PortadaGruposCharlasMásPanorama actual
Buscar en el sitio
Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.

Resultados de Google Books

Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.

Cargando...

Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

por Howard Waldrop

MiembrosReseñasPopularidadValoración promediaMenciones
793336,726 (3.54)1
Ninguno
Cargando...

Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará.

Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.

» Ver también 1 mención

Mostrando 3 de 3
This is a collection of short stories and one novella by Howard Waldrop. Having read his alternative history novel Them Bones, it's obvious given the contents of this volume that alternative histories are a favourite theme of Waldrop's as some of the stories here are based around those too.

Others are whimsy based on a what-if idea such as what if time travellers arrived in a world based on the works of the great artists, or what if all the 1950s low budget films about alien invasions, featuring Martians, giant ants/crabs/gila monsters etc etc came true. They all invade at once and overwhelm the Earth, with the story told from the POV of an American army soldier who has decided to make a final stand. This variety of story was based on an interesting idea but left me with a so-what feeling ultimately. They were clever conceits, but had no real character identification.

The best story in the collection is probably the one about the old man hired to hunt a Wild Man. It's obvious early on that this is Ernest Hemingway and this is some allegory of his ultimate fate.

The stories are not badly written but I found quite a few of them baffling. I don't see the point of, for example, rewriting the Labours of Hercules from Greek mythology, but setting them in the southern states of America in the late 1920s with Hercules as a convict doing his final year as community service. And where I knew the subject, such as ancient Egypt, this only served to highlight the deficiencies: Waldrop tells us in his intro to He-We-Await (most of the stories have intros about their conception) that he spent six months researching Eyptian history, but unfortunately this didn't allow him to avoid a 'clanger' about the goddess Sekhmet which took me right out of the story. Two of the characters are named after Sekhmet and portrays her as a hippopotamus, but she was a lion goddess, (Tarowset was the hippopotamus deity). Quite a lot of historical research is on prominent display, such as a rather fanciful account of mumification - I've never read that the priest who cut into the body was chased by the others with rocks and I don't think the practice of mummification would have survived long - not the thousands of years it did - if it put someone's life at stake every time it was done! That sequence is straight infodump to display his research as he then tells us the Pharoah in question was not mummified and there are other sequences like that in the story which add absolutely nothing. The ending also comes over as a damp squib as well as being predicatable for most of the story.

I think these stories either appeal to a reader or not - they are "Marmite" fiction - and I'm obviously not the audience for them. ( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
My reactions to reading this collection in 1992. Some spoilers follow.

“Foreword: The Left-Handed Muse”, Lewis Shiner -- Shiner details Waldrop’s writing method: long bouts of research while he talks endlessly about the story he’s going to write then a burst of (usually) single sitting writing to make a story -- usually he needs to write it down so it can be read at a convention).

“All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past” This story has a fun premise: every single monster and alien menace from 1950s sf movies comes to Earth to wreck death and destruction. The ending was just ok: our protagonist decides to go out fighting the giant ants from Them!. This story illustrates why Waldrop is, in some ways, the quintessential example of what some consider sf’s genre shortcoming: interesting setups and premises with little attention paid to plot or character or theme, a lingering feeling, beyond the initial description of setting, of what’s-the-point?

"Helpless, Helpless" -- An interesting, ok story of the Artificials Plague which strikes the robots, androids, and artificial intelligences of a future society. The tone reminded me a bit of Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (with some bits of humor from psychotic, sometimes violent machines) which is perhaps inevitable given the subject matter. Waldrop nevers explains the reason or origin of his plagu,e but, as he explains in the introduction, that's the point of the story: a sf recreation of all those historical plagues which had so much effect on their socieites but couldn't be explained by the members of those societies. I'm not sure the story would have been as enjoyable without the introduction.

"Fair Game" -- This story of Ernest Hemingway hunting a Wild Man plaguing a Bavarian village had more emotion in it than usual for a Waldrop story and made me realize that he's capable of adopting his style to the subject matter. It was a story that held my interest, and one of his better ones. I'm not sure what to make of the ending. Has Hemingway been transported to Bavaria in the afterlife to become a sort of ghost (the story originally appeared in an anthology with an afterlife theme)? The more probable interpretation seems to be the story is an hallucination between the time Hemingway puts the shotgun to his head and when he pulls the trigger (a lá Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge"). The Wild Man, "unfettered, unrestrained by law and civilization ... pure chaos," seems to symbolize the ideal Hemingway has pursued all his life, and, he realizes at he sees the Wild Man with his face, it is an ideal that has left him with little. So, he will kill himself as he killed the Wild Man.

"What Makes Heironymous Run?"- -- One of the most pointless Waldrop stories I've read and a major disappointment since I was looking forward to seeing what Waldrop would do with Heironymous Bosch. The premise of the story is that two time travelers go to a Netherlands that resembles the landscape of Bosch paintings (and other painters of the time I think), not the historical Netherlands. What follows is an exercise in surrealism and not a very inventive exercise either. How clever is it to just describe, in prose, a Bosch painting? The ending so obscure as to be meaningless. Has the Little Ice Age started up or is the white symbolic of a new canvass forming? One of the worst stories of Waldrop's I've ever read.

"The Lions Are Asleep This Night" -- This is the second time I've read this story, and I liked it better this time and think it's one of Waldrop's best. Sure the idea -- a boy writing a Jacobean style (Waldrop does a pretty good job of recreating the style) revenge drama around African history -- is pretty simple but the execution was nicely done in both the details of this alternate history and the protagonist's character. It seems somewhat improbable that a black slave revolt would not be defeated by the European colonizers of the New World. On the other hand, Bolivia broke from Spain, Washington from England. Surprisingly, Waldrop, who makes mention of William MacNeil's Plagues and Peoples elsewhere, doesn't cite the obvious advantage large numbers of blacks would have over native populations in a rebellion -- immunity to most European diseases. In Waldrop's defense, he has the slave rebellion start with the formation of Freedom, a country who then exports revolution. So maybe it's not that improbable. Waldrop's starting point for this alternate history seems much like Harry Turtledove's Sim World: a New World devoid of humans. He also seems to imply that the Spanish Armada was a success -- England produces at least three popes, and Oliver Cromwell discovers the New World.) From what I know of Zimbabwe literature (a bit about themes and titles is about all) and Jacobean drama, the literary details were well-handled. It had a lot more warmth than the usual Waldrop story.

"Flying Saucer Rock and Roll" -- For the life of me, I don't know why this story was popular enough to be nominated for Nebula and Hugo awards. I found the basic idea rather trite though at least the ending was understandable with Leroy be taken away by flying saucers. Granted, the style and dialogue suited the story well. I thought the best part of the story was the transliteration of doo-wop sounds.

"He-Who-Await" -- This story left me cold. I liked the build-up: the detailed descriptions of mummification, the secret society of He-We-Await, the strange tale of Sekhemetumi and whats seems to be at attempt to rejuvenate him via cloning and Egyptian magic so he can see the "sun rise 5000 years from his time", and the description of sherbert making in Egypt. (I still am not sure why this last was in there. Is the suggestion that the vast iceworks described were part of the preparations for Sekhemetumi? How did the ice last that long? Why were the iceworks and not his body discovered?) This story is frustrating because it almost works. But some of its elements, like the iceworks, seem to not really be an organic part of the story. The story is a bit too obscure. While it's a nice bit of grim humor to have Bobby kill dad Sekhemetumi, what's with the "last days of mankind" bit? Too obscure to be horrifying.

"A Dozen Tough Jobs" -- This short novel is one of Waldrop's better efforts. Here his energy wasn't dissipated creating an alternate history but instead a clever retelling of Hercules Twelve Labors only in the Deep South of 1926 and 1927. Like any retelling of another story, it's interesting to see what is changed, kept, and discarded from the source material. I liked the wonderful job Waldrop did in creating the world of this story which seemed so real, a South slightly tinged by what I suppose would be called "magic realism". (There is a Diana-like character with a yard full of animals and a Cybil character who prophesizes and gates of ivory and horn.) One of the most interesting bits was his use of names, and I did like the idea of Pluto (Dees) reigning as a Kleagle at a Klan meeting, the Eumenides brothers as instruments of justice who release Houlka Lee, and the centaurs as a riding club always atop their horses. Guessing the allusions is a lot of fun, and I'm sure, given my slight mythological knowledge, I missed a lot. It was only by research in the encyclopedia that I caught the significance of Mr. Ness' fishing vest and Miz Rio's suicide (a whole mythological episode only hinted at in the final chapter and of which the narrator is ignorant). This story had style, coherence, emotion, and a point like none other of Waldrop's that I've read except "Heirs of the Perisphere". ( )
  RandyStafford | Dec 8, 2012 |
ZB13
  mcolpitts | Aug 15, 2009 |
Mostrando 3 de 3
sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Debes iniciar sesión para editar los datos de Conocimiento Común.
Para más ayuda, consulta la página de ayuda de Conocimiento Común.
Título canónico
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Título original
Títulos alternativos
Fecha de publicación original
Personas/Personajes
Lugares importantes
Acontecimientos importantes
Películas relacionadas
Epígrafe
Dedicatoria
Primeras palabras
Citas
Últimas palabras
Aviso de desambiguación
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés. Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Idioma original
DDC/MDS Canónico
LCC canónico

Referencias a esta obra en fuentes externas.

Wikipedia en inglés

Ninguno

No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca.

Descripción del libro
Resumen Haiku

Debates activos

Ninguno

Cubiertas populares

Enlaces rápidos

Valoración

Promedio: (3.54)
0.5
1
1.5
2 2
2.5
3 3
3.5
4 6
4.5 2
5

¿Eres tú?

Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing.

 

Acerca de | Contactar | LibraryThing.com | Privacidad/Condiciones | Ayuda/Preguntas frecuentes | Blog | Tienda | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliotecas heredadas | Primeros reseñadores | Conocimiento común | 203,233,550 libros! | Barra superior: Siempre visible