The Hurkle is a Happy Beast
by Theodore Sturgeon

Basic Information:

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949, starting on page 61

Collected in a number of anthologies, including The Science Fiction Bestiary; The Science Fiction Roll of Honor; The World Treasury of Science Fiction; & The Perfect Host (Volume V of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon).

Sci-fi theme: Alien life (sub-category: alien being comes to Earth)

Opening paragraphs:

Lirht is either in a different universal plane or in another island galaxy. Perhaps those terms mean the same thing. The fact remains that Lirht is a planet with three moons (one of which is unknown) and a sun, which is as important in its universe as is ours.

Thoughts:

As always, please read the story first, as there are many spoilers.

Looking around online at other people's reactions to The Hurkle is a Happy Beast I note a trend, in which this story is labeled as "cute" or "slight," and generally these writers place it no better than a second-tier Theodore Sturgeon story. The plot is always summarized along these lines: a cute, six-legged, blue-furred, cat-like creature from another dimension ends up on Earth and hijinks ensue, particularly when the hurkle makes a classroom of school children (and their teacher) itch uncontrollably. Most mention the twist at the end wherein we find out humans had to abandon the Earth due to the hurkle's population explosion and that uncontrollable itching they induce. Only some commentors mention the various effects being on Earth has on the hurkle, such as the lighter gravity allowing the hurkle to jump far distances.

What very few seem to think important enough to talk about is the beginning of the story. About 2.5 of its roughly 10.5 pages (so let's call it 20% to 25% of the story) occurs on Lirht, before a text break that switches the location to Earth. It's full of information and plot that Sturgeon keeps insisting we don't have to worry about. As in paragraph two above, where the gwik are introduced, and immediately we are told to ignore them. The nature of the trouble that came to the unnamed Lirht city "does not matter to us." The one gwik named, Hvov, we "may immediately forget." There is a building that was important "for reasons we cannot understand." We told that during these troubles, life went on and "gwik still fardled, funted, and flupped. The great central hewton still beat out its mighty pulse, and in the anams the corsons grew." None of those terms are explained.

It's all a feint. None of it is necessary. All Sturgeon has to do is get the hurkle to fall into the nonsense machine that instantaneously lands it on the windowsill of a school on Earth. So why is this nonsense here?

Hold that thought – I'll get back to it. First, I'd like to look at the story's unusual form. None of the commentators I read made note of the structure of the story. It's in four clearly separated parts:

1. The opening on Lihrt, told from a narrator's point of view and then, towards the end of the section, from the hurkle's POV.
2. The school scene, from the teacher's POV.
3. A section from the hurkle's POV. This section time jumps back to when the hurkle arrived on Earth, continues through the school scene, and then ends after the time-point we reached at the end of part 2.
4. The ending of the story, which picks up after the end of part 3. First the story is told from the teacher's POV, as he sees the hurkle heading away from the school following the DDT ambush, and then, from the narrator's POV, telling us what happened to the hurkle (and the humans) after that. We also learn who the narrator is (which I'll get to).

This is an unusual form for a short story of this length. Also unusual are the changing points of view, including the reveal of the narrator's identity at the end. Particularly interesting is the rewind of time at the start of section three, which is related to a change of point of view.

That change in point of view in section three is essential to conveying the hurkle's personality, but it also allows Sturgeon to avoid the more ham-fisted way of conveying an intergalactic misunderstanding. In the most normal presentation of this not-uncommon sci-fi trope, both parties can speak (or otherwise communicate) with each other (not the case here), and we, as the reader, can understand where the misunderstanding lies as they go back-and-forth in a variation of the "Who's on first?" routine. The same trope happens in situation comedies (more on sitcom humor below). On the other hand, in Hurkle we get no explanation for why everyone is itchy, nor why the hurkle is fuzzy and then comes into focus in section two. We're halfway through section three before we get that explanation, when Sturgeon gives us the school scene as seen the hurkle's alien point of view. This presentation allows Sturgeon to better emphasize the differences between human and hurkle. It also gives him a way to freshen up this classic joke, and to do it with a non-verbal character, one who, humorously, has no interest in trying to understand the Earth natives.

And this is a funny story. But look at how Sturgeon's use of humor is different in different sections. The school scene is, I would say, conventionally funny, with a classically frustrated-with-his-students teacher and everyone getting itchy. This also reminds me of situation comedies, although given when the story was written, it might be better to just say it is "theatrically" funny. Quite a few sci-fi short stories that strive to be funny use this kind of humor, hence my labeling it "conventional." I believe that even when the premise is funny, this kind of sitcom humor is often less than successful when presented on the page instead of the stage or screen. I also think we can often anticipate these jokes (which lessens their comedic impact), perhaps just as a result of the many years that have passed and all of the sitcoms we've watched.

The digressive first section of the story is funny in a different way. The humor here is essentially about the writing. There are all of the silly "don't worry about that" statements. His writing is purposefully dry. The non-English words are just dropped in without translation or comment. Sturgeon also seems to be sending up sci-fi tropes. (Ironically, the short snapshots we get of Lihrt and its happenings remind me of Vonnegut's way of summarizing his fictional sci-fi writer's Kilgore Trout stories. I call that "ironic" because Kilgore Trout was named in homage to Theodore Sturgeon.)

While some of the opening section's gags using non-translated words return in the third section ("there wasn't a single solitary malapek to be throdded anywhere."), mostly the third section plays on the effect being on Earth has on the hurkle. Everything is topsy-turvy: the plants are wrong, the colors of things are wrong, it hears music, and the hurkle's abilities change. It turns invisible when frightened on Lihrt; on Earth, it turns completely visible when frightened. It leaps when it tries to walk, presumably because of Earth's weaker gravity, and while this upsets it at first, it learns to love this means of locomotion (the hurkle is, after all, a happy beast). And, connecting up with part two, we learn its purrlike glow – a "wave of radiation" – was visible on Lihrt but is now invisible, and it is this glow which is responsible for making people itchy. As with the alien words, none of these transformations are explained through the kind of quasi-scientific rationales common to sci-fi stories. The hurkle doesn't question any of it, and as this is from it's point of view, we get no answers.

So, in section three we have some of the dry alien-ness humor coming back from section one along with some of the sitcom humor from section two (the ‘fish out of water' misunderstanding trope), such as when the hurkle perceives everyone's scratching as a sign it was being noticed, causing it to redouble its glowing. But even with the sitcom humor, notice the differences between section two and three, based on the different points-of-view.

Now, what is the story actually about? I've given the ususal plot summery above. Given the ending, we can read The Hurkle is a Happy Beast as being a metaphor, an extreme illustration, of the impacts of (terrestrial) invasive species. I see a more specific analogy - I see Hurkle as a hilarious send-up of Superman. Yep, Superman, the most famous fictional inter-galactic invasive animal, who gains superpowers simply by moving to Earth, just as moving between worlds changes the hurkle's abilities. In addition to the "superpowers" already mentioned, the hurkle kitten is unaffected by a bee sting (and eats the bee three times before giving up "as a bad job") and finds a cloud of DDT to be a kind of hyper-catnip rather than poison, sending it to an "agonized ecstasy."

It is the height of hutzpah to mock Superman with an extremely cute "super cat" – and, on top of that, one that is repeatable referred to as a kitten, and appears to be female – but I'm not surprised because I find Sturgeon full of hutzpah most of the time.

In the twist in part four, the hurkle's arrival of Earth turns out to be far more consequential than Superman's. This super cute happy beast has become parthenogenetic, has 200 babies at a time, and, because they "bred so!" and "there wasn't a thing [we] could do about it," all humans had to leave the planet. And for the lamest of reasons, by the way: essentially, we all had to get away due to our universal allergy to hurkle glows. Another bit of dry humor.

We also learn, here at the end of the story, that our narrator is a very happy hurkle, one of original's descendants.

This last section's humor is mostly dark humor, which is new. The plot twist also bring us back to the beginning, as it turns out the misdirection displayed in the first section is a foreshadowing of the misdirection of the whole story. Just as we don't have to, or can't, understand the gwik-centric events on Lihrt, the hurkle audience, living on a post-human Earth, doesn't needs to understand all that human stuff. Oh, there was a school room, but that doesn't really matter to us. The one human named, Mr. Stott, we may immediately forget. He makes a loud noise, "for reasons we [the hurkles] cannot understand." Also notice the echo of that "fardled, funted, and flupped" stuff from earlier in the story as well: "humans had the slidy itch, and the scratchy itch, and the prickly or tingly or titillative paraesthetic formication."

To call this Sturgeon story "cute" completely misses the point. The hurkle is cute, sure, but from our human prospective, it turns out to be a monster. The story may be short, but it is hardly "slight." Sure, the consequences for us humans are revealed in a rush at the end, but this is a story told by hurkles to hurkles – and it shows, because we all end up loving the hurkle. You can't help it. It is, after all, such a happy beast. However, make no mistake, this is an apocalyptic story for us. It is just not told like an apocalyptic story. It is told as the origin story for Earth-born hurkles, because that is what it is.

And Sturgeon manages to pull that off. And do so humorously. Genius.