Search Worlds Without End

Contains:

Nebula- and WFA-winning, Hugo-, Balrog- and Locus-nominated Novelette "The Ugly Chickens"
Hugo-, Nebula- and Locus-nominated Short Story "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll"
Nebula- and Locus-nominated Short Story "Heirs of the Perisphere"
Nebula-, Sturgeon-, and Locus-nominated Short Story "The Lions Are Asleep This Night"
Locus-winning and Hugo-nominated Short Story "Night of the Cooters"
Hugo-, Nebula-, Sturgeon-, Asimov's-, and Locus-nominated Novelette "Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?"
Sidewise-nominated Short Story "US"
WFA- and Locus-nominated Short Story "The Dynasters: Vol. 1: On The Downs"
Hugo-nominated Novelette "The King of Where-I-Go"

In Things Will Never Be the Same, 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.

As usual, Waldrop generates a lot of his narrative electricity by conjoining seemingly unlikely thematic material. In "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll," he blends UFO scares, the 1965 New York blackout and a singing competition between two doo-wop groups, the Kool-Tones and Bobby and the Bombers.

"The Sawing Boys" retells the Grimm Brothers' fairy tale "The Bremen Town Musicians" in the style of Damon Runyon, setting the story in the Kentucky backwoods.

"The Lions Are Asleep This Night" imagines an alternate Africa in which young Robert Oinenke composes an Elizabethan-style drama about the "tragicall death of King Motofuko."

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? What if Chiron the centaur grew old and during the reign of Julian the Apostate needed help to make his way back to his original homeland, the as yet undiscovered America? (In a neat touch, Waldrop's narrator refers to Christians and their idiotic schism as being a danger to "decent gods-fearing folk.")

In "French Scenes," he even reveals how young Parisian filmmakers, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, interpreted American gangster movies.

When Neville Brand in "Riot in Cell Block 11" gets shot at with a Thompson submachine gun, he yells: "Look out, Monty! They got a chopper! Back inside!" But what the Cahiers du Cinema people hear is "Steady, mon frère! Let us leave this place of wasted dreams."

In "Heart of Whitenesse," which Waldrop himself seems to view as his most compacted and densely allusive work, Christopher Marlowe is sent up the frozen Thames on a secret mission to kill Dr. Faustus.

- The Washington Post

Table of Contents:

• Introduction (Things Will Never Be the Same) - essay
• The Ugly Chickens - (1980) - novelette
• Afterword (The Ugly Chickens) - essay
• Flying Saucer Rock and Roll - (1985) - novelette
• Afterword (Flying Saucer Rock and Roll) - essay
• Heirs of the Perisphere - (1985) - shortstory
• Afterword (Heirs of the Perisphere) - essay
• The Lions Are Asleep This Night - (1986) - novelette
• Afterword (The Lions Are Asleep This Night) - essay
• Night of the Cooters - [War of the Worlds] - (1987) - shortstory
• Afterword (Night of the Cooters) - essay
• Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance? - (1988) - novelette
• Afterword (Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?) - essay
• Wild, Wild Horses - (1988) - shortstory
• Afterword (Wild, Wild Horses) - essay
• French Scenes - (1988) - novelette
• Afterword (French Scenes) - essay
• Household Words; Or, the Powers-That-Be - (1994) - shortstory
• Afterword (Household Words; Or, the Powers-That-Be) - essay
• The Sawing Boys - (1994) - novelette
• Afterword (The Sawing Boys) - essay
• Heart of Whitenesse - (1997) - shortstory
• Afterword (Heart of Whitenesse) - essay
• Mr. Goober's Show - (1998) - shortstory
• Afterword (Mr. Goober's Show) - essay
• US - (1998) - shortstory
• Afterword (US) - essay
• The Dynasters: Vol. 1: On The Downs - (1999) - shortstory
• Afterword (The Dynasters: Vol. 1: On The Downs) - essay
• Calling Your Name - (2003) - shortstory
• Afterword (Calling Your Name) - essay
• The King of Where-I-Go - (2005) - novelette
• Afterword (The King of Where-I-Go) - essay

Contains:

Nebula- and World Fantasy Award-nominated Novella "A Dozen Tough Jobs"
Hugo-, Asimov's-, and Locus-nominated Novelette "Fin de Cyclé"
Sidewise- and Locus-nominated Novella "You Could Go Home Again"

Other Worlds, Better Lives features longer stories written Howard Waldrop between 1989 and 2003 and displays his mastery of the novella form.

Among the stories here is "You Could Go Home Again", in which Thomas Wolfe, having survived the brain disease that killed him in our world, returns from the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, aboard an airship where fellow voyager Fats Waller provides musical interludes, to a U.S. governed by technocrats.

"Fin de Cyclé" is the story of how a movie made by Georges Méliès, assisted by Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust, and Pablo Picasso, rouses the French public to demand justice in the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus and helps to free him from Devil s Island.

Various young characters from late 1950s and early 1960s TV programs and science fiction movies confront the Cuban missile crisis in "The Other Real World", while Richard Wagner abandons his operatic ambitions to become one of the forefathers of the Peoples Federated States of Europe in "A Better World's in Birth!"

"Flatfeet!" combines reflections on Osvald Spengler's classic The Decline of the West and American artist Thomas Cole's series of paintings entitled "The Course of Empire" with a number of historical parallels and Keystone Kops-style antics in what the author calls in his afterword "one of the most jam-packed stories I ever wrote".

In "Major Spacer in the 21st Century!" Waldrop manages to cover the history of much of twentieth century communications technology in realistic detail.

The longest story in the collection is "A Dozen Tough Jobs"; here, Waldrop takes the mythological figure of Hercules and sets him down in early twentieth-century Mississippi along with an African-American sidekick appropriately named I.O. Lace. Readers unfamiliar with Greek mythology can read this novella straight as a tale of race relations, rural poverty, and class distinctions centered on the convict Houlka Lee; those who know the old myths will delight in the meticulously worked-out parallels between Waldrop's story and the fabled Twelve Labours of Hercules.

- Pamela Sargent, SciFi Weekly

Table of Contents:

• Size Matters - essay
• A Dozen Tough Jobs - (1989) - novella
• Afterword (A Dozen Tough Jobs) - essay
• Fin de Cyclé - (1990) - novelette
• Afterword (Fin de Cyclé) - essay
• You Could Go Home Again - (1993) - novella
• Afterword (You Could Go Home Again) - essay
• Flatfeet! - (1996) - shortstory
• Afterword (Flatfeet!) - essay
• Major Spacer in the 21st Century! - (2001) - novelette
• Afterword (Major Spacer in the 21st Century!) - essay
• The Other Real World - (2001) - novelette
• Afterword (The Other Real World) - essay
• A Better World's in Birth! - (2003) - novelette
• Afterword (A Better World's in Birth!) - essay