Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon, Paul Williams
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1556432275
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Killdozer! is the third volume of a series of the complete short stories from Theodore Sturgeon's career. It contains a few of his best and most famous short stories: "Medusa", "Killdozer!" and "Mewhu's Jet." The series editor Paul Williams has dug into the background of each story, and come up with a lot of interesting lore about Sturgeon. Especially of interest in this volume is the alternative original ending to "Mewhu's Jet."
hits the place where the roof isn’t, so I can clean up the edges with a saw.” “Oh.” Jack roughed out the area with a piece of charcoal, lopped off the more manageable rough edges with a hatchet, cast about for his saw. It was still in the garage. He climbed down, got it, climbed up again, and began to saw. Twenty minutes of this, and sweat was streaming down his face. He knocked off, climbed down, doused his head at the pump, lit a cigarette, climbed back up on the roof. “Why don’t you jump
concept of a spaceship of fools (on a dangerous and vital mission), each of whom has been told there’s only one sane man aboard the ship, is a memorable one. Eminent science fiction critic Damon Knight later wrote a groundbreaking essay on Robert A. Heinlein entitled “One Sane Man.” As with so many stories from this period (and very few from later in Sturgeon’s career), a related false start can be found in the Sturgeon papers. This untitled, unfinished eight-page manuscript is about a man
do anything for her. Go ahead and stick your neck out.” “I don’t know where she lives or nothing.” “Oh—that.” He pulled out a little notebook and a silver pencil and wrote down something. “Here,” he said, tearing it off and handing it to me. It said, “Iola Harvester, 2336 Dungannon Street.” “Who’s this?” “Your damsel in distress. Your dark-eyed slapper of faces.” “How the devil do you know her name?” “She was a patient of mine for quite a while.” “She was? Why you son-of-a-gun! Why didn’t
had taken half of heaven with her along her trajectory and brought it with her. I was sprawled in the canoe with the nape of my neck on the conveniently curved cedar stern piece of the canoe, with a book of short stories in my hands and my fish pole tucked under my armpit. The only muscular energy required to fish that way is in moving the eyes from the page to the float and back again, and I’d have been magnificently annoyed if I’d had a bite. Patty was far more honest about it; she was fast
“No—don’t say that. I just got an idea we can’t stop at ‘I dunno.’ We got to figure all the angles on this thing before we know just what to do about it. Let’s just get this thing lined up. When did it start? On the mesa. How? Rivera was opening an old building with the Seven. This thing came out of there. Now here’s what I’m getting at. We can dope these things out about it: It’s intelligent. It can only get into a machine and not into a man. It—” “What about that? How do you know it can’t?”