Killdozer!

I recently finished reading The Mammoth book of Golden Age Science Fiction: Short Novels of the 1940s,(1989) edited by Isaac Asimov. I loved every story in this anthology with the exception, strangely, of the Asimov story, which was the one I was most interested in reading. It was taken from his Foundation series, and I felt like I might have liked it better if I was more familiar with the other stories about the Foundation. A little too much intergalactic politics.

The complete table of contents includes:
Time Wants a Skeleton, by Ross Rocklynne
The Weapons Shop [Isher], by A. E. van Vogt
Nerves, by Lester del Rey
Daymare, by Fredric Brown
Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon
No Woman Born, by C. L. Moore
The Big and the Little [Foundation], by Isaac Asimov
Giant Killer, by A. Bertram Chandler
E for Effort, by T. L. Sherred
With Folded Hands... [Humanoids], by Jack Williamson

A surprisingly (or maybe not so surprising) awesome story is Theodore Sturgeon's "Killdozer!" about a bulldozer that becomes possessed with some kind of ancient kill spirit with a vaguely science-oriented twist. It is obvious that Sturgeon worked in construction in his past with the lovely descriptions of operating and repairing heavy machinery, and yet none of this drags the story down or makes it any less exciting than you would want the story of a killer bulldozer to be.

Other stories include space travel, the mix-ups possible with time travel, robots, mutant rodents, robots, futuristic political systems, and more robots.

There is something about the pulp stories from the forties that really appeals to me, be they detective stories, romances, westerns or science fiction. Its like these guys are really real writers with typewriters and cigarettes and a whole industry of cheap magazines to publish their work. And science fiction in the 1940s has this great atomic power / distrust mixed with total excitement about the power of science and space travel and such. So good.