Howard Waldrop, Things Will Never Be The Same:
A Howard Waldrop Reader (Old Earth Books, 2007)
Howard Waldrop is a writer who is, perhaps, better known than purchased. Mention his name in science fiction circles and you'll get a chorus of "Oh, he's great" from every corner of the room. Ask said chorus how many Waldrop books they own, however, and the discussion gets a bit quieter. Waldrop himself makes a similar point in the introduction, which comes across as a bittersweet mash note to his loyal readers, laced with regret that there are, in his words "3000 or so" of them.
This book, then, is something of an attempt to rectify that situation. It's all the best Waldrop, or as near as makes no never mind, slammed between two covers and set out as a dare to the reading public: a greatest hits collection that includes all of the stories that passers-by are likely to have heard of. It's a feast of unrestrained, relentless fictional excellence, one great story after another.
The auctorial introductions are a different story. But we'll get to them in a minute.
What Waldrop does, relentlessly, is take something familiar and give it a hard, left-hand twist. Done wrong, this approach comes across like an issue of the old "What If?" comic book. Done right, and it resonates with an inevitability and emotional appropriateness that makes the reader wonder why they hadn't seen it that way all along. Waldrop, needless to say, does it right.
Consider "Night of the Cooters," a batter-dipped and deep-fried retelling of War of the worlds. Of course Texas good ol' boys are going to have a little better luck dealing with them pesky Martians than H.G. Wells' characters; by God, they're from Texas. And you read it, and you find yourself thinking that maybe this was the real action of the Martian invasion, and what went on in London and that pesky book were just sideshows. What could have been pastiche is instead engaging, entertaining, and in its own way, simply right.
Not your cup of tea? Then how about "Wild, Wild Horses," in which a physician and a fixer do their best to transport a lonely, aging centaur across the Mediterranean so he can die at home. Or "Heirs of the Perisphere," which takes Disney theme park madness to its animatronic extreme -- why wouldn't robot cartoon characters survive the Apocalypse -- and yet manages to resonate with a deep sense of genuine caring. Or the quiet terror of "Mr. Goober's Show," in which a childhood impossibility is remembered but never revealed, without detracting one whit from the dread the story generates.
And then there's "The Ugly Chickens." Officially, it's about dodos, the ugly chickens of the title. Unofficially, it's about obsession and having a dream fall into your lap and the inevitability of disappointment, all built on the slender reed of one small change in history. What if, just maybe, some dodos survived? If you can buy that notion -- and Waldrop makes it impossible not to -- then of course you can buy the narrator's journey in search of those ugly chickens, and you can buy the ending. After all, it only makes sense that the owner of those chickens -- but that would be giving too much away. Suffice to say that when you read it, you'll feel the ending as much as read it, and that holds true for pretty much every story in here. The one exception is the shaggy dog story "The Sawing Boys," which starts as pastiche and ends as shtick, but manages to be a pretty good ride in between. That being said, calling out the one story that's merely good as the weakest link in the collection tells you how very, very good the rest of it is.
What's not quite as good is the author's notes that follow each story. They're an uneven bunch, mostly dealing with the genesis of each piece, but since they're mostly award winners (or at least nominees), there's a certain sameness there. That combines with the explicit "I-didn't-make-any-money-at-this" vibe from the introduction to make the reader feel vaguely guilty every time there's a break in the fiction. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the only people reading those notes are the ones who've shelled out for the book, so at best, it's preaching to the converted.
It's a minor quibble, though, and if the first few bother you, it's easy enough to skip the rest. After all, it's the stories that should be -- and are -- unskippable.
