You would be surprised, did you know it, to know that Theodore Sturgeon used to write for the National Review. He and William F. Buckley respected each other, and Buckey respected Sturgeon — even though Ted agreed with Buckley politically not very much at all. But Buckley and Sturgeon could be — and were — friends.
Sturgeon used to review books for the National Review, and, very often, these were science fiction books, which Buckley had an appreciation for, and even dabbled in himself. (“Crisis in Space,” 1975 — in which a Soviet astronaut defects during an Apollo/Soyuz mission.) And that was probably a big point of commonality. Sturgeon was writing for the National Review as early as 1964, when Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative was the star at the center of the conservative firmament, and it was possible to disagree, to debate, to speculate about the nature of the Constitution and the limits of freedom. Continue reading
