Summary:
An outstanding issue of Astounding that not only has Theodore Sturgeon’s Killdozer and Clifford Simak’s Desertion but also has good stories from Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (When the Bough Breaks), and Malcolm Jameson (Alien Envoy). Unusually, the only non-fiction in this issue is the editorial and a science essay.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]
Other reviews:1
Alva Rogers, A Requiem for Astounding p. 129-134
_____________________
Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Catherine Tarrant
Fiction:
Killdozer! • novella by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗∗
Desertion • short story by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗∗
When the Bough Breaks • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett] ∗∗∗+
Alien Envoy • novelette by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗
Redevelopment • novelette by George O. Smith [as by Wesley Long] ∗
The Harmonizer • short story by A. E. van Vogt ∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by William Timmins
Interior artwork • by Paul Orban (x3), A. Williams (x23), Frank Kramer (x2)
CRT • editorial by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Time for a Universe • essay by R. S. Richardson
_____________________
The next issue of Astounding I intended to review was the July 1944 one but, seeing as it has been a while since the last one and, as that issue has the start of a 100,000 word 4-part serial by Raymond F. Jones (sigh), I thought I’d ease myself back into the swing of things with this. As it happens I’ve already reviewed three of the stories (the Sturgeon, Simak, and Kuttner/Moore), so it also made for a quick read.
Normally I’d put the stories I’ve already discussed at the end of this review but, for various reasons, I’ve decided not to do that this time (one is that the first 100 or so pages of this issue must be the most sustained level of quality seen in any magazine in any decade, and I want that to be obvious here).
The fiction leads off with Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon,2 which gets off to a (surprisingly, considering its ‘classic’ status) clunky, data-dump start which tells of an ancient war involving an alien lifeform of “tangible electrons” which ends up trapped on Earth. It would have been better if this had been chopped up into smaller sections and inserted into the narrative. That said, when the story gets going, it has an immersive opening section which portrays a small group of civilian contractors on a Pacific island during WWII, who are there to build a runway for the military. Tom Jaeger is the boss, and one of several clearly drawn individuals in a tale that is much better characterised than any other contemporaneous SF work I can think of. One of the men, Dennis, is the obvious troublemaker of the bunch, and a racist to boot. This latter characteristic comes to the fore in several passages which make the story one of the few of the time which has an obvious, if occasional, anti-racist slant. In the following extract Dennis comments about another man, Rivera, a Puerto Rican mechanic’s assistant:
“Why doesn’t that monkey stick to his grease guns?”
Tom turned and took the chewed end of a match stick out of his mouth. He said nothing, because he had for some time been trying to make a habit of saying nothing to Joe Dennis.
Dennis was an ex-accountant, drafted out of an office at the last gasp of a defunct project in the West Indies. He had become an operator because they needed operators badly. He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field; for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office. Tom, trying so hard to keep his mind on his work, had to admit to himself that of all Dennis’ annoying traits the worst was that he was good a pan operator as could be found anywhere, and no one could deny it.
Dennis certainly didn’t.
“I’ve seen the day when anyone catching one of those goonies so much as sitting on a machine during lunch, would kick his fanny,” Dennis groused. “Now they give ’em a man’s work and a man’s pay.”
“Doin’ a man’s work, ain’t he?” Tom said.
“He’s a Puerto Rican!”
Tom turned and looked at him levelly. “Where was it you said you come from,” he mused. “Oh yeah. Georgia.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Tom was already striding away. “Tell you as soon as I have to,” he flung back over his shoulder. p. 253-254
The action starts when Tom and Rivera go on a recce and come upon a mound where there is an odd looking stone. They move it and find what looks like a wall underneath. Tom guides Riviera in with the bulldozer and, when the wall gives way, the alien energy-being from the prologue escapes from the enclosure and possesses the machine. The bulldozer goes wild, and Riviera is thrown from it, his back broken. After Tom manages to fight the bulldozer to a stop with another machine he disables it by emptying the fuel tank. He then goes for help.
When Rivera is finally brought back to base the rescue party give Tom the shocking news that the bulldozer used the petrol starter motor (not its main engine) to move itself from its previous position to within twenty feet of Rivera before the former burnt out.
The next part of the story chronicles the mistrust that arises between the men, some of whom think that Tom attacked Rivera (who subsequently dies). Looming in the background is the bulldozer, which Chub the mechanic has started repairing. Even though Tom orders that no-one is to start the machine apart from him, Dennis does so once it is fixed. The final third of the story then tells of the alien-possessed machine’s killing spree, and the men’s attempt to destroy it.
This is a pretty good adventure story, but my four star rating is more for the character driven first two-thirds than the more straightforward (and perhaps overlong) action of the finale.
The fourth in the ‘City’ stories is Desertion, and it is set in a station on Jupiter, where they are transforming men into the native “loper” life form and sending them out onto the surface. The story opens with the chief of the station, Fowler, briefing Allen—the fifth candidate for conversion. Fowler does this against the backdrop of the converter operator’s, Miss Stanley, obvious disapproval (two earlier two-man teams have not returned).
The second half of the story sees Allen also fail to return, at which point Fowler decides to transform and go outside himself, along with his dog Towser. When this happens they find themselves in a wonderland where they can both talk to each other telepathically and, as they stand by an ammonia waterfall, they realise that they can both do much more:
“The music,” said Towser.
“Yes, what about it?”
“The music,” said Towser, “is vibrations. Vibrations of water falling.”
“But, Towser, you don’t know about vibrations.”
“Yes, I do,” contended Towser. “It just popped into my head.”
Fowler gulped mentally. “Just popped!”
And suddenly, within his own head, he held a formula—the formula for a process that would make metal to withstand the pressure of Jupiter.
He stared, astounded, at the waterfall and swiftly his mind took the many colors and placed them in their exact sequence in the spectrum. Just like that. Just out of blue sky. Out of nothing, for he knew nothing either of metals or of colors.
“Towser,” he cried. ‘Towser, something’s happening to us!”
“Yeah, I know,” said Towser.
“It’s our brains,” said Fowler. “We’re using them, all of them, down to the last hidden corner. Using them to figure out things we should have known all the time. Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe. Maybe we are fixed so we have to do things the hard way.”
And, in the new sharp clarity of thought that seemed to grip him, he knew that it would not only be the matter of colors in a waterfall or metals that would resist the pressure of Jupiter, he sensed other things, things not yet quite clear.
A vague whispering that hinted of greater things, of mysteries beyond the pale of human thought, beyond even the pale of human imagination. Mysteries, fact, logic built on reasoning. Things that any brain should know if it used all its reasoning power.
“We’re still mostly Earth,” he said. “We’re just beginning to learn a few of the things we are to know—a few of the things that were kept from us as human beings, perhaps because we were human beings. Because our human bodies were poor bodies. Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.”
He stared back at the dome, a tiny black thing dwarfed by the distance.
Back there were men who couldn’t see the beauty that was Jupiter. Men who thought that swirling clouds and lashing rain obscured the face of the planet. Unseeing human eyes. Poor eyes. Eyes that could not see the beauty in the clouds, that could not see through the storms. Bodies that could not feel the thrill of trilling music stemming from the rush of broken water.
Men who walked alone, in terrible loneliness, talking with their tongue like Boy Scouts wigwagging out their messages, unable to reach out and touch one another’s mind as he could reach out and touch Towser’s mind. Shut off forever from that personal, intimate contact with other living things.
After these epiphanies, both Fowler and Towser are reluctant to return to the dome and devolve back to man and dog. This sets up the memorable closing lines of the story:
“I can’t go back,” said Towser.
“Nor I,” said Fowler.
“They would turn me back into a dog,” said Towser.
“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.” p. 220
This truly classic story provided me with a massive sense-of-wonder hit when I was twelve or so, and it still holds up pretty well today (although the idea of a dog with fleas on a planetary station probably needs updating).
I note that this story, and the previous tale Census, both have an elegiac feel—at this stage in the series we are at a point where humanity and its civilization is dying. They are also, I would suggest, anti-Galactic Empire stories: rather than mankind spreading out through the universe and subjugating it to its will, it is quietly fading away.3
The magazine’s trifecta is completed with a story that isn’t quite as good as the first two, but which isn’t far behind. When the Bough Breaks by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore is one of the three stories that Kuttner and/or Moore published in Astounding in 1944, and it’s saying something that this good to very good piece is the weakest of the three, but only just.
The story opens with a young couple and their young child receiving a visit by four small men with big heads. They say they are from the future and have arrived to educate Alexander, who will grow up to become an immortal superman and leader in their time. After this explanation they paralyze the parents and start the process:
Dobish came over, clambered up, and pried Alexander out of his mother’s grip. Horror moved in her eyes.
“We won’t hurt him,” Dobish said. “We just want to give him his first lesson. Have you got the basics, Finn?”
“In the bag.” Finn extracted a foot-long bag from his garments. Things came out of that bag. They came out incredibly. Soon the carpet was littered with stuff—problematical in design, nature, and use. Calderon recognized a tesseract.
The fourth dwarf, whose name, it turned out, was Quat, smiled consolingly at the distressed parents. “You watch. You can’t learn; you’ve not got the potential. You’re homo saps. But Alexander, now—”
Alexander was in one of his moods. He was diabolically gay. With the devil-possession of all babies, he refused to collaborate. He crept rapidly backwards. He burst into loud, squalling sobs. He regarded his feet with amazed joy. He stuffed his fist into his mouth and cried bitterly at the result. He talked about invisible things in a soft, cryptic monotone. He punched Dobish in the eye.
The little men had inexhaustible patience. Two hours later they were through. Calderon couldn’t see that Alexander had learned much.
Bordent twirled the object again. He nodded affably, and led the retreat. The four little men went out of the apartment, and a moment later Calderon and Myra could move. p. 225
The rest of the story charts Alexander’s development under the tutelage of the four men. He learns to talk, develops telepathic powers, and learns to teleport. He also learns how to teleport others and, at one point, sends his mother to the store for candy. Then he starts giving his parents electric shocks, and starts behaving more malevolently. At this point, Alexander’s father, Calderon, discusses disciplining Alexander with Bordent, the leader of the four, but the latter refuses.
The final section of the story (spoiler) has Alexander playing with a forbidden blue egg. At this point the traumatised and frightened parents vacillate about intervening, even though they fear that this may prove lethal for him. Alexander finally completes the egg, and vanishes in a flash of white light.
This latter part is well executed. Not only is the parents’ fear and ambivalent attitude to their son convincingly developed (one wonders to what extent this taps into all parents’ potential or sometime ambivalence about their spawn) but the manner of Alexander’s demise has a subtlety that would be missing in a more explicit attempt on his life by the parents (which is what I expected).
The story has an early 1940’s, Twonky-ish, execution for the most part (e.g. the inclusion of strange little men with big heads) although the subject matter is more Mimsy Were the Borogoves (educational devices transform children into super-beings). However, the ending is darker and more emotionally complicated than in that latter piece, and it has a satisfying, albeit troubling, ending. I almost gave it four stars.
There are three other stories in this issue, and the first of these, Alien Envoy by Malcolm Jameson, would have been one of the stronger pieces in a normal edition of the magazine. It opens with Ellwood, chief of the Bureau of Interplanetary Military Intelligence, receiving a call saying that the military has disabled and captured one of the hitherto impenetrable alien cruisers that have been landing on Jupiter and the outer planets for many years.
After some back story about the military’s lack of success in interdicting the Ursans, Elwood arrives in orbit to examine the ship and finds a surviving alien on board. He decides to suit up and go inside the chamber himself (the temperature and pressure are similar to Jupiter).
Later, he begins to teach this odd looking octopus-like creature English, a process that takes a number of weeks as he has to use audio, video, and Morse code (the aliens may communicate with radio waves). Eventually, the alien learns enough of the language to communicate with Elwood and, at this point, suggests that its way will be less painful, and quicker:
Ellwood turned off his set meekly.
It had not occurred to him before that mechanically generated radiation might have subtle differences in characteristics from the organically generated variety. He found himself praying that now that it was his turn and he was on the receiving end the converse effect would not be equally painful.
It proved not to be, though there were times when Ellwood felt he would go mad from the exquisite ecstasies that sometimes rose to intensities amounting almost to agony. For the Ursan discarded all dots and dashes and went straight to the source of thought. By means of its own uncanny mechanism it managed to tune in on the neural currents of the brain itself.
It was a dreamlike experience, verging occasionally on the nightmarish. Ellwood had a hard time later conveying some stretches of it to the Grand Council. Indeed, he had a hard time even remembering part of what he experienced, so utterly alien to human conception were many of the bizarre scenes he saw and activities witnessed.
First he had the giddy feeling one has when succumbing to a general anesthetic. It was as if his soul was being torn from his body and forced to float in space. There was never a time when he could be sure that he saw what he saw, or heard what he heard, or felt what he felt. Sensed? Divined? Perceived intuitively? Some such verb seemed more appropriate. But shortly Ellwood quit caring. He was in another world, a world so weird, so fantastic, so amazing in its extremes and distortions of ordinarily accepted laws of nature that he knew that up to then human science had no more than scratched the surface of general knowledge.
Throughout the education process we learn more about the human race’s lack of military success against the Ursans, and that the latter have only ever fired on the humans when they were fired upon themselves. Moreover, the aliens have shown no interest in the inner planets of the solar system, only the gas giants.
The Ursan offers Ellwood a peace deal: in exchange for access to the outer planets of the solar system the aliens will do the same for humans on suitable planets in other parts of the galaxy. The Ursan adds that, if the humans do not accept the offer, they will continue with their operations, and will ignore them unless attacked.
The story itself is fairly straightforward but there are a number of ideas that make it quite an original piece: first, there is the idea of a war starting between humans and aliens due to an inability to communicate; secondly, the Ursans are technologically superior to humans to the extent that they don’t really care about us; finally, and despite the latter, the aliens are capable of being altruistic and/or pragmatic, and even friendly—in the last scene the Ursan uses its pseudopod to shake hands with Ellwood. All of this makes it an atypical story for Astounding. Yes, another one.
Redevelopment by George O. Smith is the third of his ‘Plutonian Lens’ stories, and this one starts off with the “headstrong” Sandra Drake arriving at the Lens in a more collegiate mood, and looking for help from John McBride, the station director. Steve has gone missing in the Haywire Queen and she wants her drive modified to an FTL one so she can look for him. Cue this kind of thing:
McBride wasted no time. “Al,” he said, “you fit the mag-G for vertical bi-lobar field to cover the nose of the crate with the top lobe, and Westy, you see that the mech-G generator in the nose induces the proper vectors in the cupralum bar. I’ll get Hank and Jim to touch up the wiring and safety devices. We’ll have this crate back in space within the hour!”
“Working a little fast, aren’t you?” asked Sandra.
“No. I don’t think so. You’ve got most of the main stuff in place. It’s merely a matter of running the alphatron lines correctly—remember, Sandra, alphons are not electrons and even low-alphon lines require smooth, round bends, otherwise they squirt off in a crackling alphonic discharge that will eat the side out of a steel tank. You’ve done most of the heavy work. It just requires touching up here and there; getting the proper field-intensity out of the gravitic generators and adjusting the output of the alphatrons. Then there is some tricky relay work with the safety circuits; it wouldn’t improve your beauty to suddenly find yourself sitting in the pilot’s chair at seven thousand gravities. pp. 138-139
Once her ship is modified Drake sets off for Sirius, supposedly look for Steve. Of course he later turns up on the station, and it becomes obvious that Drake has pulled a fast one, wanting her ship modified so she can be the first person to discover an extra-solarian planet.
McBride and Steve follow Drake to Sirius in the Haywire Queen, and eventually find her stranded on a planet inhabited by feathered humanoids. After some back and forth over the radio about her situation they approach the planet to land but find that the ship’s drive stops working. The rest of the story has them work through the problem with a lot of makey-up science involving a nearby moon:
Larry Timkins looked up from a page of scrawled equations. “A slab of cupralum a hundred miles in diameter, rotating in the mechanogravitic field thrown out by Sirius would certainly soak up every bit of power. Must be a slick tie-in. The gravitron puts our O.K. on a resistive load. Hooked to the drive, everything goes phhht.”
“Sure. That’s part of the trouble. It’s the drive, coupled with the general gravitic interference cut up by Soaky.”
“Soaky?”
“I have hung a name on the satellite. Heretofore it has been nameless. We have named it Soaky.” p. 158
Meanwhile we see Drake behaving like a brat with the alien Telfuians, but she gets her comeuppance when they go to meet the landing Haywire Queen without her (they understand the science behind the drive even though they haven’t been able to get off the planet). The ship takes the two ambassadors on board but they have to leave Drake on the planet for six months because of more dodgy science, giving her a chance to cool her high heels.
This story has all the faults of the first two in the series and is even more padded (there is endless chit chat: “science” problems, domestic arrangements, banter, and patronising conversations with and about Drake).
There is another of this series due in an upcoming issue, sigh.
The last story in the issue is a fairly short piece by A. E. van Vogt, The Harmonizer, which starts off with a soldier noticing an unusual plant in his garden before he returns to the front. The story then flashes back to prehistoric times when an alien spaceship crashes on Earth—but not before spilling its cargo of ibis trees. One later reproduces, and we see the pacification effect that the seeds have on carnivorous dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex, which later become extinct.
This is moderately interesting but the twist ending, which (spoiler) involves the soldier (now revealed as a German) coming home to his house to fall under the plant’s thrall, is just a war-time gimmick. I’m also not sure it makes any sense unless the soldier (and the rest of the Reich) eat the seeds.
The Cover by William Timmins is a rather dark and uninspiring affair, and not one of his best. The bulldozer, however, with the impression of a mouth in its underside, looks suitably monsterish.
The Interior artwork comes mostly from A. Williams, who has a staggering twenty three illustrations in the issue. Most of these are spot illustrations, and fairly average stuff. That said, the last one for the Kuttner/Moore story, the empty booties, is quite good. Or at least suggestive.
Paul Orban and Frank Kramer provide the rest of the internal artwork (and given the length of Killdozer I would have expected more than three illustrations).
There is a very limited amount of non-fiction in this issue. CRT by John W. Campbell, Jr. is another of his dull editorials where he drones on about bits of radios or electronics. In this case he discusses the larger cathode ray screens that are becoming available, and how radio-hams can use them.
Time for a Universe by R. S. Richardson looks at how the age of the universe has been calculated by various means (expansion of the universe, uranium clock, dynamics of clusters, and statistics of binaries) and the differences in the results.
There is also a good anecdote about the necessity of being cautious about data:
There is a story told about Robert lvirchoff, the physicist, and Wilhelm von Bunsen, inventor of the Bunsen burner, that is worth repeating. The two were strolling across the campus of the University of Heidelberg one sunny afternoon deep in conversation upon some abstruse subject. As they passed a silver-coated globe set on the lawn as an ornament Bunsen absent-mindedly ran his fingers over the reflecting surface. To his amazement the side exposed directly to the sun was cooler than the side in shadow.
Immediately the two stopped and began excitedly to investigate this anomalous heating effect. Here perhaps was a new phenomenon in heat conduction involving some mysterious interaction between solar radiation and the reflecting properties of silver. While they were busy devising a theory to account for it the school janitor came by and reversed the position of the globe.
“I have to keep turning it around every once in a while on these hot days,” he remarked.
The story is pretty good except that it seems doubtful whether a reflecting surface as good as silver would heat up so seriously. p. 107
There is no Analytical Laboratory this time around.4
A very good issue, maybe even one of the best ever. ●
_____________________
1. Alva Rogers had this to say about this issue (A Requiem For Astounding, 1964):
November was distinguished by two outstanding novelettes. The first of these, “When the Bough Breaks,” by Lewis Padgett, could be considered a companion piece to the same author’s earlier “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.” Alexander is a normal eighteen-month-old son of a normal couple until four gnome-like characters present themselves and announce that they are from five hundred years in the future where it seems this same Alexander is still alive, the first of a new race of homo superior. The gnome-like characters are here at the future Alexander’s instructions to give the infant Alexander advanced training so he can get a head start on the future, and the results of this training are tragic and catastrophic.
The second novelette was the classic “Killdozer!” by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s last story in Astounding had been “Medusa,” a less than memorable short in the February, 1942 issue. “Killdozer!” was up to the par of his classic 1941 novelette, “Microcosmic God,” and is, perhaps, his greatest story of his early period of science fiction writing. (“It,” from Unknown, was the greatest thing he ever wrote, including More Than Human, Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953, but this little gem was an out-and-out horror story and it isn’t fair to compare his science fiction writings with it.)
In its own way, “Killdozer! , the story of a giant bulldozer on a Pacific atoll during World War II that is brought to terrifying life by a malevolent alien intelligence—raising merry hell in the process—is as much a horror story as “It.” The picture of an utilitarian piece of machinery such as a bulldozer, without human guidance operating with deadly purpose, was very unsettling, to say the least.
Although Rogers mentions the ‘City’ series, he does not mention Desertion—even though he refers to the other three stories.
2. Paul Williams provides extensive story notes for Killdozer! at the back of Killdozer!, Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon (North Atlantic Books, 1996). Here are some brief extracts:
In terms of money and acclaim, it was arguably the most successful story of the first decade of his career. And in Sturgeon’s own telling of his life story, it punctuates his longest bout of “writer’s block,” usually described by him (in interviews, and in the foreword to his 1971 collection Sturgeon Is Alive and Well . . .) as lasting for six years, 1940 to 1946, with “Killdozer!” a solitary interruption in the middle, 1943.
Close examination of documentary evidence, primarily copies of letters to and from Sturgeon during and after this period, allows a more accurate dating. He did continue to write as long as he was still in New York, which he left (in order to manage his uncle’s hotel at Treasure Beach on the island of Jamaica) on June 28, 1941. Although he and his wife expected that the hotel job and change of scene would make it easier for him to go on writing fiction, he did not do any writing until April of 1944, on St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, when he wrote a (probably mainstream, i.e. not aimed at the science fiction or fantasy market) short story propagandizing in favor of the much misunderstood Nisei, or American-born Japs. (Italicized phrases are quotes from Sturgeon, in this case from a letter writen to his mother on May 8, 1944.) This story immediately went to a new agent, Nannine Joseph, who was unable to sell it; the manuscript does not survive among Sturgeon’s papers.
The first week of May, 1944, while still completing “the Nisei story,” [a mainstream story written in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands] TS began “Killdozer!”, which he wrote in nine days and immediately sent to [John Campbell]. From a letter to his mother, Christine Hamilton Sturgeon, July 8, 1944: “When we were right at the end of the rope, in comes a check and a letter from Jack Campbell. The check was a godsend, but the letter is something that I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. I must have sold him thirty-five or forty stories and never have I had such a missive from him. ‘I don’t know how I can place it or when I’ll be able to use it, but there, my friend, you have a hunk of story. I’m giving you our highest rate, which brings the check to $542.50. I’m glad you’re back in the field, and if you have any more with anything like this level of tenseness, send ’em along. I want ’em.’ ”
[ . . . ]
How Ted became a ’dozer driver (abbreviated from a conversation between TS and Paul Williams, December 6, 1975): “So while we were in Jamaica, along came December the 7th, and Pearl Harbor, and here we were at the hotel, ninety miles away from Kingston, with gasoline supplies cut off and no chance of getting any guests out there at all. The Americans started building a very large base at Fort Simonds, and we went down there and applied for jobs. I ended up on the Jamaican payroll, handling mess halls and barracks, and a food warehouse. And finally a man came along, clearing up ground around the housing area, and driving a bulldozer. And I fell in love with that machine. So he let me get up on it, and I learned an awful lot. Then I was transferred from quarters and barracks to a gasoline station. We serviced all kinds of equipment, and I got to know some of the American operators, and finally I got hired as a bulldozer operator. I was making more money than I’d ever seen in my life. Then when the base began to fold up, a guy came around recruiting for another job, in Puerto Rico at a place called Ensenada Honda, where they were building an enormous shipfitting plant, and a dry dock, and a landing field. And ultimately we moved over to St. Croix and I settled down to write.” Sturgeon worked in Puerto Rico as a bulldozer operator from August ’42 to December ’43, after which he worked for the Navy for a few months as a supply clerk and cost analyst. In April he and Dorothe and their two daughters moved to St. Croix.
[. . .]
In a letter to his father, Edward Waldo, Feb. 27, 1946, he further reported: “[. . .]the editor thought so well of it that he cancelled his production schedule and had it in print within weeks, as the lead novel in his magazine, with a cover illustration. (The original oil painting for that cover now hangs in my living room.) The magazine hit the stands just as I arrived back in the States, and apparently caused quite a stir in the science-fiction crowd.
[. . .]
Crown Publishing Co. released a new anthology of science-fiction last week. [The Best of Science Fiction.] A month ago, an advance copy was read by a science editor out in California who, on seeing KILLDOZER leading its section in the book, wrote me and asked me if I would take on this series of juveniles.” [. . .] And Crown has just sent me a check for $155 for the reprint rights! In other words, what seemed like a mere temporary alleviation of my circumstances down in St. Croix and nothing more, has proved to be the focal point of a whole series of fine breaks.”
The notes also include information about the 1974 TV movie made from the story, and details about a revised version of the story* used in a later Sturgeon collection Aliens 4:
Sept. 23, 1958, Sturgeon wrote his agent: I would like to correct galleys on the collection called KILLDOZER. One reason . . . has to do with the title story, which has been talked about for films ever since it was written. It is a World War II story and needn’t be; a very little invisible mending will take care of that. It also needs a touch here and there in characterization and dialogue—for example, Street & Smith’s editing “damn” into “care” every time they saw it, so that your bulldozer operators keep saying “I don’t give a care . . .” and one or two other small repairs.
So Sturgeon did rewrite the last eight paragraphs.
* The updated version of Killdozer! is unhelpfully listed as a separate story by ISFDB: Killdozer! (revised).
3. As well as Desertion being an anti-Galactic Empire story, it is another which does not fit into the supposed human primacy/exceptionalism rule said to exist in Campbell’s Astounding.
4. The Analytical Laboratory results for this issue appeared in the February 1945 issue:
I get the impression Campbell wrote this one before lunch. ●
