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 - Sleeper Straddle

Croyd And Seek

Wild Cards
Sleeper Straddle
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Bantam Books
ISBN 9780593357835

This one’s all about Croyd.

Wild Cards - Sleeper Straddle is the 32nd of the Wild Card mosaic novels that began releasing onto an unsuspecting public in 1987. That’s when I started reading them and I’ve managed to keep up to date over the years. After a few long slumps in publication, not to mention a few different publishing houses, the series seems to be going stronger than it ever has, with a new novel published almost every year for the last decade or more.

The basic set up from the first volume is about the Wild Cards virus from the planet Takis, which fell into the wrong hands and was detonated over New York in the 1940s... when local hero Jet Boy failed to stop an evil villain’s plot involving the stolen, alien virus. What happened next is that the world was instantly affected. Many turned ‘the Black Queen’ and died, many became Jokers (hideous and varied mutations) and a few became Aces, receiving various superhero powers. And there were also Deuces... a kind of cross between and Joker and an Ace... although even Jokers have some kind of minor power, usually related to the nature of their mutation (like waking up from a coma in the body of a centaur).

And the human gene pool was forever tainted by the virus, so when you grow up and reach puberty (or sometimes later) your ‘card will turn’ and you’ll either stay a Nat (a natural, unaffected person) or you’ll as likely become a Joker or possibly an Ace or, if you’re unlucky (or lucky, depending on your point of view) you’ll just die.

And the series goes from the 1940s and brings us right up to the modern day, telling tales of a large range of characters throughout the history of the Wild Cards universe... mostly these days contemporary to the year the novel is released but sometimes they’ll still look back (as this latest tome does). And so we get generations of different characters represented with, since it’s an 80 year old history by now, various deaths and new characters cropping up all the time. As you might imagine, the world building in these novels is fantastic.

Also special about these is that they’re rarely a single novel written by one writer (although that has happened at least once). They are collections of stories focusing on different characters by different writers, which almost always link together to give an overreaching story arc to a particular book and also, mini-series of events in a chain of books. So there are trilogies and more of specific themes involving different ‘threats’ to the world, for example. Of course, the writers also die after a while too.

Now this latest volume, Sleeper Straddle, follows the exploits of one of the original, old school characters introduced in the very first book in 1987... Croyd Crenson, aka The Sleeper. And Croyd is well over 80 but doesn’t really age at all... the way the virus affected him back in the 1940s, when he was in school as the virus was released, is quite unique. Basically, whenever Croyd goes to sleep, he goes into a period of hibernation for a number of weeks and wakes up as something totally different... sometimes an Ace, sometimes a Joker, sometimes something in between and with the shadow hanging over him that, one day, he’ll probably draw the Black Queen and die. So Croyd is a... freelancer... a career criminal but on the side of good. When he reaches the end of his cycle of being awake he gets really frantic, keeping himself awake with pills for as long as he can and getting way too paranoid for anyone to cope with. He’s also one of the greatest loved heroes in the Wild Cards universe, from the point of view of the readership and he usually gets at least a mention in any of the novels... mostly just a passing reference or a guest cameo for a part of the story... often called ‘Croyd sightings’ by the readers.

But like I said, this one’s all about Croyd and he was originally created and written about for the series by the late, great, old school science fiction writer Roger Zelazny (who died back in 1995). This volume starts off with a dedication to him and it’s kinda nice the way various writers have kept his Croyd Crenson character alive over the years.

This one comprises seven stand alone stories about various incarnations of Croyd over various years, linked by a binding story which bookends it and also provides long story links from each chapter. That story, Swimmer, Flier, Felon, Spy is by Christopher Rowe and presents a unique challenge for Croyd Crenson. Crenson hires a powerful, fastidious and very secretive, ex-CIA trained Deuce called Tesla (who also has two horns on his head from which he can emit arcs of electricity) to help find himself. In that, when Croyd awoke from his latest sleep, he had split into six different Aces, most of whom think the others are imposters (and want to kill them) and all who are slightly diminished without the other five. So it’s Tesla’s task to locate the various new Croyd’s in the city and try to get them all to meet one night before they start going to sleep again, in an effort to get them all to recombine somehow then they lose consciousness.

Hence, as Tesla plays detective and starts interviewing various people, we get the stories of various incarnations of Croyd and the people he’s encountered, via the person who Tesla is interviewing (or variations of, at any rate). The stories are Days Go By by Carrie Vaughn (set in 1961 in Greenwich Village), The Hit Parade by Cherie Priest (set in 1983), Yin-Yang Split by William F. Wu (set in 1990), Semiotics of the Strong Man by Walter Jon Williams (set in 1999), Party Like It’s 1999 by Stephen Leigh (also set in 1999), The Bloody Eagle by Mary Anne Mohanraj (set in 2003) and The Boy Who Would Be Croyd by Max Gladstone (set in 2019).

And once again it’s a fantastic set of stories and, like the majority of these mosaic novels, there’s not a bad one in the bunch. My personal favourites in this volume were Days Go By, which tells the story of a young joker photographer as she gets out from her abusive relationship (helped by Croyd, who spends a good month or two asleep on her couch after a party) and gets recognition for her own art... and the brilliant Semiotics of the Strong Man. This latter features another old school Ace who never ages from the original first novel, Jack Braun aka Golden Boy. He was an actor in the 50s and from then on but also sold out all his friends in the McCarthy communist witch hunt in the 50s so... yeah, not everybody likes him. It’s a great tale in this one where he meets Croyd in the audience of a film festival in Rome where he is a guest and more shenanigans follow, revolving around an exhibit in a suite of rooms in the same hotel from which the head of an old robot superhero from the early books, Modular Man, is stolen.

But readers will encounter a few old characters. Such as a younger version of Jokertown Police Detective Leo Storgman from the relatively recent Fort Freak trilogy of Wild Cards novels and another story featuring The Oddity... who was originally a woman and two men engaged in a threesome in bed one morning when their cards turned and they became a painful, ever shifting, combined mutation of all three in one body. There are even quick references to people like Thomas Tudbury, aka The Great And Powerful Turtle and, cameos from much loved characters who have also since died in the series, such as Father Squid.

Perhaps my favourite moment was early on in the novel and, like all the Wild Cards stories which... like all good science fiction... comment on, satirise and hold a mirror up to our society, reflects the times we live in. In this case, a biting criticism on ‘wokeness’, it seemed to me, when Croyd refers to Tesla as a Joker and then corrects himself, commenting that these days he’s probably supposed to call Jokers ‘Jacks’.

And, honestly, there’s not much else to say. Like all the Wild Cards mosaic novels, this one is insanely good and presents a plethora of ideas and observations in the most entertaining way possible. Long term readers of the series will almost certainly love Sleeper Straddle but, even people who just want to sample one of the books for the first time might find this one more of a stand alone experience, as most of the characters who are not making their debut here are fairly well explained to new readers. A wonderful book and, as usual, I can’t wait for the next one (which will be out this year apparently... wow, two Wild Card novels in the same year, I don’t think that’s happened since the 1980s).