The story was significantly improved by being shortened. The published version is between 7,500 and 8,000 words (evidently 6,000 was not possible).
The narrator says of Séleen, “She looked like a Cartier illustration.” Edd Cartier was one of the finest fantasy artists of the era, and did many of the interior illustrations for Unknown (which changed its name to Unknown Worlds in late ’41); ultimately he did illustrate this story.
Patty in the story has the same name as Dorothe and Ted’s first child, who was no more than six months old when “The Hag Séleen” was written.
Magazine blurb (contents page): THE DARK, DANK MAGIC OF THE BAYOUS WAS BEYOND THE UNDERSTANDING OF MODERN ADULTS. IT TOOK A CHILD WITH A GIFT FOR RHYMING TO HANDLE THE HAG SÉLEEN.
“Killdozer!”: First published in Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1944. Written early May, 1944. Later adapted for an ABC-TV “Suspense Movie,” directed by Jerry London and starring Clint Walker, first aired on February 2, 1974.
The purpose of these story notes is to make readily available to readers useful information about each story’s writing and publication, including biographical and other influences that may be reflected in its content, comments the author has made about a story, at the time of writing or since, and the context of the story’s writing within the events of the author’s life and career. With this in mind, there is much that must be said about “Killdozer!” It draws heavily, of course, from Sturgeon’s experience as a bulldozer operator in the tropics in 1942 and 1943. 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,” TS began “Killdozer!”, which he wrote in nine days and immediately sent to the science fiction editor who had published him regularly between 1939 and 1943. 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.”
In May or June Sturgeon wrote and sent his agent another story, “Operator—Please!”, a slick-style woman’s angle number about a USO singer in the South Pacific who was walking on a cleared track by herself deep in the jungle and came on the bulldozer that was doing the work; argued [with] the operator because he wouldn’t let her ride; jumped on the machine when his back was turned; dropped the blade on him by accident, pinning his legs. This story also didn’t sell and has been lost. Sturgeon’s frustration with his agent was the primary reason for his trip back to New York in October 1944; he subsequently found himself unable to sell or to write satisfactorily. He didn’t return to his family on St. Croix, or send them money, and in June 1945 Dorothe divorced him.
Although TS did write a few more stories in 1944 and early ’45, the breakthrough as he remembered it came with the next story he sold, “The Chromium Helmet,” completed at the end of 1945. So what he thought of as his “writer’s block” lasted from July ’41 to December ’45, punctuated by only one story that sold close to the time when it was written: “Killdozer!” in 1944.
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.
The manuscript title of “Killdozer!” was “Daisy Etta.” In August 1945, recalling the experience of writing this story as Worked like hell for nine days, wrote something after two and a half years of being dried up, Sturgeon described it to his mother as Complete justification for everything. In a letter to his father, Edward Waldo, Feb. 27, 1946, he further reported: The thing wrote itself! It was called KILLDOZER and after it I could write nothing else. It sold on sight for $542.50, and 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. Through this I met many people who have become valuable friends—including [his roommate] Stanton. 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. [A “novel series” called Bob Haley of the Atomic Police, that employed Sturgeon as a “for hire” writer in spring 1946.] 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. And in two more letters to his mother: March 25, 1946: The original oil painting from the cover … is my proudest possession. Through that yarn I got in really solid with John Campbell, editor of Astounding and now an increasingly important man. April 25, 1946: By the way, got a call from a screen agent who has high hopes for KILLDOZER in Hollywood. Good ol’ KILLDOZER!
So the story also brought Sturgeon the first
of what was to be a lifelong series of tantalizing (and, usually, disappointing) flirtations with the money and glory of Hollywood, in regard to his stories and novels and original scripts. In July 1970 (after Sturgeon had already seen two of his scripts become well-known Star Trek episodes) he wrote to Tom Snell at Columbia Studios, apparently a producer who’d expressed interest to a director who told Sturgeon he wanted to film this story: I have been called a “visual” writer; KILLDOZER is far and away the most cinematographic piece of prose I have ever done. It has been optioned before, over the years. The last time was CBS’ Cinema 100. Just before first-draft screenplay it became a victim of Sen. Pastore’s famous speech on violence in TV. The people out here were all for going ahead, but back east CBS got cold feet and killed every one of their works-in-progress that might possibly be called violent. I honestly do not think that the kind of violence which occurs in KILLDOZER is the sort of thing the good Senator had in mind. KILLDOZER is a fable about man vs the machine, and it ends in a fine climax of victory for man. But you can’t argue with cold feet—not in television-land, anyway.
Later in this letter Sturgeon said, We’ve even got a class-A heavy equipment operator who knows construction machinery as well as he does a script—especially this script. Namely, me. And then he provided a compact treatment: KILLDOZER is the story of eight men alone on an island with a million dollars’ worth of heavy earth-moving equipment and the assignment of carving an airstrip in ten days’ time. One of the machines—an 18–ton Caterpillar D-7—gets a life of its own, vast intelligence, and the obsessive desire to kill men. It gets five of them; the survivors “kill” it.
The 1974 TV movie that did get made was commemorated in the April 1974 issue of a Marvel Comics comic book called Worlds Unknown presents the Thing Called KILLDOZER. (“based on the spine-tingling shocker by Theodore Sturgeon, author of ‘It!’ ”) The story and film have since given their name to at least one rock and roll group.
In 1972 actor Anthony Quinn called TS to ask if screen rights to “Killdozer!” were available—but he had just sold it to Universal Television. On 4/4/78 Sturgeon wrote to Quinn, saying, They finally rejected my first draft [screenplay] and produced one of the worst “Movies of the Week” I have ever seen.
Editor’s blurb from the original magazine publication: STURGEON’S BEEN MISSING FOR A LONG TIME NOW; HE’S BEEN DOING HEAVY CONSTRUCTION WORK. THIS YARN HE GOT OUT OF THAT EXPERIENCE; IT WILL, CERTAINLY, BE LONG REMEMBERED.
In 1959 “Killdozer!” was first included in a book of Sturgeon stories, a paperback, Aliens 4. At first the publisher was going to call the book Killdozer but they changed their mind, and Sturgeon expressed his chagrin to his agent at the time, Sterling Lord, in a letter dated 2/25/59: Not too bad a title, but it irritates me on two counts. They say the title must categorize the book; now, that’s just stupid. There are more impulse-buyers who can’t stand s-f than those who look for it. They say KILLDOZER sounds like a detective novel. Well, dandy. What’s wrong with that? In addition, the only similarity between my stuff and what is usually called s-f is that my stuff has appeared mostly in s-f magazines—not a subtle distinction at all when you think about it. If it’s the real s-f cognoscenti they’re after, the much-lauded KILLDOZER will pull ’em in better than any new title. (Sturgeon had tried unsuccessfully in 1947 to get Simon & Schuster to publish “Killdozer!” as “a separate novel.”)
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. In cases like this, this series chooses to assume that the last revision the author chose to make for publication is the proper text for his Collected Stories. So our text has been set from the book that reflects Sturgeon’s 1959 corrections and revisions. For the readers’ interest, we do include in these notes the text of the original ending, as published in Astounding in 1944 and The Best of Science Fiction in 1946.
Text of the original ending of “Killdozer!”:
This is the story of Daisy Etta, the bulldozer that went mad and had a life of its own, and not the story of the flat-top Marokuru of the Imperial Japanese Navy, which has been told elsewhere. But there is a connection. You will remember how the Marokuru was cut off from its base by the concentrated attack on Truk, how it slipped far to the south and east and was sunk nearer to our shores than any other Jap warship in the whole course of the war. And you will remember how a squadron of five planes, having been separated by three vertical miles of water from their flight deck, turned east with their bomb-loads and droned away for a suicide mission. You read that they bombed a minor airfield in the outside of Panama’s far-flung defenses, and all hands crashed in the best sacrificial fashion.
Well, that was no airfield, no matter what it might have looked like from the air. It was simply a roughly graded runway, white marl against brown scrub-grass.
The planes came two days after the death of Daisy Etta, as Tom and Kelly sat in the shadow of the pile of fuel drums, down in the coolth of the swag that Daisy had dug there to fuel herself. They were poring over paper and pencil, trying to complete the impossible task of making a written statement of what had happened on the island, and why they and their company had failed to complete their contract. They had found Chub and Harris, and had buried them next to the other three. Al Knowles was tied up in the camp, because they had heard him raving in his sleep, and it seemed he could not believe that Daisy was dead and he still wanted to go around killing operators for her. They knew that there must be an investigation, and they knew just how far their story would go; and having escaped a monster like Daisy Etta, life was far too sweet for them to want to be shot for sabotage. And murder.
The first stick of bombs struck three hundred yards behind them at the edge of the camp, and at the same instant a plane whistled low over their heads, and that was the first they knew about it. They ran to Al Knowles and untied his feet and the three of them headed for the bush. They found refuge, strangely enough, inside the mound where Daisy Etta had first met her possessor.
“Bless their black little hearts,” said Kelly as he and Tom stood on the bluff and looked at the flaming wreckage of a camp and five medium bombers below them. And he took the statement they had been sweating out and tore it across.
“But what about him?” said Tom, pointing at Al Knowles, who was sitting on the ground, playing with his fingers. “He’ll still spill the whole thing, no matter if we do try to blame it all on the bombing.”
“What’s the matter with that?” said Kelly.
Tom thought a minute, then grinned. “Why, nothing! That’s just the sort of thing they’ll expect from him!”
“Abreaction”: first published in Weird Tales, July 1948. Written between July and October 1944. In a letter to TS dated Dec. 19, 1944, his friend Art Kohn said, “What cooks on the literary front? By now maybe comes words of acceptance from Colliers of one or two stories—but howzabout the ones you had already prepared—to wit ‘Poor Yorick,’ ‘Crossfire,’ ‘Abreaction’ et all. Surely must be a market for ’em somewheres. Also and to wit the Campbell inspired yarn anent polarized fields of rotators or some such.” In context, this seems to refer to stories Sturgeon told Kohn he had written (or showed him) before he left St. Croix.
Sturgeon was a gymnast in high school and may well have fallen off the parallel bars.
Magazine blurb: HE WANTED TO GO BACK TO A PLACE HE’D SURELY NEVER VISITED!
“Poor Yorick”: unpublished. A handwritten note on the manuscript says “submitted—NJ
[agent’s initials] 8–2–44.” Manuscript is untitled, probably a rough draft, but surely is the “Poor Yorick” referred to in Kohn’s 12/44 letter. Some pages of “synopses,” ideas for stories he might try to write, survive from this era (dated by a reference to “NJ” in one of the notes). One of the 32 entries reads as follows:
Wicked little short short—and I dare you sell it. Girl gets present from boy-friend in the South Pacific of Japanese skull. Is a little queasy but proud. Some character—friend of the family, Lionel Barrymore type, gives deep pronouncements on the basic fellowship of man and so forth, and rather deplores the gift. Family dentist drops around, takes one look at it, and then what you will. It’s the manhandled skull of her own brother, picked up already sunbleached and to an expert not recognizable as caucasian.
“Crossfire”: unpublished. Another single-spaced rough draft, probably written in summer ’44. No title on ms., but quite possibly the “Crossfire” Kohn refers to.
“Noon Gun”: first published in Playboy, September 1963. The existence of a manuscript with Sturgeon’s St. Croix address on the top sheet alongside the name of the agent he got in late ’44 to replace Nannine Joseph, dates it as having been written in the second half of 1944 or the early months of 1945. Never included in a Sturgeon book until now, this was scheduled for a collection called Slow Sculpture that was cancelled by the publisher sometime after TS wrote an introduction and rubrics for it in 1980. The “Noon Gun” rubric:
I’ve been very fortunate; what I write, I sell. There have been just two stories I couldn’t even give away for years: “Bianca’s Hands,” which ultimately won a prestigious literary award in England and the first check I had ever seen for over a thousand dollars, and this one, written in 1946 and sold in 1962 to Playboy for $100 per typed page. It’s a highly autobiographical tale.
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