Custer's Last Jump and Other Collaborations

Rating:
Summary: Excellent read!
Review: As always, Waldrop comes through, here in collborations with some of science fiction's brightest lights. Offbeat, well-researched and thought provoking. Well worth your time.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent read!
Review: As always, Waldrop comes through, here in collborations with some of science fiction's brightest lights. Offbeat, well-researched and thought provoking. Well worth your time.

Rating:
Summary: A dazzling display of literary imagination
Review: Compiled by Howard Waldrop (a renowned writer of deftly researched alternate-history stories and winner of both the Nebula and World Fantasy awards), Custer's Last Jump And Other Collaborations is an enthralling anthology of original short stories in which Howard Waldrop combined his talent with other skilled wordweavers such as George R. R. Martin, Bruce Sterling, and others. From a unique perspective on the saga of Troy; to a distant future in which Mankind is nearly extinct; to an alternate history when Crazy Horse uses Confederate monoplanes against Custer; Custer's Last Jump And Other Collaborations is a dazzling display of literary imagination, and a very strongly recommended read for science fiction fans enthusiasts everywhere.

Rating:
Summary: Idea (...) from the galactic fringe
Review: The stories in this collection are great, of course. Some are recently published, some have been sprung from the prison of time, and one, the long-rumored collaboration between Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling, has never been published previously. The title story is the one that changed the ground rules for writing alternate history. These are stories of ideas -- of complete profligacy with ideas -- of inventing forms, pushing their envelopes, and making the rest of the world sit up and take notice.

Howard's collaborators are among the people who made Austin a free-fire zone of SF ideas and original stories in the Seventies and Eighties: Bruce Sterling, Steven Utley, George R. R. Martin, Leigh Kennedy, Buddy Saunders, and astrophysicist Al Jackson. Howard says it's "thirty years of the True History of SF." Since he and Saunders were in the 7th grade together, and he and Martin first started corresponding in 1963, so I'd say Howard is shorting himself a decade there, but really, who's counting?