Among the stories here is "You Could Go Home Again," in which Thomas Wolfe, having survived the brain disease that killed him in our world, returns from the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, aboard an airship where fellow voyager Fats Waller provides musical interludes, to a United States governed by technocrats. "Fin de Cyclé" is the story of how a movie made by Georges Méliès, assisted by Alfred Jarry, Marcel Proust and Pablo Picasso, rouses the French public to demand justice in the case of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus and helps to free him from Devil's Island.

Various young characters from late 1950s and early 1960s TV programs and science-fiction movies confront the Cuban missile crisis in "The Other Real World," while Richard Wagner abandons his operatic ambitions to become one of the forefathers of the Peoples' Federated States of Europe in "A Better World's in Birth!" "Flatfeet!" combines reflections on Osvald Spengler's classic The Decline of the West and American artist Thomas Cole's series of paintings titled "The Course of Empire" with a number of historical parallels and Keystone Kops-style antics in what the author calls in his afterword "one of the most jam-packed stories I ever wrote." In "Major Spacer in the 21st Century!" Waldrop manages to cover the history of much of 20th-century communications technology in realistic detail.

The longest story in the collection is "A Dozen Tough Jobs," a Nebula and World Fantasy Award finalist; here Waldrop takes the mythological figure of Hercules and sets him down in early-20th-century Mississippi along with an African-American sidekick appropriately named I.O. Lace. Readers unfamiliar with Greek mythology (although even the completely uninformed might still have been viewers of the 1990s TV series featuring Kevin Sorbo as Hercules) can read this novella straight as a tale of race relations, rural poverty and class distinctions centered on the convict Houlka Lee; those who know the old myths will delight in the meticulously worked-out parallels between Waldrop's story and the fabled Twelve Labors of Hercules.

A master who doesn't repeat himself

One trap in writing alternative histories is the gratuitous story, the "what if Attila the Hun had howitzers" kind of tale. A somewhat better alternative, in an age when ignorance of history abounds, is concentrating on major historical figures and events, ones familiar to most people, or at least likely to be known about by many readers. Howard Waldrop usually ignores these alternatives in favor of focusing on more obscure, although still important and influential, cultural figures and social movements. In the process, he offers insight into some of history's more overlooked streams and also manages to draw parallels between his imagined worlds and "reality," while capturing both the undertone of regret and the sense of precariousness that seem essential elements of alternate history.

Waldrop is also an expert at anchoring his stories in gritty, realistic detail. "Fin de Cyclé," for example, offers readers a mini-course on various film techniques later to become standard ways of shooting a movie, while "A Dozen Tough Jobs," even with the exaggerations that are an essential part of any American "tall tale," comes close to making the fabled labors of Hercules seem plausible.

Other delights of this collection are Waldrop's afterwords to each story, in which he discusses what inspired him and fills in some additional details, which will help readers appreciate how much thought and research have gone into creating these pieces. For "The Other Real World," he offers a glossary of TV characters, musical selections and other cultural tidbits that are part of the story, while the afterword to "You Could Go Home Again" gives readers both a list of great music and some comments about the nearly forgotten Technocracy movement of the early 1930s. Waldrop, with an apparently limitless range of interests and the ability to tell his stories in a nearly infinite number of narrative voices, is, quite simply, one of fantastic literature's treasures. Readers unacquainted with his work should remedy this lack immediately with this thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding volume and its predecessor.