Where can I find this Howard Waldrop novella?

Cafe Society
1

Howard Waldrop, one of my favorite AH writers, has published a novella, A Better World’s In Birth, set in a world were there was a Europe-wide socialist revolution in the mid-19th-Century – http://www.goldengryphon.com/betterworld-frame.html. But it’s been published in a limited edition of 500 signed copies! I don’t want to collect it, I just want to read it! (Partly to see how it compares to Back in the USSA, by Eugene Byrne and Kim Newman – http://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/byrne.html – where the point-of-divergence is a socialist revolution in the U.S. in 1917.) Arrggghhh! Does anybody know if it’s been collected in an anthology or something?

Why does Waldrop do this kind of thing anyway? “Waldrop’s work is invariably out of print and routinely hard to find.” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Waldrop Dude needs an agent.

2

Nobody knows? :frowning:

3

Um, because Golden Gryphon will pay Waldrop far more money than he can get from selling it to a magazine?

And then he can collect additional payments if it does get reprinted in an anthology, whereas it’s worth much less if it’s in an easily available cheap edition first before it’s published as a high-end hardback.

Waldrop may or may not have an agent, and most agents won’t bother with short fiction in any case, but any agent who told him to do it any other way should be fired immediately.

4

But has it been, yet? Does anybody know?

5

Sorry, I didn’t realize it was a 2003 book. I just assumed it was something brand new.

The Locus index (www.locusmag.com) doesn’t show a reprint in 2003 or 2004. However, they don’t do 2005 until the end of the year.