2010 Reading #24: Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon
Books 1-10.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith.
22. A Black Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson.
23. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley.
24. Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, by Theodore Sturgeon. I invoke Sturgeon with a fair amount of regularity as one of my three favorite Golden Age SF writers (the other two are Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester), but I have to confess that there's a lot of Sturgeon I haven't read; my high opinion of him is based mainly on having been blown away by his novel More Than Human. All praise to North Atlantic Books for collecting his many short stories; I've been slowly working through them over the past few years. The highlight of this volume is certainly the title story, in which a fairly slim SFnal premise kicks off a very satisfying horror/survival narrative. At times Sturgeon's hands-on description of heavy machinery operation threw me out, and the epilogue doesn't make a great deal of sense, but this is a really fun story, with some really well-observed commentary on the dynamics of a group of working men. Robert Silverberg's introduction reads almost like an apology for the fact that these are not Sturgeon's best stories, and I guess that's fair to say; but some of them are good, and at least one--the non-genre "Noon Gun"--is great. As a group they provide insight into the writer in transition, from the fairly straightforward thought-experiments of his early work into the increasingly humanist psychological work that became his stock-in-trade.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith.
22. A Black Explorer at the North Pole by Matthew Henson.
23. Cinnamon Kiss by Walter Mosley.
24. Killdozer!: Volume III: The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, by Theodore Sturgeon. I invoke Sturgeon with a fair amount of regularity as one of my three favorite Golden Age SF writers (the other two are Cordwainer Smith and Alfred Bester), but I have to confess that there's a lot of Sturgeon I haven't read; my high opinion of him is based mainly on having been blown away by his novel More Than Human. All praise to North Atlantic Books for collecting his many short stories; I've been slowly working through them over the past few years. The highlight of this volume is certainly the title story, in which a fairly slim SFnal premise kicks off a very satisfying horror/survival narrative. At times Sturgeon's hands-on description of heavy machinery operation threw me out, and the epilogue doesn't make a great deal of sense, but this is a really fun story, with some really well-observed commentary on the dynamics of a group of working men. Robert Silverberg's introduction reads almost like an apology for the fact that these are not Sturgeon's best stories, and I guess that's fair to say; but some of them are good, and at least one--the non-genre "Noon Gun"--is great. As a group they provide insight into the writer in transition, from the fairly straightforward thought-experiments of his early work into the increasingly humanist psychological work that became his stock-in-trade.