Killdozer!

Theodore Sturgeon, New York City, March 1945.
“No, This isn’t the office boy cutting up after the boss left for lunch. This is Teddy as Copy Director of the Hudson-American Corporation for two glorious weeks.
Isn’t he cute with his little blue pencil?” (written on the back of the photo by THS, to his sister-in-law)

T
HEODORE
H
AMILTON
S
TURGEON
was born February 26, 1918, and died May 8, 1985. This is the third of a series of volumes that will collect all of his short fiction of all types and all lengths shorter than a novel. The volumes and the stories within the volumes are organized chronologically by order of composition (insofar as it can be determined). This third volume contains stories believed to have been written between 1941 and 1946. Four are being published here for the first time; and two others have never before appeared in a Sturgeon collection.

For invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume, I would like to thank Noël Sturgeon and the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust, Marion Sturgeon, Jayne Williams, Debbie Notkin, Robert Silverberg, Virginia Heinlein, Ralph Vicinanza, Lindy Hough, Richard Grossinger, Tom Whitmore, Frank Robinson, Kyle McAbee, Matt Austern, Donya White, Sue Armitage, Bob Greene, Dixon Chandler, David G. Hartwell, T. V. Reed, Cindy Lee Berryhill, Sam Moskowitz, and all of you who have expressed your interest and support.

THE COMPLETE STORIES SERIES

Foreword by Robert Silverberg

Afterword by Robert A. Heinlein

T
HE STORIES IN
this volume are the work of a writer in transition, a writer on the threshold of greatness who has already found his important themes but has not yet—quite—attained his full measure of artistic breadth and technical assurance. The familiar Sturgeon warmth and compassion are there, the concern with the inner workings of the human soul, the narrative ingenuity. What we don’t yet have is the soaring poetry, the visionary beauty, of Sturgeon’s writing in the great period of his maturity that began about 1950 with the novel
The Dreaming Jewels
and reached its apogee with the 1953 novel
More Than Human
and the myriad short stories and novellas of 1952–1962. But we can see harbingers of it.

The present group of stories come from two very different periods in Sturgeon’s life. “Blabbermouth,” “Medusa,” “The Hag Séleen,” “Ghost of a Chance” and “The Bones” were written by 1941, when he was 23 years old. They represent the last outburst of the precocious first phase of his career, the 1939–41 period when he carved a place for himself among the heroes of editor John W. Campbell’s Golden Age period with such tales as “Microcosmic God,” “It,” “Shottle Bop,” and “Yesterday Was Monday” in Campbell’s magazines
Astounding Science-Fiction
and
Unknown
. The remaining stories in the book were written between the spring of 1944 and the early months of 1946, after three years of silence. That three-year gap is a significant one, and not only because three years is a long time in the development of a prolific writer who is still in his twenties. Those particular three years were the years of World War II, which worked an immense transformation on Ted Sturgeon and on
the world in which he lived. They were a time of challenge and maturity for him; the author of “Memorial” was a very different man from the author of “Medusa,” and the problems of 1946 were very different from those of 1941.

The war years were bleak and gray ones for science fiction readers and writers. The war effort itself was all-encompassing. Most of the top writers were involved, either through actual battlefield experience or in some non-combatant role that absorbed most of their energies. In those years magazine publishers were plagued by skyrocketing expenses and paper shortages; many magazines disappeared altogether and those that survived cut back severely on their frequency of publication and number of pages per issue. Magazines then were the only outlet for publication that an American science-fiction writer had: paperback book publishing in the United States had only barely been born, and the orthodox hardcover publishers had scarcely any interest in science fiction. Only in the pulp magazines—gaudy-looking crudely printed entities with names like
Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories
, and
Astounding Science-Fiction
—could a science fiction writer find readers, and then only at a rate of pay that even then had to be considered a pittance. $50 to $75 was the going price for short stories; a long work, running to 100 manuscript pages or even more, might fetch $200 or so. The shrinkage of the magazine market during those years eliminated any hope that a writer, even one who had not gone to the war, could earn even a modest living from science fiction.

It was in the brief pre-war boom of the pulp magazines that the young Ted Sturgeon, unfettered and experimental-minded, launched his writing career. After some uncertain times writing short-short stories for newspaper syndicates, he turned to fantasy and science fiction in 1939 and clicked almost immediately with John Campbell, the pre-eminent science fiction editor of the day. Throughout 1940 and 1941 he sold Campbell virtually everything he wrote.

Campbell, a ponderous, emotionally awkward man with a background in engineering and gadgetry, found the mercurial, elfin young Sturgeon immensely charming. Isaac Asimov, another of Campbell’s discoveries of that era, wrote more than forty years later of how,
“little by little, John gathered a stable of writers and learned the trick of keeping us rubbing our noses against the grindstone. One thing he did, in my case, was to tell me what the other members of his stable were doing.

“The one he mentioned with the greatest affection was Theodore Sturgeon. I can see him grinning now as he would hint at the manifold pleasures of something upcoming by Ted.