An interesting collection of Waldrop's collaborations, with a cover I would never have guessed was by Freas. It reminded me a bit of Pohl's The Wonder Effect collecting his short stories with Cyril Kornbluth. But where only Pohl was around to talk about the collaboration process, every story in Custer's Last Jump is preceded by a note from Waldrop on how the story came to be, and followed by a note from the co-author on their version of the events. The collection is also in part a celebration of a collective of Texas SF authors who arose at roughly the same time.

History is a recurring element. Custer's Last Jump involves Custer, dirigibles, airplanes, and the parachute jump of the title, told in a very dry matter of fact series of historical selections, with bibliography. A popular story but it was an idea dragged out much too long for my tastes. Most of the other stories are good, albeit mostly downbeat. One Horse Town retells the story of the Trojan Horse from three temporal viewpoints -- a soldier at the event, Homer, and Schliemann -- with some intersections in time. A Voice and Bitter Weeping is the seed for Waldrop and Saunder's novel The Texas-Israeli War:1999. My favorite is Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole, which tells what happened next to Frankenstein's monster in the Arctic, cleverly mixing together multiple real versions of inner Earths. The other stories are already fading in memory.

Recomended as a solid interesting collection. ( )