"The Man Who Lost the Sea" is a science fiction short story by American writer Theodore Sturgeon. Originally published in the October 1959 issue of '' The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'', it was nominated for (but did not win) the 1960

Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction The Hugo Award for Best Short Story is one of the Hugo Awards given each year for science fiction or fantasy stories published or translated into English during the previous calendar year. The short story award is available for works of fiction of ...

. Writing in '' The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction'',

John Clute John Frederick Clute (born 12 September 1940) is a Canadian-born author and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy literature who has lived in both England and the United States since 1969. He has been described as "an integral part o ...

described "The Man Who Lost the Sea" as "strong, immeasurably complex, word-perfect and deeply fixative to the reader's memory".

Plot summary

When the story opens, the reader is introduced to a boy who is showing a model helicopter to a person described as a "sick man" on a beach. As the story progresses, the models shown by the boy increase in sophistication, first a rocket plane and then an interplanetary spacecraft. The reader also learns of significant events in the boy's life, including his fascination with the

Sputnik Sputnik 1 (; see § Etymology) was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for t ...

satellite and a near-drowning experience while swimming in the ocean. Eventually, the reader is told that the boy and the sick man are the same person, an injured astronaut who is regaining consciousness after a crash landing on Mars. The story is told as a

second-person narrative Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...

(i.e., "You raised your head ...", "If you were the kid ...").

Publication history

Shortly after its original appearance in ''The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction'', "The Man Who Lost the Sea" appeared in issue 74 (January 1960) of the French-language magazine ''Fiction'' (under the title "L'homme qui a perdu la mer"). Its first appearance in Britain was in the October 1963 issue of '' Venture Science Fiction''. "The Man Who Lost the Sea" appeared in two best-of-the-year

anthologies In book publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed work ...

—''The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction'' (Ninth Series, 1960) and ''The Best American Short Stories, 1960'', as well as being reprinted in ''The Fifth Annual of the Year's Best SF'' (1960). Since then, it has been anthologized at least eight times and has been translated into French, Italian, German and Dutch. It also appears in three collections devoted to Sturgeon's work—''The Golden Helix'' (1979), ''Selected Stories'' (2013) and ''The Man Who Lost the Sea'' (2013); the latter two are e-books. It is the title story of volume 10 of ''The Complete Works of Theodore Sturgeon'' (2005). The foregoing was taken from the story's listing in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (for which see the External Links section below). More detail on its publication history can be found at that listing.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Man Who Lost the Sea 1959 short stories Short stories by Theodore Sturgeon Works about astronauts Works originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction