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. 

Wild Cards - House Rules

Loveday To Be Here

Wild Cards - House Rules 
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Assisted by Melinda M. Snodgrass
Harper Voyager
ISBN 9780008283612

House Rules is, by my count, the 33rd novel in the Wild Cards series of books I’ve been reading since the 1980s. This one was published and purchased by me last year and so, apologies for not getting to this review sooner but my book pile was a little more unmanageable than usual this year. 

This one opens, as did at least one of the other recent ones (if memory serves) with a three page summation of the main points of the Wild Cards world and, if you’re not familiar with the story of the Wild Cards virus from the planet Takis, then a very bare bones summation may be... a horrible alien virus swept the Earth in the 1940s and you and your future generations either die when the Wild Card gene pops up in your natural life cycle, or you are a nat (normal person, unaffected), a mutated Joker, a super-powered being (an Ace) or something in between those last two (a Deuce). But you wouldn’t want to start on the books this late in the series anyway so, go back because, the Earth has its own alternate evolution from the 1940s onward as a result and the various writers who create these ‘mosaic novels’ have created an entire history of this world leading to the present day.

And this one takes place on an island off the coast of Cornwall called Keun, protected by a disappearing causeway when the tide is high. Here a very rich and mysterious ace called Jago Branok has rebuilt a famous manor called Loveday House. And every month or so he invites different guests he’s researched for a weekend party in the house. But you don’t want to go out on the grounds at night and you certainly don’t want ot be wandering the corridors of this vast house alone without one of the servants to guide you... you may find yourself a little lost.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, that the Wild Cards books found themselves digging into the concept of a multiverse and the unique thing about Loveday House, which is a really dangerous place to the curious and unescorted, is that it is a hub for different worlds which share the same point in time and multidimensional space as this version of Loveday. And, of course, because this is a Wild Cards book, it doesn’t once revert to having multiple heroes and villains from multiple dimensions meet each other in battle (other than one special ‘spectre’, I’ll leave it at that)... instead, the idea is explored by a group of different stories, each taking place at a different party at Loveday... all woven together by the bookends and linking narratives told from the viewpoint of Mr. Gary Bushorn, in story excerpts by Stephen Leigh. Leigh also writes the story of the first party which Gary attends, called Promises Redux. Gary then, after some shenanigans, stays on at the house to be the dance master for Jago and is, of course, the constant story arc observer that weaves through the rest of the stories.

In this story we also meet the butler, who looks like, sounds like and is called Hitchcock... rescued from a parallel world where, presumably, Hitchcock was not a director. To quote Caroline Spector’s later story, “‘Good evening,’ he said, drawing out evening...”, which is exactly how I do my Alfred Hitchcock impression in real life. 

Now there aren’t that many appearances by known aces but there are a few which will delight readers of the previous novels... so Dr. Bradley Finn, the centaur joker, is one of the guests in the first story. Topper and Ink also appear in one of the stories here too and... oh, wait, I’ll get to Herne The Hunter in a minute.

The second story, Lady Sri Extricates Herself, Emerging Not Entirely Unscathed by Mary Anne Mohanra, features an ace I’m pretty sure we’ve met before and is another wonderful story set in the house, where things get kind of out of hand (and things getting out of hand usually means at least one person meets their death at the house, in this particular tome). This one’s a really delightful story about embracing love in unexpected places, too.

Next up is Caroline Spector’s Bah, Humbug, Murder... a Christmas tale which is also a sort of drawing room murder mystery, which is always a favourite around that season. This one also includes Constance, the Ace powered dress designer who we first met in a story where she killed one of the Kray twins in the Wild Cards version of the UK in the 1960s. So, she’s quite old now at the time of this story but she’s certainly no less fun and, of course, solves the murder like an Ace version of Miss Marple. 

After this we have Two Lovedays by Peter Newman, where the owner and builder of the original house, at least one of her multiversal versions, sets ace against ace (including a few you may also remember from the British set cycle of Wild Cards novels) and nearly succeeds in her power play. 

The fifth tale is called The Nautilus Pattern by Kevin Andrew Murphy which tells its story from the viewpoint of the owner of the local antique shop and his wife, an ex-porn star especially remembered for appearing with Jokers in Joker-porn movies in her youth. This one does indeed include Herne The Hunter and said wife who was his ex, has believed him dead all these years since the battle of The Rox, which involved Bloat, who readers of the earlier books will certainly remember.* 

The sixth and final tale before the concluding bookends is Raw Deal by Peader Ó Guilín. This is probably the nastiest of the stories but it’s no less entertaining and, well, the cost of this one certainly threatens to rock the status quo of Loveday House and Lord Jago Branok’s parties. This one also mentions an alternate reality Hitchcock film called The Fish (as opposed to The Birds) and, I for one, would like to know what establishment Jetman is referring to when he says that some unnamed place is “the best comic shop in London” because, frankly, very few comic shops in my country’s capital manage to stock a decent supply of back issues these days. 

And what can I say, really, other than that which I say whenever I read a new Wild Cards novel... it’s an absolute joy to read. There are actually no dud stories here again and, yeah, no matter if the writer is new to me or a seasoned favourite, it always captures my imagination and leads me back into the world of the Wild Card characters in the most addictive way possible. I had an absolutely wonderful time with this one again but, asides from my usual warning about House Rules not being a jump on point (you should always read these novels from the very start, I would say), then fans of the Wild Cards novels as a whole should really give this one a go. It’s brilliant and I, once again, never wanted it to end.

*Although this is one of those Wild Card books which doesn’t have a Croyd Crenson sighting, this time around... as far as I could tell, anyway.