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Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003
| Author: | Howard Waldrop |
| Publisher: |
Old Earth Books, 2008 |
| Series: | A Howard Waldrop Reader: Book 2 |
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1. Things Will Never Be the Same |
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| Book Type: | Collection |
| Genre: | Science-Fiction |
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Synopsis
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
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