still casting about for another weird bear story, may I suggest "The Terror of Blue John Gap" by Arthur Conan Doyle. Although somehow, I think this bear month may end up recurring a few times, given how many suggestions I've read here.

Tom Král

Amazing episode as always. I have a great story suggestion for you all. I just finished reading Through The Flash from the Friday Black book written by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I'm not sure how is your stance about living authors nowadays but the short story is PERFECT for this show. It is about a city stuck in timeloop for eternity. To say anything more would be a possible spoiler for you guys but even if not for the show everyone should read it. It's perfect!

Joe Webb

I don’t think you can find a weirder bear story than this.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Wasn't Bert the name of the thug whose head Johnny Black smashed in last week? Miss Patchell might be out of luck.

nils hedglin

I wonder if this story is somehow related to the tv series A Good Place's concept of JeremyBearimy

Pam Winkler

“Footsteps” by Anne Leckie has some similarities to this story. Major surprise as I was listening to her “Lake of Souls” story collection.