Like so many enterprises, science
fiction and fantasy have given big rewards to a few of their
practitioners and a pittance, or worse, to many more. Longtime fans
will recall stories of Philip K. Dick living on pet food, or H. Beam
Piper choosing a quick death over slow starvation. Howard Waldrop
numbers among the numerous SF writers who earn far less than they
deserve. In Waldrop's case this results, in part, from his preference
for short fiction, no longer a very marketable product, over novels
and series, which pay better but don't match his talents or
inclinations. This is a great pity, for Waldrop combines a well-honed
talent for story-telling with erudition, a nicely-perverse
folksiness, and fearless speculation. His story “The Ugly Chickens”
speculates on the survival into the present-day, in a Faulknerian
backwater, of the most famous extinct species of all, and includes
one of the most vivid dream sequences it has been my pleasure to
read. “Custer's Last Jump,” co-written with Steven Utley,
featured nineteenth-century paratroopers, Lakota fighter pilots, and
a massive bibliography of sources, all invented by the authors. In
“The Effects of Alienation” Waldrop staged a “Hitler
Victorious” alternate history scenario for the sole purpose of
testing its impact on Peter Lorre. “Night of the Cooters” pitted
a small-town Texas sheriff (a thinly-disguised Slim Pickens) against
H.G. Wells's Martians. One could go on and on.
A critic aptly called Waldrop's work
“brilliant and berserk.” One could also describe it as
labor-intensive and uncompromising. The author never hinges a story
on one idea when half a dozen will do, and he never tells the same
story twice. This makes it impossible for him to churn out the
serials and hackwork that provide other SF authors with their path to fame and, if not wealth, at least self-sufficiency. Indeed, Waldrop apparently finds
it hard to write novels: his humor, intellectual games,
Classical references, and cultural ephemera work much better in the
confined space of a short story or novella. He has, however, left us
one solo novel, Them Bones, and it shows that, whatever the cause of Waldrop's
aversion to novels, it isn't lack of talent. It is a
multi-plot book of time travel, alternate history, and
apocalypse, involving baffled archaeologists, Mound-Builder Indians,
mammoths, lost G.I.s, Aztec priests, and a heady evocation of the
lower Mississippi Valley, a place more alien to SF writers than Alpha
Centauri. I read it at just the right time: in grad school, just as I
began my study of Native American history. I reread it when I took my
first trip down the Natchez Trace Parkway, a journey that showed me
the dense interlayering of pre-Columbian Indian culture and early
American history in the Deep South. “The past...isn't even past,”
one Mississippi writer famously wrote, and Waldrop, born in
Mississippi himself, show that this applies just as readily to
Coles-Creek Indians as Faulkner's peasants and nabobs. Lying at the intersection
of my hobby and my vocation, Them Bones remains one of my favorite
books, and over the next year or so I plan to spend some time on this
blog revisiting it and its many charms. I hope my readers will enjoy
the trip.
**
(Above image, of Waldrop in 2007, courtesy of The Jeff and Wikimedia Commons.)
No comments:
Post a Comment