by Tam Thompson
Photography by Barton Wilder Custom Images

Howard Waldrop has destroyed New York City twice, saved the dodo from extinction, engineered post-apocalyptic tractors pulls, and reinvented human history to an extent that makes most parallel universes look as common as a corner convenience store.

He's also, by his own admission, killed almost a dozen magazines and small publishers. He loves to pull apart pop culture like taffy, twist it into Gordian knots, and then tie it all together in some insanely improbable way that makes his readers laugh, shake their heads, or sob-sometimes all at once.

And only maybe a hundred or so people in Austin know about him.

Who is Howard Waldrop? He's Austin's-and the world's-most under-appreciated science fiction (SF) writer. If you're one of those people who likes your humor layered like a casserole, you just might fall in love with Waldrop's unique stories because they're always about something, quirky and bizarre though they may be. Think The Simpsons, as opposed to Seinfeld, and you've got the idea.

Waldrop is a master of the short SF story, and it's said that no one does it better. His stories, settings, and people are real and gritty, much like the original Star Wars movie, which was lauded for presenting a "used future" replete with dirty, dinged-up spaceships and similarly damaged characters. In Waldrop's world, instead of shiny spaceships and dewy-eyed heroines you'll find pissed-off car thieves puttering along in rusted out old junkers that just barely run, and the occasional gorilla in a wig.

This is a man who's been described by one of his lifelong friends, George R.R. Martin (author of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, among others) as "a short squinty-eyed fellow with an atrocious accent and a wardrobe like Mork from Ork."

Waldrop's accent can be explained by the fact that he's very nearly a native Texan; he was born in Mississippi in 1946 and his family moved to Texas when he was four. His deep Texas drawl has been the source of confusion and much merriment in the SF community of writers, fans, editors, and agents.

For instance, there was the time that Gardner Dozois, former editor of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (now contributing editor) first met Waldrop in 1976, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

In the introduction to Waldrop's collection of stories, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Dozois recounts that at that particular convention, "A short, stocky man wearing a Zippy The Pinhead T-shirt and a cowboy hat walked up to me in the middle of the crowded Science Fiction Writers of America party, stuck out his hand, and said, 'Hi, I'm hard.' I eyed him warily. Before I could tell him that I sympathized with his condition but lacked the proper glandular bias to want to attempt to do anything about it, he added, 'You know. Hard Waldrop,' and the dime dropped for me at last."

About Waldrop's work, Dozois wrote, "Although Howard would shrug this off with an embarrassed laugh, there are quite a few people-including at least one of the publishers of this collection-who will forthrightly tell you that they think that Howard is a genius. I tend to agree. This does not mean that he is incapable of writing a bad story-in fact, he has written several of them.

"But if one definition of genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," Dozois continued, "then Howard indeed fills the bill. His capacity for incredibly detailed research is legendary-he frequently spends six months or more in intensive research for his stories; for one of them, he spent three years, on and off. When he's ready-or when they're ready-he then writes the stories out longhand, frequently on someone else's kitchen table, working long into the night. In this fashion, he manages to produce, usually, two or three stories a year. Sometimes more…but also, sometimes less."

SF legend has it that Waldrop writes his stories in his head. He loves to fish, and rumors abound that he weaves together all the intricate, subtle threads of his stories while standing in icy water wearing neoprene waders and waiting to catch a fish. Then, so the tale goes, when he has it all worked out, he sits down with pen and paper and his stories spring forth onto the page fully formed, like the birth of Athena from the head of her father, Zeus.

I asked him about that.

"Usually, I think about stories in the long, boring periods between fishing strikes when you're mindlessly casting. That's how I came up with 'Night of the Cooters'," Waldrop says. "I was thinking about H.G. Wells' story, The War of the Worlds. In that story, Wells says that seven out of ten cylinders fired at Mars landed in England, but he never says where the other three went. So, in my story, those other three landed in (the fictional) Pachuco County, Texas, to be found by a Slim Pickens-type character, in 1898."

"In fly-fishing, there's a lot of mechanical stuff, particularly after you've done it for forty years or so. You set up your line, and after that it's all up to the fish. There's a lot of mental downtime. All the time I was fly-fishing during that year, I was thinking about what the differences between 1898 Texas and 1898 England would be. Then I wrote the story the day I got back to Austin, and read it at a SF convention the next day."

When asked if that was how he wrote all his stories, including the one in which an idea came to him as he was changing the spark plugs on a car, he shakes his head. "I do perform some editing and revising," he admits. "In my career, I've had exactly three stories come to me like thunderbolts. Oftentimes you get through and the story isn't what you imagined, so you have to go back and revise it."

So how does his creative process work? Waldrop's theory is, "I think your subconscious works on things for years, then you come across some key piece of information that lets you know that the end of one story is the beginning of the next, and what you thought were two stories are one. I have to wait for that last piece of information to come to me, the piece that makes it all fall together, that one fact that makes the story work. And when that happens, it's a wonderful feeling-you recognize it instantly."

Waldrop isn't one of those writers who sets word-count goals and sits down faithfully each day to churn out material. "I realized early on that trying to make stories work wasn't going to work," he says, "but I can visualize what's going to happen at the start, the end, and then maybe I wait on the middle. Different parts of the story come to me at different times; it isn't always in the same order."

His story, "Winter Quarters," was a classic case. Waldrop explains, "It had two beginnings and I couldn't decide between them, so I used them both. It went something like, 'The story could begin this way…or this way….'"

In 2003, Waldrop taught at Clarion West, the highly-regarded six-week workshop for aspiring professional SF and fantasy writers. Of his students, he says, "I told 'em…that they couldn't do something, and then they came back and said, 'But you did it!' I said, 'That's because I know how to do it. When you know how to do break the rules, you can do it, too.'"

He smiles, and says, "The rules are there for writers. Through the years, as you write, you see ways you can go around them. For instance, in 'The Ugly Chickens,' I realized that the story would have to contain some info dumps (long stretches of narrative exposition used to explain plot points, and generally regarded as something for a writer to avoid, since info dumps tend to bore readers). So, I just wrote info dumps instead of trying to disguise them as dialog or doing it any other way. It took six months to do that, and it was really hard to do."

One rule that Waldrop always adheres to is that he writes the ending that the story needs, which may not be what the reader anticipates. This can be dangerous territory, since one of the unwritten contracts between writers and readers is that if the readers plunk down their money and invest time reading, there will be some sort of emotional payoff at the end.

Waldrop says many readers were upset at how Charles Frazier's 1998 novel Cold Mountain ended, because they didn't get the emotional payoff they were expecting. But, he says, "Cold Mountain had to end the way it had to end, not the way people wanted it to end. People wanted it to end differently so that they could feel good, but the artifice would have shown. I've always written the ending the story needs. Theodore Sturgeon did that, too-he changed things to fit the story, and that's why he wasn't more successful."

On a different topic, he notes, "There's nothing so bad as a bad writer getting ahold of a good idea and ruining it for everyone," he says. "It taints it, messes up the idea. Nor is there anything so bad as a good writer getting hold of a good idea and then that's the definitive story and no one else wants to mess with it."

Is Waldrop the 'next big SF Writer?'

From reading introductions to Waldrop's work written by such luminaries as George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and others, it becomes immediately apparent that Howard Waldrop is vastly underrated. In fact, many of his editors and fellow writers are stumped as to why he hasn't achieved the fame, fortune and first-rate success he deserves for combining inexhaustible imagination with relentless research and serving it all up in his own folksy, here-it-is, comin'-right-atcha style.

It was Waldrop who coined the SF literary criticism term: "tabloid weird." According to Turkey City Lexicon-created by Lewis Shiner (author of five novels and four collections of short stories), and Bruce Sterling (whom Publisher's Weekly calls "the godfather of cyberpunk," a subgenre of SF, and author of this year's novel The Zenith Angle)-tabloid weird is what results when a story has too many fantastic elements: "Either the FBI is hunting the escaped mutant from the genetics lab, or the drill-bit has bored straight into hell-but not both at once in the very same piece of fiction. Even fantasy worlds need an internal consistency of sorts…."

Ellen Datlow is arguably the most successful living SF editor. From 1981 to 1998, she edited the popular Omni magazine. Currently, she edits SciFiction, the fiction portion of SciFi.com, the web site of television's SciFi channel. She's also tied for having won the most World Fantasy Awards ever-seven-and won the 2002 Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor. Datlow loves Waldrop's work.

"He's a treasure, and I wish he'd write more because he has a great take on popular culture, tearing it apart and piecing it back together again," she says in a phone interview. Datlow also feels strongly that Waldrop deserves a wider audience. "He should be known outside of SF, but he hasn't quite hit that point yet. He writes these wonderful alternate-history stories, and people would love them. Stories like 'Ike at the Mike' or 'The Ugly Chickens' are very accessible."

So why hasn't Waldrop been widely discovered? Datlow says, "His name and stories need to be more widely publicized outside the SF genre. If you read his stuff, you will find him hilarious. He's got an incredibly sharp wit, so you'll find his stories very witty. What Howard does best is that he writes with humor and intelligence. He also does incredible research, so it's really the whole package. He writes an entertaining story, he's a good storyteller, and he always has the historical details right."

Is there anything Datlow would like to see him do better? She laughs, and replies, "He needs to write more. I'd like to see him quit doing so much research and watching TV so much and produce more stories. He's a perfectionist. His movie columns-especially 'Crimea River'-are terrific. His nonfiction is as good as his fiction!"

Why Waldrop won't use computers

I make the mistake of telling Waldrop, "What I like about using the computer to write is the ability to cut and paste." He looks me right in the eye with his characteristic charismatic-yet-uncompromising stare. "Oh, I do plenty of cutting and pasting," he replies, and I know without a doubt that he's not talking drag-and-drop-he's talking kitchen scissors and Elmer's glue.

Waldrop does not believe in using computers. It isn't because he's of a generation that grew up without them-he's only in his late-fifties. Yet he writes his stories out longhand, or on a typewriter, preferably manual.

"In the middle of my career, I wrote on the last Adler portable typewriter-a manual," Waldrop says. "Now, it's hard to find ribbons for my typewriter, but I've found I can use Okidata calculator ribbons."

Why won't he use a computer, when friends have offered to buy or give him one? For one thing, as other Waldrop biographers have pointed out, Waldrop has the true grace and manners of a traditional Southern man who would sooner starve than take charity. On a more practical note, he views the Internet and e-mail with great distrust. "The Internet is a big time-suck. You can waste hours surfing," he maintains. "And e-mail-you're yammering with someone you wouldn't spend thirty seconds talking to at a party."

However, some progress has been made in bringing Waldrop on-line. Datlow says, "I've persuaded him that accepting contracts and offers from foreign publishers via e-mail is a good thing, since it shortens the time within which he'll receive money!"

And then there are the nitty-gritty details of word processing. Waldrop candidly states, "I'm such a slow typist that it would take me longer to learn the computer keyboard than it would to write the story. The other thing is that people with computers and e-mail tend to procrastinate until the last minute instead of planning ahead and using the US mail like God intended." Is that last phrase just one more example of wry Waldropian humor? I couldn't tell.

He continues, "There's no carriage return on the keyboard, and besides, my eyes are so bad I can't see the little dots between words. I'd have to learn to underline, italicize…retrain myself entirely. The way I do it, I type letters on paper and publishers print my stories on paper. How it gets from one to the other isn't my business."

At one SF writer's critique session I attended with Waldrop, when someone complained that he didn't have an e-mail address, Waldrop responded: "OK, you wanna send me e-mail? You can send me e-mail. Here's how you do it: you type up what you want to say, like normal. Then instead of hitting that little 'send' button, you hit 'print,' and you put that sucker in an envelope with a stamp and send it to me. I'll get it sooner or later, and then I'll mail you a letter back."

But Waldrop doesn't take himself and his Luddite tendencies too seriously. "I've done two e-columns," he says with a self-deprecating grin. "'Crimea River' (published at electricstory.com) and a column I wrote for Eileen Gunn (infinitematrix.net), they're the only e-columns I know of typed manually, printed, put in an envelope, and sent out Priority Mail." He laughs. "If anyone else was doing the kind of stuff that I do, those online editors would go to them, because they would be on-line, and easier to work with."

Rich man, poor man-His lifelong friendship with George R.R. Martin

Waldrop and his old friend Martin are like two sides of an old forty-five rpm vinyl record, which usually featured an A-side with a song that producers hoped would make the top forty and a B-side with a song they figured would never catch on.

The two writers are a year apart in age, and they met when Waldrop was in the ninth grade and Martin was in the eighth grade. "I put an ad in a fanzine (fan magazine) for a comic book," Waldrop recalls, "and George saw it, and taped a quarter to a piece of cardboard and paid thirty cents-more than the price of the comic book!-to mail it to me special delivery from Bayonne, New Jersey, to Arlington, Texas. He really wanted that comic book."

The comic book was The Brave and the Bold issue number twenty-eight-the first "Justice League of America" comic book, published in 1960 and sold for ten cents. Waldrop says it's now worth $12,000.

The two men's lives have paralleled and diverged, like the rails on a DNA strand model that circle each other in spirals. They sold their first stories within six months of each other, and both have been married once. When Waldrop lived in Washington state from 1995 to 2003, Martin loved to regale people with tales of Waldrop eking out a living in a tiny shack made of cardboard, duct-taped to the side of the local general store.

Then, Martin actually visited the shack. "When he walked in," Waldrop recounts, "George remarked, 'Oh, this is actually quite a nice fishing cabin.' It was an old three-room fishing cabin attached to a general store near a river, and it really was pretty nice."

Waldrop is clearly proud of his friend Martin's commercial success, and takes great delight in telling the 'turtles under the refrigerator' story about the genesis of Martin's series, A Song of Ice and Fire. At a professional SF writer's critique group last year, Waldrop told me, "When George was growing up, he had these little dime-store turtles he'd buy. Occasionally, they'd crawl under the old refrigerator, which was up on legs, and months later he'd find their desiccated remains. So, under the refrigerator became Mordor to him (after reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series).

"Also, he had a terrarium with one of those castles in it, and he had goldfish and parakeets. So he made up stories about them, and that's where that fantasy series came from, with all the castles, and dragons flying and whatnot."

Their vast differences in fame and fortune doubtlessly lie not only in timing, but in the forms in which they write. Martin is a master of the novel, although his short stories are also top-notch. Waldrop's strong point is the short story, and there's simply not much money in that. Another reason Martin has landed repeatedly on The New York Times Best-Seller List is because he has managed to write fantasy novels that have mainstream appeal, whereas Waldrop remains firmly entrenched in the SF ghetto.

Sacrificing for his art

In our modern age of materialism-mania, Waldrop is an anachronism because of the huge sacrifices he makes for his art. He rarely accepts any sort of paying work that isn't writing because he pours every ounce of his waking consciousness and subconsciousness into his craft.

Attend any SF convention (not the Star Trek ones, but the literary ones) and you'll hear apocryphal tales of Waldrop living under bridges or on people's back porches for years at a time, surviving on nothing but canned peas, just so that he can have all the time he needs to write the stories he feels compelled to write.

"So, did you really live under a bridge on canned peas?" I ask him.

He gives me an embarrassed grin and waves a hand. "People like to romanticize this sort of thing. No, I never lived under a bridge, but I have lived on people's screened-in back porches, including the wintertime in Austin, for about eight months at a stretch. And when I lived in the fishing cabin in Washington for seven years, I didn't have a fridge for the first four years and I had no stove the first year, although I did have a hot plate. I had a TV and a VCR, but you couldn't get broadcast TV there, so people sent me videotapes in the mail."

"But it really wasn't that bad-people thought I was in the woods, deprived and all that, but it wasn't like that. When I had money, things were just fine." He chuckles. "The general store was open from 5am to 9pm, so I'd buy milk each day and put it in a little Tupperware container of water to keep it cold. Lots of times I didn't have money to put gas in my car, but there was a Bookmobile that came by every two weeks for forty-five minutes. And I could tell that that library had a good person buying their SF."

Even so, many of his fans wonder why Waldrop decided to move from Texas to the north fork of the Stillaguamish River in Washington State. Some speculate it's about the fishing, since Waldrop's passion for fishing is well-known.

"I made conscious choices about my work," Waldrop explains. "If I was gonna write, and be broke all the time because of it, then I figured I might as well be where I can do some good fishing. I made the choice to move to Washington (and focus on writing) because I saw what happened to friends who waited too long to do what they really wanted to do."

He paused.

Tentatively, I asked, "What happened to them?"

"They died."

A classic hard-luck story

Unfortunately, despite his tremendous talent and storytelling savoir-faire, hard luck runs from Waldrop like a scalded dog. "I've killed half a dozen or so magazines and several small press publishers, too," he says offhandedly, with regret evident in his voice.

"You, uh…you what?" I ask.

"Killed 'em. Killed 'em deader'n a doornail," he confirms. "I was the last story in the last issue of Amazing Stories twice; the magazine was resurrected after it folded, but I fixed that. I also killed Galaxy, Crawdaddy, Vertex, New Dimensions…the list is long, know what I mean?" he says, finishing his literary obituaries with his trademark phrase.

"Those magazines I killed, what happened with 'em was they got to a certain point, then they published something of mine, and the wheels came off, they just came right off."

According to acclaimed science-fiction writer and editor Eileen Gunn, Waldrop "…once pulled a story that had already sold to a big-bucks market in order to place it elsewhere for half the price."

The reason for such fame as Waldrop does have is because, Gunn says, "Occasionally stories slipped through to higher-paying markets-Playboy, Omni, and the like. Howard compensated for these lapses by selling his books only to very high-quality small presses or to publishers who could be counted on not to distribute them."

Ever had a good friend who always seems to just barely miss being in the right place at the right time? Welcome to Howard Waldrop's world. And the shame of it all is that in addition to his tremendous talent, he's a genuinely nice man.

To paraphrase an anonymous reviewer on sff.net, a web site for SF, it's not that Waldrop disdains commercial success. If anything, it's more that commercial success disdains Waldrop. And disdains is actually quite a mild word for what transpires: commercial success stalks Waldrop, knocks him down, steals his lunch money, and runs off with it.

However, Waldrop does have one of the most clear-cut cult followings around. "I can sell thirty-five hundred copies of any book I write and they publish," he says, "but not more. One time St. Martin's Press wanted to print four thousand copies of one of my books. I told 'em they were gonna get five hundred of 'em comin' straight back, and I was almost right on the money-they had to eat about five hundred copies."

Where is SF headed?

One question remained: "Howard, do you think that as world events are getting increasingly weird and scary, it's getting harder to dream up science fiction?"

He thinks about the question for a moment, then replies, "It's getting harder to come up with bizarre near-future stuff. If you try to outguess what's going to happen next, you're going to miss. In the near future, either things will calm down or they'll get worse. Sure, in SF some writers hit their predictions, but it's like a shotgun: everybody's writing about all kinds of new stuff, so someone's bound to be right. It's a whole lot easier to write about fifty years from now, after all the dust has settled, than to try to predict the next five years."

"The problem with most 'hard' (meaning traditional) SF predictions about the future has been that they were all predicting a straight line of what would happen-not that it would happen all at once. And everyone just predicted the one thing that they were interested in. In the fifties, Philip K. Dick predicted that every morning you'd get a phone call and it would print out the whole newspaper. Not just the parts you wanted to read, but everything.

"What they didn't predict was Gameboys or five hundred cable TV channels and nothing on worth watching. (The writer) Philip José Farmer's been mad at SF ever since 1949, when the old SF writers had said we were supposed to be on the moon by then and we didn't make it."

And then there's cyberpunk, the subgenre of SF favored by Waldrop's friend and fellow SF writer, Bruce Sterling. Waldrop's explanation for the animosity between hard SF fans and cyberpunk fans: "Hard SF has always been about the hardware, and about solving the official problems by using technology in the official ways. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is about people subverting technology to further their own ends. It's about Black Ice, hackers, and high-tech lowlifes using things developed for military and business use. (The term Black Ice originated with novelist William Gibson, and was a fictional computer security system-ice stood for "intrusion countermeasures electronics"-that would hit back at hackers and cause permanent brain damage or even death. Black Ice has since been coopted as the name of a computer software protection system.)

"The same solution that solves the official problem should also solve a personal problem a character is having. When it's done seamlessly, it's a great story-it just works. It resonates because it's across both sides of the story, like in the short story "The Cold Equations" (by Tom Godwin, originally published by Amazing Stories in 1954), where the guy has to choose whether or not to throw a stowaway girl out the air lock. She wants to go save her brother, but the ship only has enough fuel to get the current cargo of people and vaccine to the colony to save her brother and the others."

He's hooked me-I have to know. "So what happens?" I ask.

"He throws her out the air lock, because he has to," Waldrop says. "The story has the ending it has to have."

What's Waldrop up to now?

A glut of Waldrop's work came out in 2003-eight or nine stories and collections. His next short story collection is due out soon, from Subterranean Press. He's also finishing a novel, Search for Tom Purdue. And his latest short story, "The Wolfman of Alcatraz," will be published on SciFi.com September 22.

"So, Howard," I ask him, "what do you see yourself doing in the future?"

"Dying," he says, and laughs. Then he adds, "Actually, I will continue on like I am until I either die or get too feeble to do it anymore, or until the tastes of America change."

Tam Thompson has gotten to know Howard Waldrop and his work through Turkey City, a local critique group for professional science-fiction writers, currently run by Bruce Sterling. One of the things Tam enjoys most is the opportunity to read Howard's stories before they're published. You may e-mail Tam at tthompson@goodlifemag.com.

A Howard Waldrop Primer

Selected Short Stories

• "The Ugly Chickens", Universe 10, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1980. Available on-line at: www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/waldrop/waldrop1.html.
• "Ike at the Mike," Omni, June 1982.
• "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll," Omni, January 1985.
• "Night of the Cooters," Omni, April 1987.
• "The Heart of Whitenesse", New Worlds, White Wolf, originally published August, 1997, due to be re-released soon in a new collection published by Subterranean press.
• "Mary Margaret Road-Grader," Strange Horizons, January 2001. Available on-line at: www.strangehorizons.com/2001/20010129/mary_margaret.shtml.

Short Story Collections

• Howard Who? Doubleday, 1986.
• All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Ursus Imprints, 1987.
• Strange Things in Close-up: The Nearly Complete Howard Waldrop, Legend (Century Hutchison) UK, 1989.
• Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Ace, 1991.
• Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, Ursus Imprints, 1991.

Novels

• Them Bones, Ace, 1984.
• Texas-Israeli War: 1999, with Jake (Buddy) Saunders, Ballantine, 1974 through 1986 printings. (Also French, Italian, and Spanish editions, Waldrop's favorite of which is Israel Frappe a Dallas.)

Forthcoming Works

• Short story "The Wolfman of Alcatraz," coming September 22 on the SciFiction web site, www.scifi.com.
• Novel, Search for Tom Purdue, almost finished.
• Novel, Moving Waters, a fishing novel, in process.
• Novel, I, John Mandeville, a novel that has been in process for thirty-three years and which Waldrop perennially promises his fans he'll finish.

More Waldrop on the Internet

• A Woodsman's Guide to Howard Waldrop. Web site: www.sff.net/people/Waldrop.
• Complete Bibliography: http://isfdb.tamu.edu/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Howard_Waldrop.

ArmadilloCon 26

• This literary-oriented science-fiction/fantasy convention for writers and fans is scheduled for August 13-15 at the Hilton North, 6000 Middle Fiskville Road, in Austin. Web site: www.fact.org/dillo. Waldrop will be participating.

Fandom Association of Central Texas

• This reading group for science-fiction and fantasy hosts a web site at www.fact.org.

-Tam Thompson