Howard Waldrop (1946–2024)

This is a collection of short stories and one novella by Howard Waldrop. Having read his alternative history novel Them Bones, it's obvious given the contents of this volume that alternative histories are a favourite theme of Waldrop's as some of the stories here are based around those too.

Others are whimsy based on a what-if idea such as what if time travellers arrived in a world based on the works of the great artists, or what if all the 1950s low budget films about alien invasions, featuring Martians, giant ants/crabs/gila monsters etc etc came true. They all invade at once and overwhelm the Earth, with the story told from the POV of an American army soldier who has decided to make a final stand. This variety of story was based on an interesting idea but left me with a so-what feeling ultimately. They were clever conceits, but had no real character identification.

The best story in the collection is probably the one about the old man hired to hunt a Wild Man. It's obvious early on that this is Ernest Hemingway and this is some allegory of his ultimate fate.

The stories are not badly written but I found quite a few of them baffling. I don't see the point of, for example, rewriting the Labours of Hercules from Greek mythology, but setting them in the southern states of America in the late 1920s with Hercules as a convict doing his final year as community service. And where I knew the subject, such as ancient Egypt, this only served to highlight the deficiencies: Waldrop tells us in his intro to He-We-Await (most of the stories have intros about their conception) that he spent six months researching Eyptian history, but unfortunately this didn't allow him to avoid a 'clanger' about the goddess Sekhmet which took me right out of the story. Two of the characters are named after Sekhmet and portrays her as a hippopotamus, but she was a lion goddess, (Tarowset was the hippopotamus deity). Quite a lot of historical research is on prominent display, such as a rather fanciful account of mumification - I've never read that the priest who cut into the body was chased by the others with rocks and I don't think the practice of mummification would have survived long - not the thousands of years it did - if it put someone's life at stake every time it was done! That sequence is straight infodump to display his research as he then tells us the Pharoah in question was not mummified and there are other sequences like that in the story which add absolutely nothing. The ending also comes over as a damp squib as well as being predicatable for most of the story.

I think these stories either appeal to a reader or not - they are "Marmite" fiction - and I'm obviously not the audience for them.… (more)

An interesting collection of Waldrop's collaborations, with a cover I would never have guessed was by Freas. It reminded me a bit of Pohl's The Wonder Effect collecting his short stories with Cyril Kornbluth. But where only Pohl was around to talk about the collaboration process, every story in Custer's Last Jump is preceded by a note from Waldrop on how the story came to be, and followed by a note from the co-author on their version of the events. The collection is also in part a celebration of a collective of Texas SF authors who arose at roughly the same time.

History is a recurring element. Custer's Last Jump involves Custer, dirigibles, airplanes, and the parachute jump of the title, told in a very dry matter of fact series of historical selections, with bibliography. A popular story but it was an idea dragged out much too long for my tastes. Most of the other stories are good, albeit mostly downbeat. One Horse Town retells the story of the Trojan Horse from three temporal viewpoints -- a soldier at the event, Homer, and Schliemann -- with some intersections in time. A Voice and Bitter Weeping is the seed for Waldrop and Saunder's novel The Texas-Israeli War:1999. My favorite is Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole, which tells what happened next to Frankenstein's monster in the Arctic, cleverly mixing together multiple real versions of inner Earths. The other stories are already fading in memory.

Recomended as a solid interesting collection.… (more)