Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader
Things Will Never Be the Same: A Howard Waldrop Reader: Selected Short Fiction 1980-2005.
In this Locus Award finalist, Howard Waldrop selects sixteen of his own short stories (with help from Michael Walsh and Jonathan Strahan). At some point Hollywood will discover the one and only culture mashup genius brain of Howard Waldrop. He’s their biggest fan and movies will be made... get in on the ground floor! From the extinct to the pinpoint of the zeitgeist, Waldrop mixes and matches pop culture until you’re never sure if it’s history or fiction you’re reading. Either way, the deeper you delve, the better it gets.
Waldrop’s unique introduction (“Welcome to the shattered remnants of what I laughingly refer to as my career.”) and afterwords (“You can imagine my horror and intellectual fear when a fantasy story came to me.”) give naked insights into his life as a writer: from living on $7,000 (on a good year) to killing magazines — including his “pride and joy? I killed Amazing. TWICE!!”
“The 16 stories in this retrospective volume from World Fantasy Award–winner Waldrop tend to be more sober and less zany than those in his previous collection, Heart of Whitenesse (2005). Highlights include “The Lions Are Asleep This Night,” a touching alternate history of a would-be playwright set in Africa; “French Scenes,” in which Francophiles make movies using computers; and “Household Words or the Powers That Be,” a tale Dickens fans are sure to love.” — Publishers Weekly
“Waldrop has chosen 16 of his best short stories and written a new afterword to each. The book opens with the multiple award-winner “The Ugly Chickens,” in which a chance remark on a bus leads a young researcher into backwoods Mississippi to discover the real fate of the dodo. It closes with a tale of alternate realities, “The King of Where-I-Go,” somehow combining the polio epidemic of the early 1950s, the famous ESP experiments at Duke, and a man’s love for H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine... The best Waldrops tend to mix the humorous and wistful. What if robotic versions of Mickey, Donald and Goofy, designed for an amusement park, were the last creatures on Earth? What if the Martians landed in Pachuco County, Tex., back in the late 19th century, and a kind of Slim Pickens character was the sheriff in charge of keeping the peace?” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World
Contents:
- Introduction (essay by Howard Waldrop)
- The Ugly Chickens
- Flying Saucer Rock and Roll
- Heirs of the Perisphere
- The Lions Are Asleep This Night
- Night of the Cooters
- Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?
- Wild, Wild Horses
- French Scenes
- Household Words; Or, the Powers-That-Be
- The Sawing Boys
- Heart of Whitenesse
- Mr. Goober's Show
- US
- The Dynasters
- Calling Your Name
- The King of Where-I-Go
Howard Waldrop
Howard Waldrop was born in Mississippi in 1946 and has lived most of his life in Texas except for about six years when he lived along the Stillaguamish River in Washington state. He made his first professional sale in 1970. He was nominated for two Nebulas in 1977 for his stories "Custer's Last Jump" (written with Steven Utley) and "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" and has won both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for "The Ugly Chickens" (1980).
Howard Waldrop's stories combine elements such as alternate history, American popular culture, the American South, old movies (and character actors), classical mythology, and rock 'n' roll music. His style is sometimes obscure or elliptical. The stories are often considered entertaining: Night of the Cooters is The War of the Worlds told from the perspective of a Texas sheriff (a homage to Slim Pickens); "Heirs of the Perisphere" involves robotic Disney characters waking up in the far future; "Fin de Cyclé" describes the Dreyfus affair from the perspective of bicycle enthusiasts.
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