This week I lost a personal hero of mine, a writer named Howard Waldrop, who died at the age of 77.
Unless you are a particular kind of science fiction fan 鈥� a fan of short stories mostly published in magazines with pictures of exotic planets on the cover 鈥� you鈥檝e likely never heard of Waldrop.
Within the narrow world of people who care about such things, though, he was a legend.
Waldrop didn鈥檛 write the sorts of stories you can look at and easily categorize. Where some writers write space opera, or cyberpunk, or epic fantasy, Waldrop wrote鈥� well, he wrote Howard Waldrop stories.
He wrote a story about an avant-garde French playwright who duels a rival in a battle with elephant guns and hand grenades, on the stairs of the Eiffel Tower 鈥� both men riding bicycles.
He wrote about a director so obsessed with French New Wave movies that he goes more than a little off his rocker trying to make a tribute to that era.
He wrote about a pulp hero of the Second World War who comes home and finds that there might not be much of a place for the ace pilot of an experimental plane 鈥� so he might as well take down one last world-threatening villain.
Most famously, he wrote The Ugly Chickens, about an ornithologist who discovers that dodos may not be extinct 鈥� because they鈥檙e being raised as livestock by a couple of rural families in the Deep South, who have no idea what a dodo is.
Waldrop stories delighted the kind of people who love the weird and the offbeat. There were recurring themes in Waldrop stories 鈥� fly fishing, old movies, history, and mythology 鈥� but you never really knew which version of Waldrop you鈥檇 get next, which of his various obsessions he鈥檇 work into a story.
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Not surprisingly, Waldrop never made much money. He wrote only a few novels, which did not exactly sell in airport-fiction quantities. His friend George R.R. Martin (who has a few books that did sell pretty well) repeatedly threw opportunities at Waldrop through the years, but Waldrop just kept doing his own thing, regardless.
I鈥檓 sad this week because I鈥檒l never get another new Howard Waldrop short story. There are a few older stories still for me to track down, ones I鈥檝e never read. But then, that鈥檚 it.
One of the more melancholy things about getting older is that you keep losing heroes. There are people we admire from afar for decades 鈥� athletes, writers, comedians, actors, news anchors 鈥� and they contribute something valuable to our lives. They can make us think or laugh or cry. We鈥檒l never meet them, for the most part.
We find our heroes when we鈥檙e young and learning who we are. We take on a little piece here and there from these folks. We admire and try to emulate them.
But because we were so young when we picked our heroes, they鈥檙e almost always older than we are.
Too soon, they鈥檙e gone.
But like the ugly chickens, their influence lingers, often in unexpected places.
