The Complete Stories Of Theodore Sturgeon, Volume III: Killdozer! (1999) - Plot & Excerpts
In a nutshell: Sturgeon is still on the verge of becoming a moving force. And his knowledge of, of, of everything still astounds me. (Everything but deeply appealing characters. Of his cast, only the children really appeal to me. Just you wait, though; they're growing up. ;)My impressions as I read:~ "Blabbermouth" is built on this idea:“Remember what I told you about the entity that is conceived of suspicion and born of guilt? It’s a wicked little poltergeist—an almost solid embodiment of hate. And I’m a susceptible. Eddie, I can’t be in the same room with any two people who bear suspicion and the corresponding sense of guilt! And the world is full of those people—you can’t avoid them. Everyone has dozens upon dozens of petty hates and prejudices. Let me give you an example. Suppose you have a racial hatred of, say, Tibetans. You and I are sitting here, and a Tibetan walks in. Now, you know him. He has a very fine mind, or he has done you a favor, or he is a friend of a good friend of yours. You talk for a half hour, politely, and everything’s all right. In your heart, though, you’re saying, ‘I hate your yellow hide, you sniveling filth.’ Everything will still be all right as long as he is unconscious of it. But once let this thought flicker into his mind—‘He dislikes me because of my race’—and then and there the poltergeist is born. The room is full of it, charged with it. It has body and power of its own, completely independent of you or the Tibetan.”Which I find fascinating, both from reading about how the brain works (e.g. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain) and observing how people interact. Paul Williams, Sturgeon's biographer, notes that "it is his treatment of this sort of insight that makes Sturgeon close to unique among fiction writers, sf or otherwise"; I can't think of any other writer who did so much exploration in this particular direction. In fact, in the stories so far, I've seen little of the love that is Sturgeon's staple--but much of his genuine interest in what makes us think and act in certain ways; what makes us human.The ride is getting truly thrilling. :)~ First story that gave me the real creeps was "The Hag Séleen." It starts all childlike and funny and innocent; and it ends all funny and childlike ... but the innocence drowns somewhere along the way. In a sawyer.And if you just watch that sawyer long enough, the carcass may leap out at you. See?As for Patty, she bounced resiliently away from the episode. Séleen she dubbed the Witch of Endor, and used her in her long and involved games as an archvillain in place of Frankenstein’s monster, Adolf Hitler, or Miss McCauley, her schoolteacher. Many an afternoon I watched her from the hammock on the porch, cooking up dark plots in the witch’s behalf and then foiling them in her own coldbloodedly childish way. Once or twice I had to put a stop to it, like the time I caught her hanging the Witch of Endor in effigy, the effigy being a rag doll, its poor throat cut with benefit of much red paint. --It's there.~ The amount of telling in "Killdozer" is unbelievable. What bothered me was that it is completely unnecessary, with all the masterful showing around it.The earliest Sturgeon story where he came to a better balance (at least better from a contemporary point of view) is, as far as my reading goes, The Dreaming Jewels. (Here, I refer only to stories which require both showing and telling. Sturgeon was already extremely proficient when he only chose to show.)~ "Crossfire" is one of those stories (?) that reduce me to a "wut?!". Can anyone please tell me what jus' happened?(The notes say it's a rough draft. Perhaps not a story then, only a bud? Bringing such drafts to the public eye can indeed do a disservice to the writer. :( )~ Fact check: Is Segundo Revenir in "Bulldozer Is a Noun" the precursor of Hari Seldon in the Foundation series?Judging from the publication history of the earlierst Foundation stories, Hari came before Segundo, who was probably written in 1945 (but not much earlier). So my next question is, did John Campbell reject it because it reminded him too much of Asimov's idea?~ You want to know all about bulldozers and bulldozing? Then Sturgeon is your man.You want to know all about burglar alarms: setting them up and disabling them? Try Sturgeon.You want to know all about all sorts of electric gadgets and doodahs? Have you checked Sturgeon?... The man's curiosity and erudition are staggering. I'm trying to come up with someone even vaguely similar here in Bulgaria. Perhaps Николай Теллалов; Иван Попов; Асен Сираков? But none of them have Sturgeon's curiosity and erudition about language itself ....~ Nailing (some of) it down:https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6814864
Actually, I'm only commenting on the title story simply because it's the sort of story that stays with you. At least, it stays with me, perhaps because I read it at just the right moment, and I'd believe that if, when re-reading it not long ago, the story was as engrossing as the first time. A note: I almost never re-read anything, and I recall at least three times reading this story.I should add that I've read much of Mr. Sturgeon's stories; this is the one that stays in my mind without paging through lists to jog the memory cells.
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