Wild Cards 31 - Pairing Up

Hearts And Flowers

Wild Cards Vol 31
Pairing Up
edited by George R. R. Martin
and Melinda Snodgrass
Harper Collins
ISBN: 9780008410667

Warning: Some light spoilers

Wow... I’ve been reading the Wild Cards series of novels since they first started getting published in the mid-1980s and we’re already up to volume 31, subtitled Pairing Up. The publication history has been spotty over the decades, with various sequences in the continuing story, which spans generations of characters, being published by different publishers at infrequent intervals. For the last ten or so years though, the books have been coming out fairly regularly, about one a year and I’m really pleased this is the case because, frankly, the Wild Cards novels are amazing.

A lot of the novels are mosaic novels, single story arcs with different chapters about overlapping characters told by several writers dealing with different people and aspects of the story. There’s even an occasional ‘single writer’ novel. This one, like maybe only a couple of the other novels, is more of a collection of short stories by different writers (some new writers to the series, some old, as has always been the case), which don’t make up a single arc but, instead, are stand alone stories.

Now, I’m guessing the popularity... or rather the frequency... of the released novels just lately has something to do with the film/TV rights being worked on by different production companies over the last 10 years or more and, they are trying to keep the brand in the public consciousness for when a TV show finally happens. Now, I have to admit that while I think a series of interlocking, big budget mini series would be the best possible outcome for a moving picture adaptation of the books... the more I hear about it, the less I like. My understanding is the history and original characters of the series are getting a raw deal in favour of stories set in contemporary times and, yeah... I don’t like that idea. We need Jetboy, Croyd, The Great And Powerful Turtle, Golden Boy, Dr. Tachyon, Blythe, Fortunato, Mark Meadows, Chrysalis and Mack The Knife etc to be in the show and set in their respective eras. I’m very worried about the way a TV version could go now, truth be told.

But, I can’t overlook that a good side effect of that, if I’m right, is more Wild Cards novels. The stories in Pairing Up are all set in different decades... kind of starting a little later than I would have liked but, still. I’m not going to over cook this review and I don’t want to give out any heavy spoilers so, a quick run down of each story instead. Following an introduction which explains the Wild Cards virus and how it released the Aces, Jokers and Deuces... not to mention a heavy death rate and a load of people, Nats, who are unaffected by the continuing legacy of the virus (which is something I don’t remember them recapping like this in the books before, or at least recently... so, hmm), we have the following stories...

1. Trudy Of The Apes by Kevin Andrew Murphy
Setting 1957
This one is about Trudy, a teleporting jewel thief going on a treasure hunt and seducing Golden Boy himself to be the patsy that gets her the gold. There are some nice details in the story... as there are in all the Wild Cards novels to be fair, they are full of ideas and sly winks... but stuff like the fact that Braun is the current TV show version of Tarzan is a nice one and a lot of the action takes place on location for that show. I got a bit bent out of shape when Queen Azura is mentioned as being a character from Flash Gordon, since she doesn’t show up until the second serial, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars (from before the virus hit and reviewed here) but then I realised the character who mentioned this could well have just been talking about the original Alex Raymond newspaper strip instead.

2. Cyrano d’Escargot by Christopher Rowe
Setting: 1981
Next up is a story about the super intelligent snail joker who was a big part of the plot of Joker Moon (reviewed here) and how he first meets his actor friend, who he hires to help ‘Cyrano’ his way into the heart of the Ace Chrysalis.

3. In The Forests Of The Night by Marko Kloos
Setting: 2010
This one is the tale of a sympathetic half human, half tiger bodyguard to a high ranking criminal and what happens when he lets one of the opposition, a lady ace assassin (who I’m sure I’ve met before in the stories and I can’t remember anything significant about her) get too close to him, romantically.

4. The Wounded Heart by Melinda M. Snodgrass
Setting: 2013
Veteran Wild Cards writer Snodgrass continues the adventures of Franny from what is now know as the Mean Streets triad of Wild Cards novels. It deals specifically with that characters emotional damage from High Stakes (reviewed here) in terms of the terrible decisions and consequences of that adventure, not to mention the truth about his parental legacy. It also deals with his current girlfriend and the next one coming along. For regular fans of the series, there’s also a quick, blink and you’ll miss it, Croyd sighting.

5. Echoes from a Canyon wall by Bradley Denton
Setting: 2019
The Deuce Adesina’s Auntie Ink is sent to protect a newish Ace that a sinister force wants to control... falling in love with a guy for the first time (as opposed to her usual ladies) and trying to keep him alive while waiting for Carnifex or Midnight Angel to come and get him to safety.

6. The Long Goodbye by Walton Simons
Settings: 2020, 1913 and 1911.
This one takes place in flashbacks from 2020 to Chicago in 1911-1913 as shapeshifting Ace detective Jerry Strauss is stranded there with a few others, building a new movie studio, one successful movie after another... and waiting for Croyd to get them back to their own time. Regular readers will realise this takes place sometime during the adventures of the various characters in the Wild Cards novel Low Chicago (reviewed here). There’s a lovely moment in this one where Jerry screen tests his girlfriend and you realise straight away he’s recreating the screen test between Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray from the original version of King Kong (reviewed here).

7. What’s Your Sign? By Gwenda Bond and Peter Newman
Setting: 2021
This is about the accidental meeting and ‘dating for charity’ of an Ace who can change herself to any astrology sign and another Ace who has the unfortunate happenstance of having his name chosen by the public for charity and ends up with the monicker Hero McHeroface (and if you don’t get the joke, Google Boaty McBoatface and you’ll know the score).

8. The Wolf and the Butterfly by David Anthony Durham
Setting: 2023
This last tale is what happens when Adesina meets a new Ace who is figuring out still how to control his inner... and not so inner... Wolf. It’s a nice conclusion to the volume.

So, just a couple more comments. One is that, if you haven’t figured it out by now, the stories in Pairing Up are all stories about... well, people doing just that. They are romantic tales... albeit also appropriately action packed... and are as close to the constantly warm beating heart of the Wild Cards universe as possible. However, buyer beware (so to speak)... they’re not all happy endings. Over half of the stories here don’t end in the best places for the characters but, at least there are significant strings left in place for most of them (not all, alas) to be more happily resolved in some future stories.

The other thing I want to say is... and this may be a boring statement, not to mention obvious to fans of the series but... there’s not a bad story in the bunch. The Wild Cards novels are never hit and miss, that’s for sure and Pairing Up is no different. After just a page or two into each story I was completely hooked into each set of characters again and sailed through this book in a quite pacey fashion. My only regret is that I now have at least a year to wait until the next time around. As always, I give this book my heartiest recommendation to fans of the series and remind those who have never read them before that, despite it having a brief explanation of the world at the heart of these books in an intro, if you are a newcomer you would be better served starting right at the beginning of the volumes rather than trying to play catch up from here. You’re missing half the story behind the emotional context of the some of the characters if you do try and jump in at this point.