The true technician is indeed the form-changer, transforming simple materials into near limitless proliferations and a variety of forms. Sturgeon can do this with words and with narrative lines, and he often creates protagonists who possess a similar fecundity of inventiveness and controlled variation. These mad scientists of Sturgeon's, who are usually quite sane, loving, and gentle men, are his images for the technician and craftsman that is he himself as artist. James Kidder, the protagonist in … "Microcosmic God," is an invention capable of incredible proliferation and variation who finally turns his inventive skills to the basic problem of how to increase the rate of proliferation itself…. Kidder does this by inventing a small intelligent species of his own who rush through their life cycles generation after generation at a phenomenal rate from the human point of view, hence producing evolutionary "progress" from which Kidder can benefit. A...