Wild Cards - Aces Full

Deck N’ Roll

Wild Cards - Aces Full
Edited by George R R Martin
Tor Books
ISBN 9781250396891

Warning: A couple of spoilers in one or two of these short story summaries.

Well, here we go again. It’s my pleasure to review Aces Full, the 34th of the Wild Cards novels, a series of absolutely wonderful science fiction mosaic novels which I’ve been reading since they first came out in the 1980s, put out by various publishers at various times... sometimes with very long, many year gaps between volumes or, as just recently for the last decade or so, at a rate of about one a year. 

Now all of these books (asides from one which was only in shops for about a week before the company went bust and was hard to get ahold of... I have a signed copy because I bought the writer’s last copy on ebay, which was a really important story in terms of a couple of the regular characters, old and new) are basically short stories which interlock and tell one overreaching arc by the way they fit together in each volume. Asides from the one I mentioned above, there are two exceptions to this in that two of the collections are reprints of internet published short stories which were put up on various publishers’ websites, so they don’t follow one single arc. 

Now, skip this if you’ve read it here many times before but the Wild Cards novels explore an alternative history of the Earth after an alien virus hit the planet on September 15th 1946 and gave the us the legacy of a species which can turn a Wild Card at any point... they either draw an Ace (giving them super powers), a Joker (giving them hideous mutations), a Natural (no change whatsoever) or the Black Queen (death). And so the history of the world since that fateful Wild Card Day is reshaped and re-lensed through the experiences of these various generations of characters.

And this latest volume, Aces Full, is one of these internet reprint collections but, let me assure you, this doesn’t make any difference to the quality of these stories. And, of course, I’m not a reader of stuff online so... all of these shorts are completely new to me. And all of them, as I read each one, was my new favourite of this book... something which I suspect I would have experienced no matter what order these things were in. In other words, every story was a delight to read and I had an absolute blast, once again, with this latest Wild Cards tome (which also, in a couple of the stories, represents the British strand of Aces and Jokers too).

Okay, so here’s an overview of the stories in this volume. 

The Button Man and the Murder Tree by Cherie Priest
Set in Chicago of 1971, a hit man has his Wild Card turn and he becomes a fungal, mushroom joker. This is how he is sent to kill and old flame and how there is one last punchline left, while he finds himself trying to flee his profession, because his mob bosses don’t tolerate jokers. 

The Thing About Growing Up in Jokertown by Carrie Vaughn
A nice ‘Joker’s day out’ as a teenage joker who has mongoose fangs, called Rikki (presumably after Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi character) and her joker friends go on a nervous trip outside of their Jokertown ghetto to Central Park... and end up assising the police catch a teleporting, criminal Ace.

The Flight of Morpho Girl by Caroline Spector and Bradley Denton
Morpho Girl is the post chrysalis butterfly-like Joker/Ace state of Adesina, still living with her foster mum The Amazing Bubbles. However, her friend Ghost is abducted and so, while her mother is away, she and Ghost’s adoptive father, the Ace Rusty, go to get her back. Also, via various diary entries which Adesina is reading, crosscut against the main action, we actually get a proper ‘origin story’ for The Amazing Bubbles (outside what we already knew about her from stuff like the American Heroes reality TV show in the Wild Cards world).

Naked, Stoned and Stabbed by Bradley Denton
This one also features Adesina and The Amazing Bubbles, as they help out a roadie Ace for The Who as the concert that Roger Daltrey and co are playing gets attacked by Russian mobsters (possibly the same Russian mobsters that Adesina also got involved with in the previous story in this collection). 

The City That Never Sleeps by Walton Simons
Set in New York, New York of December 1986 this follows the events where Spector (aka Demise), killed The Astronomer on the Wild Cards Day catastrophe from one of the earlier novels in the 1980s.  He gets involved with a guy who hires him to kill mob members. However, his life is saved in a hit that goes wrong by none other than the constantly changing , in appearance and power (Joker or Ace he never knows), fan favourite Croyd (aka The Sleeper). His new employers hire Demise to kill Croyd but... Spector has never had a friend before. I loved the moment in this one where Demise goes to the cinema and watched Gene Kelley in An American In Paris.

Long Is The Way by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker
Jonathan ‘Bugsy’ Hive goes to interview Zoe Harris from the Black Trump cycle of novels that were published in the 1990s.So we finally get to see what happened to Zoe after all this time and learn how this ‘terrorist’ has managed to redeem herself somewhat. This flashes back, during their interview, to a certain incident soon after the events of those books, which set her off on a new course. This story also involves Croyd (who, of course, never gets old due to the constant changes and hibernation periods... and who has been in the books in all the various decades that the novels cover from 1946 to the present day). And, small spoiler, we find out that Croyd had fathered a son at one point.

Berlin is Never Berlin by Marko Kloos
This one is a body guard job for Khan, the fierce tiger looking Joker/Ace as he tries to protect a social media teenage influencer, the daughter of a mob boss, only to have her kidnapped on his watch. This is the story of how he gets her back and, in just a little way, redeems himself at the end of the tale.

Hammer and Tongs and a Rusty Nail by Ian Tregillis
Wally, aka Rustbelt, aka Rusty, gets involved in running to be the new Jokertown mayor but uncovers a real estate plot in the process. This one about one of the more ‘intelligence challenged’ Aces is another showing how righteous and genuinely good this particular character can be. Another winner (as are all the stories in this collection).

Ripple Effects by Laura J. Mixon
Flame Ace Candle, with his security company who are currently protecting the golden trumpet formerly belonging to the late Ace Louis Armstrong (as it gets played during a tour of jazz concerts), gets pulled back to the past by a new threat. He and his friends and colleagues try to stop one of the most powerful, criminal Aces that ever tried to play with the world. 

Skin Deep by Alan Brennert
Trina is a joker and this wonderful story is set in the 1960s. We flash back to how she came to be who she is from the original Wild Card Day in 1946 and how she ended up working in a bar in a Joker neighbourhood. And then, as soon as Rod Serling enters the picture, I knew exactly where this one was going... but that’s not a bad thing because they really went for it here. So this tale presents an alternate origin of Rod’s episode of The Twilight Zone, named by many a fan as a favourite, Eye Of The Beholder. And Trina ends up playing the main nurse on whom all the other people apart from two in the episode (and if you know the episode, you’ll know exactly which two characters) have their make-up based on. Serling is well written and the story ends up with Trina’s involvement in the filming of the episode being a very positive experience for her. 

Hearts Of Stone by Emma Newman
St Albans, England, September 2005 and a lethal, teenage Ace called Stonemaiden (who can’t help turning to stone anybody she touches) wants to join the British Secret Service division of Aces known as The Silver Helix. This one is an absolute cracker of a tale done in the style of something written by John Le Carre or Len Deighton and will keep you guessing as to the motivations of the various characters up until the end. 

Grow by Carrie Vaughn
Set in Spring of 1994 in Leeds, this is a lighthearted origin tale of a new Ace, nicknamed the Towering Teenager by the press, who tests out her new powers to calamitous effect... bringing her infamy but also an opportunity to join up with The Silver Helix. 

And that’s it for this batch of tales. As I said, there’s no overreaching arc to Aces Full with bookends and ‘between the tales’ glue to sew it all together with this one but, once again, with Wild Cards - Aces Full, I was completely suckered in and hooked on every story here and, fans of the series will certainly not be disappointed.