Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em

Bubble Mum and
the Beautiful Dreamers

Wild Cards - Texas Hold 'Em
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765390592

So here we are at the 26th of the George R. R. Martin edited Wild Cards mosaic novels, Texas Hold ‘Em. Now, I’m usually quite positive and enthusiastic about pretty much all of the Wild Cards novels, which I’ve been reading since they first started in the 1980s and, this time too, I’m going to be just as enthusiastic. I do though... and this is quite unusual for me in terms of the series in general... have one, possibly three, slight criticisms. I’ll get to the other ones in due course but the first one is based purely on my expectations and it is this...

Since, I think, Tor Books have been publishing the later novels (and, I think, reprints of some of the earlier novels), they have kind of retroactively bunched both these and all the old ones into clusters of  named story arcs. Now the previous ‘trilogy’ was called The Fort Freak Triad and it was pretty heavy and dramatic for all the active players in the contemporary Wild Card universe (and you can read my reviews of it here, here and here). It started off soft and then got really heavy, very quickly by the end of the second volume. This current trilogy, which is the last of a trilogy called The America Triad, started off with a very dramatic and moving story promising lots of future consequences for some of the characters, called Mississippi Roll (reviewed here) and then went full steam ahead to a completely unrelated time travel story for the next volume, called Low Chicago (reviewed by me here). Now, I commented at the time that I was going to assume that, like the last trilogy, the final tome in that sequence would bring all the loose ends from these two together and close out the trilogy as recognisably a single arc. Well... I’m wondering just who is it is imposing these collective cluster titles on the books now because, frankly, this third volume really has nothing much to do with either of the previous two novels. So, there you go... that’s one grumble.

Okay, so the plot set up is very simple for this one. The Amazing Bubbles, who went through such a hard time at the end of the last trilogy, has been talked by her Deuce daughter Adesina, into being one of her high school joker jazz band’s chaperones for the national jazz band competition finals in Texas. This book covers just under a week of the incidents that happen to the kids and the competing bands while they are staying at the hotel for the competition and, perhaps somewhat predictably, deals almost solely with the issues surrounding ‘joker prejudice’ and is pretty much, in some ways, dealing with exactly the same kind of not-so-much-of-a-stretch metaphors that the original 1960s The Uncanny X-Men comics were dealing with when Stan Lee first created them. And... well I have to say that it’s a very light and frothy, for the most part, mosaic tale with the various writers concentrating on certain characters in mostly short bursts and then handing over the next crossover of characters to the next person before returning back to them... and most of the writers span the whole length of the novel with just a couple of exceptions.

Now, I usually like the lighter, whimsical stories in the Wild Cards universe and they are often a refreshing and welcome respite from some of the heavier issues but, in all honesty, this does somehow give this particular tome a kind of ‘young adult’ vibe and, well, I normally wouldn’t be caught dead reading something written especially for such a dubiously titled section of the audience. This novel is great fun and that’s fine but... it just feels like there’s absolutely nothing at stake. In the last ‘trilogy’ the whole world was almost obliterated and even in the previous volume in this trilogy, the whole world was at risk of being completely rewritten. Heck, even Mississippi Roll, which was much more a lighter tale, was extremely moving and you cared about the characters because the stakes to them personally were quite high. Here, the stakes are... I dunno... maybe trying to win a competition and trying to figure out teenage hormones, I guess. Which, frankly, makes the big finale, set piece battle of the novel seem kinda superfluous.

I did enjoy the inclusion of Creighton, the shape shifting detective who is ‘popped’ over by Popinjay to help clear up the ‘behind the scenes’ sabotage at the competition. I love the fact that he often uses old movie stars to base his character on so when he changes to Dwight Frye, the James Arness incarnation of The Thing (From Another World) and the William Powell version of Nick Charles from The Thin Man films, it’s always a pleasure to read his antics. And there are some great comic moments too when he has to impersonate Bubbles and babysit her grounded daughter while she has to go and take care of some business herself. This is not a bad novel by any stretch and, certainly, there are no really bad Wild Cards novels... but it’s possibly the most trivial of the series for sure.

So, as I said before, the story has a big action set piece at the end of it and, don’t get me wrong, it’s a pleasure to read. It involves Creighton who has gotten so drunk in his impersonation of The Thin Man that he has morphed into Mighty Joe Young and is rampaging his way towards The Alamo and, well, the way he’s stopped from obliterating this historical landmark is something that I’ll just say that anyone who is a fan of the original version of that particular movie (I’ve not seen the remake and don’t even talk to me about that) will absolutely love and applaud. And I don’t know why I didn’t see it coming even sooner than I did because it’s frankly the only solution that would do in this case. I have the original movie on Blu Ray now so I’ll probably revisit it sometime later this year and do a review here.

However, although this sequence is, again, a joy to read... the whole thing felt like it was just tacked on because the writers or possibly editor felt like they needed to have some kind of big ‘potential carnage’ scene at the end and, it doesn’t really have any consequences to do with the rest of the novel at all. It’s just a piece of spectacle similar to what Hollywood might add on to the end of a film to make it seem a little more punchy. However, brilliant as it is... it really doesn’t add anything to the book and, in all fairness, with so little at stake, there doesn’t seem to be much point to any of it.

So there you have it. Texas Hold ‘Em is another, hugely entertaining tome in the Wild Cards shared universe but, in all honesty, it’s also one of the worst and, almost certainly the least relevant of the series. Regular readers may like to know that there are no new Croyd Crenson sightings in this book but the character is referred to at least twice over the course of the story. However, with only a few Aces in sight and mostly just a bunch of jokers and the odd deuce, there’s not really a lot going on in this one. However, if you are a regular reader of the series, like me, then of course you will love it and want to read it for sure. So that’s me done and I’ll hopefully get around to reading the next novel in the series - which jumps back right to the beginning of the series but taken from a British viewpoint - sometime fairly soon.