Howard Waldrop: "The Ugly Chickens," "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" and "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me"

Just recently I read my first ever Howard Waldrop story when I took a look at a 1979 issue of Pat Cadigan's magazine Shayol.  In the comments to my Shayol blogpost, Lastyear recommended Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens," so today we'll read that award-winning story via the sorcery of the internet archive, world's finest website, which has a scan of the 1986 Waldrop collection Howard Who?  Looking at the table of contents, I have decided to also read "Mary Margaret Road-Grader," which I am guessing is a feminist story about a woman construction worker, and "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me," which I am guessing is an environmentalist story about how a small elite are going to escape Mother Earth after we humans have ruined it with our strip mining and fossil fuel burning.  

Every story in Howard Who? is preceded by an introduction from the author, and I am going to resist the urge to read these intros before I read the stories so I can go in cold and interpret and assess each story without any clues or prejudices.  (I'll read the intros after.)   

"The Ugly Chickens" (1980)

"The Ugly Chickens" won a Nebula and a World Fantasy Award, and has been reprinted many times since its debut in Terry Carr's Universe 10, including in the 1999 volume My Favorite Science Fiction Story, in which it was Harry Turtledove who declared it his favorite.  Everybody loves this thing!

Well, it is easy to see why "The Ugly Chicken" has broad appeal.  It stars a scientist, and includes a science lecture, written in the same jocular tone of the entire piece (the jokes didn't actually make me laugh, but they weren't irritatingly bad, either.)  Waldrop stuff the tale with references high brow (e.g., Walker Evans and Pachelbel's Canon in D) and topical (e.g., "Hee Haw" and Billy Carter.)  The plot structure is like that of a detective story or a Lovecraftian tale and the tone is pessimistic and ironic, dwelling on poverty, futility, and death.  There is that air of elitism we find in so much SF and I guess appeals to many SF readers: the narrator is a smart guy devoted to the truth--just like the reader, of course!--and all the other people in the story are stupid and/or some kind of fame-chaser or money-grubber oblivious to the life of the mind and the perils facing the ecology.

Our narrator is a young ornithologist, a grad student with a particular interest in endangered and extinct birds, a man who actually has dream-like visions of dodos dancing with Dutch royalty.  (The dreamy vision sequence is the worst part of the story.)  By chance, a clue that dodos were brought to America in the 18th century and bred by a family in the South up into the 20th century falls into his lap.  The story relates how the narrator travels around the backwoods of Mississippi and then around the world, interviewing people of various social strata and examining documents, trying to figure out what happened to these domesticated dodos with the hope some are still to be found alive; the text is punctuated by the aforementioned lectures (about the history of the dodo) and, as the narrator unravels them, episodes in the history of the American family that cultivated the strange foreign birds.

"The Ugly Chickens" is a pretty effective story, and people into 1970s pessimism will like it even more than I did.  Thumbs up!  

Having drafted the above, I then read Waldrop's intro, which is about the process by which he wrote "The Ugly Chickens" and got it published; like the story itself, we might characterize the intro's style and content as braggadocio camouflaged behind pessimism and self-deprecation.   

"Mary Margaret Road-Grader" (1976)

This one made its debut in Damon Knight's Orbit 18 and was chosen by Gardner Dozois as one of the best stories of the year; eighteen years after its first appearance, Kim Stanley Robinson selected it for inclusion in Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias.

This is a jokey story about a post-apocalyptic future in which the protagonists, I guess Native Americans, pursue a nomadic lifestyle that is a sort of caricature of the traditional culture of Plains Indians. These tribes raid each other as well as "white settlements" in order to steal automobiles, tractors, and other motorized machines, and meet regularly at big "Ceremonies" where they smoke dope, dance, and engage in tractor-pulling contests.  License plates are used for currency.  As in so many SF stories, a major theme of "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" is paradigm shift, and this motorized Indian civilization is in the midst of change; as no new machines are being built, the stock of cars, trucks etc., is diminishing, and the tribes are relying more and more on horses.  Society is changing in other ways, too, women getting more sexually provocative, for example.

Our narrator is Billy-Bob Chevrolet; other characters have names like "Freddy-in-the-Hollow," "Elmo John Deere" and "Simon Red Bulldozer."  Billy-Bob is a prominent member of this barbaric society; over the course of the story he is called upon to adjudicate disputes between two feuding groups, for example.  The plot of the story concerns an event that triggers radical social change ("At noon, everybody's life changed forever"): the appearance at one of the Ceremonies of a headstrong woman, the most beautiful woman Billy-Bob has ever seen, Mary Margaret Road-Grader.  Early in the story Waldrop showed us that women in this society are confined to such roles as whore and member of a big man's harem, but MMRG insists on being treated as a man, demanding to be allowed to enter a tractor pull; her demands lead to women being allowed into Councils and other social and political functions, and the narrator is instrumental in ushering in this social change.

The last third or so of the story describes the tractor pull in which Mary Margaret Road-Grader proves the equal of the best of the pullers because she has a machine which is particularly large and in particularly good condition.  ("No one had seen one in years, except maybe as piles of rust on the roadside.")  She might have won it all, but a disgruntled misogynist shoots at her during a close contest; Billy-Bob saves MMRG (and she later becomes his wife), but the bloodshed hastens still more social change--seeing them as too dangerous, the Indians cease holding the Ceremonies and the focus of their economy evolves away from the raiding of motorized vehicles and towards trade. 

Waldrop does a good job with the pacing and the action scenes, and deals with the intellectual material in an engagingly ambiguous way.  Is "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" a celebration of women's liberation and societal progress?  Maybe, but our narrator Billy-Bob, even though he bears some responsibility for the evolution of his society into something less violent and more inclusive of women, makes clear in the end of the story that he thinks that the changes, on the whole, have been for the worse.  And Mary Margaret's success is founded on less-than-admirable stereotypical female tactics (deceit and exploitation of her sexual attractiveness.)  And what about Waldrop's depiction of the lifestyle of the tribes?  To what extent does he expect us to admire their violent sexist society?  "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" reminds us of a tension we see in progressive thought: at the same time people on the left demand social and political equality, many of them also glamourize non-Western societies in which women have far less equality than in the Western societies progressives are always condemning. 

Thumbs up for a well-constructed story which plays with ideas in a provocative way.

In his intro, Waldrop describes how "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" came to him in a flash while listening to Simon and Garfunkel, and talks a little about his career and his relationship with Damon Knight; he also suggests that the best story of 1976 was Jake Saunders' "Back to the Stone Age;" Waldrop thinks Saunders' story should have won the Nebula in '77.  (In the event, Charles L. Grant took the prize for "A Crowd of Shadows," which I blogged about back in 2014.)  

"Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" (1976)

This one first appeared in Nickelodeon, a fanzine that was noted for its nude centerfolds and which lasted two issues.  It is easy to see why "Ugly Chickens" and "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" debuted in prestigious hard cover original anthologies and "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" first saw publication in a zine with a centerfold featuring two dudes I never heard of--it is a painfully labored and gimmicky joke story, a pastiche of old comedy films like those of the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy, and a spoof of and homage to late 1950s rock and roll.

Much of the text of the 16-page story consists of Waldrop's (admittedly convincing--Waldrop is obviously very familiar with this material and clearly worked hard on this story) efforts to reproduce in print Marx Brothers' dialogue ("Whatsa matter us?") and Laurel and Hardy/Abbott and Costello slapstick ("The car roared past, whipping their hats off...They bent to pick them up and bumped heads.")  I love Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello, but reading a literal textual interpretation of their routines is nothing like watching their performances, and gets tedious pretty quickly.  (The Marx Brothers I am not that keen on in any case.)

Anyway, the plot revolves around the fact that the three comedy teams have to get to a snowbound Iowa in time to stop a travelling tour of popular musicians--caricatures of the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, and Buddy Holly--from getting on a doomed airplane.  It is implied that the comedians have been sent on this mission by God or Fate.

Gotta give this lame derivative gag story a big thumbs down.  I find cheap, lazy and annoying that humor that consists of just rehashing some other work (like the parody fairy tales you see in the Bullwinkle show or EC comics, or when Homer Simpson is the Prisoner or the South Park kids star in a Dickens adaptation), anyway, and "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" isn't funny or interesting, and if Waldrop is trying to pull the old heartstrings by referring to the tragic death of the young musicians, he fails because the whole story is so silly and boring.

In his intro to the story, Waldrop talks about his career and the process of writing and selling "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" and reminds us that for people his age (Waldrop was born in 1946) the plane crash that killed the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, and Buddy Holly is as moving and memorable as the moon landing and the murder of JFK.

In our own 21st century, "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" would reemerge in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy. 

**********

"The Ugly Chickens" and "Mary Margaret Road-Grader" are good science fiction stories that have humor as one component, but are carried to success by effective pacing and plotting and well-written scenes and the employment of traditional SF elements like paradigm shifts and speculations about science and the future--the humor doesn't get in the way of the story's literary virtues or SF themes.  But "Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me" consists almost entirely of repetitive derivative material, the same goop again and again just piled up so it leaves no room for anything else, anything truly affecting or interesting, making the story a tedious slog and undermining any pathos the story of young ambitious people tragically dying in an accident might have had.

Maybe I'm ending this blog post on a sour note, but two out of three isn't bad, so it is possible that we'll read more Waldrop in the future.