Waldrop, Howard (1946– )

Howard Waldrop began his career in 1972 and has
been a steady though nonprolific writer ever since,
producing short stories with some regularity and
two novels separated by a considerable interval.
Most of Waldrop’s fiction employs one or both of
two devices—alternate history and the juxtaposition of two apparently anomalous situations—and
most of his work is extremely funny, although
sometimes the humor is bittersweet. His first
novel,
The Texas-Israeli War (1974), a collaboration
with Jake Saunders, is set following a limited nuclear war. Texas has seceded, and Israeli mercenaries are imported by what remains of the U.S.

government to put down the rebellion. Them Bones
(1984) mixes time travel with several different
alternate histories in a complicated mix that
might have devolved into nonsense but in fact is
remarkably coherent and effective. Much of it is
set in the South, a common locale for Waldrop’s
work; however, in the root timeline, Christianity
never existed and Louisiana is inhabited by Arabs
and Aztecs.
Waldrop is clearly more in his element with
short fiction, however, and has produced many
memorable stories, including “The Ugly Chickens”
(1980), a Nebula Award–winner that explains how
the dodo became extinct; “Night of the Cooters”
(1987), a very funny spoof of
The WAR OF THE
WORLDS (1898) by H. G. WELLS; and “A Dozen
Tough Jobs” (1989), which superimposes the legend of Hercules over early-20th-century America.
Senator Elvis Presley is entertained by singer
Dwight Eisenhower in “Ike at the Mike” (1982),
and “Fin de Cycle” (1991) considers the Dreyfuss
Affair from several unusual points of view.
“C
USTERS LAST JUMP” (1976), a collaboration
with Steven Utley, describes what the Civil War
might have been like if primitive airplanes had existed. Waldrop frequently collaborates, and all of
the stories in
Custer’s Last Jump and Other Collaborations (2003) were written in this fashion.
Most of Waldrop’s short stories have been variously collected in
Howard Who? (1986), Night of
the Cooters
(1990), Strange Monsters of the Recent
Past
(1991), Going Home Again (1997), and A Better World’s in Birth (2003). Beneath the humor and
bizarre imagery lurk more serious concerns about
how we treat one another. Waldrop is effectively
economical with words, and often manages in a
few sentences what would take a lesser author several pages to express.

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