{"id":45,"date":"2001-09-22T14:04:55","date_gmt":"2001-09-22T21:04:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/09\/22\/45.html"},"modified":"2001-09-22T14:04:55","modified_gmt":"2001-09-22T21:04:55","slug":"sturgeon-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/09\/22\/sturgeon-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Sturgeon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I've been reading the <cite>Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon<\/cite> series, edited by Paul Williams.  (We interrupt this entry for a commercial message, or maybe a public service announcement: If you like Sturgeon and have any interest at all in seeing how he developed over the years, you really must go buy the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/cgi-bin\/biblio?inkey=7-1117734897-0\">first four volumes<\/a> in the ten-volume series&#8212;as of this writing, Powell's still has two \"as-new\" (slightly used) sets of those first four for sale.  <i>$25<\/i> for the set of four books in trade paperback.  Each volume is $19 new, and worth buying at full price, so the set is a great deal.  What are you waiting for?  Besides the stories themselves, you get to read Williams's fascinating notes on them.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway.  I'm up to vol. 3, <cite>Killdozer!<\/cite>, covering stories written between 1941 and 1946 (when Sturgeon was 23 through 28 years old), and Sturgeon's beginning to really hit his stride.  \"Killdozer!\" is particularly impressive&#8212;a 30,000-word novella written over the course of nine days in the middle of a four-year period of writer's block.  It sold to <cite>Astounding<\/cite> for their highest rate, which came to $542.50 (somewhere around 2 cents a word). Despite the tedious and hard-to-visualize detailed descriptions of heavy construction equipment (lots of terminology I just don't understand), and despite my skepticism over the idea that a bulldozer could be scary, the story is remarkably gripping, and remarkably cinematic.  I kept thinking that a pretty good <cite>Jurassic Park<\/cite>-style movie could be made out of it.  Turns out others have thought so too over the years, but the closest anyone's come was an apparently dreadful TV movie-of-the-week.  Oh, well.<\/p>\n<p>...I'm drifting way off the topic this entry was meant to cover, so I'll continue in a separate entry.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been reading the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon series, edited by Paul Williams. (We interrupt this entry for a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[117],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sturgeon"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}