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).

Wild Cards - Low Chicago

Temporal Temptations

Wild Cards - Low Chicago
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765390561

Warning: Slight spoilers on character appearances in this one if you’re a regular Wild Cards reader.

Low Chicago is the 25th of the long running Wild Cards mosaic novels which have been going, on and off, since the 1980s. If you’ve not read these before they map out a complete alternate history of the world since the Wild Card Virus was released in the Earths atmosphere in the 1940s, dividing the survivors into either Aces (with different superpowers), Jokers (deformed creatures, some of whom can still access superpowers) and the Nats (those somehow unaffected). The virus is passed down from generation to generation throughout history and these novels are seen through the eyes of multiple characters by multiple writers, often given a section of a novel each involving their character with one writer weaving all the bits together to make a coherent whole. George R. R. Martin used to be one of the many contributing writers (and it was his project from day one in the 1980s, from what I remember) but these days he’s usually just listed as editor (not that this isn’t a significant job).

The last decade or so has seen the series divided up and reclassified into trilogies and other sized sections which kinda makes sense when you look back on things. This book is apparently the middle section of one such trilogy, following on directly from the last novel Mississipi Roll (which I reviewed here) but, honestly, I can’t work out what that last one has to do with this one. That being said, the previous 'trilogy' did exactly the same thing to me until I realised how everything was tying together in the third part so... I’m keeping an open mind until I can see how they are going to link this in down the line in the near future. If it hadn’t been for that I would have said that this is a good jumping on point for people who haven't read one of these before but... yeah... I have no idea how this is going to link in later.

The book itself is the usual blend of well written, attention grabbing short stories held together by an overall arc. That arc being a high stakes card game in Chicago played out by rich people with a number of Ace bodyguards in tow. Fans who have been with the series since it’s inception will possibly be interested to know that Jack Braun, aka Golden Boy, is one of those players. I’d never thought about it before but I guess he doesn’t age so much and still looks pretty much the same since we first met him in the 1940/50s. That being said, a few old faces return in this volume because, for the first time that I can remember in Wild Cards history, this book is all about time travel. One of the players, or bodyguards actually, is fan favourite Croyd, who was originally created by the late, great Roger Zelazny from what I can remember but the character has been turning up, off and on, since the first volume. Like certain other characters, he doesn’t get old and die, due to the nature of his ace. Croyd Crenson is also known in the novels as The Sleeper and that’s because he tries to keep himself awake for as many weeks/months possible (getting more and more paranoid the longer he is awake due to the large quantities of pills he pops to keep him alert) before crashing out big time and sleeping for months at a time. The reason he does this is... well... because he never knows who he’s going to wake up as next. His ace is that he draws a new Wild Card every time he goes to sleep... so he knows he’ll either be an ace or a joker (or a combination of both) and he always dreads waking as a joker (at which point he just sleeps it off as quickly as he can).

Anyway, Croyd is at the table, along with many others including another long lived Ace born before the Wild Card extended his life, Nighthawk. And the linking story which pulls all the shorts here together is of Croyd and Nighthawk working together to rescue various people in the room since tragedy struck. A kerfuffle in the room in a hotel meant that Croyd accidentally, by reflex, defended himself with his new powers which he’s still trying to get to grips with... the power to travel in time. He accidentally transports a large number of people and they are all thrown into separate parts of history before the card game... some even before the Wild Card virus infected the Earth in the first place (and some of those by several million years). It’s up to Croyd and Nighthawk to keep dipping back to other times to re-teleport each one out of there before they change history which, given the time storm that starts to occur outside the hotel in the present, may well be a huge problem. And although this sounds like a good starting point to revisit some of the long dead characters from Wild Cards history... the book doesn’t do this as a main agenda and a surprising amount of the stories are, in fact, free of old characters at all. Although, the sequence where Croyd and Nighthawk meet the P. G. Wodehouse characters Jeeves and Wooster seems a bit odd as one would assume they are also fictional characters in the Wild Cards universe?

Anyway, the book uses the various characters stranded for weeks, months or years in another time before Croyd can find them to explore their personal histories in detail and also to craft some entertaining stories where the main character of each story can at least, if they know their history, predict certain events before they happen. Some of the writers also, quite cleverly, do leave history changed at the end of their stories, only to have Croyd and Nighthawk arrive in the next chapter of the linking story and go back to before that character had changed history too. And sometimes not. There’s a wonderful argument in the book about who wrote the famous science fiction story where treading on a butterfly in the past changed all of future history and this gives the novel its basis in terms of where everything is going... not to mention a nice punchline to the perpetual argument in the closing sentence of the novel.

That being said, there is also a lot for long term fans of the series regarding appearances and interaction. For instance, we are reminded that in the Wild Cards universe, Kennedy was still assassinated but Marilyn Monroe went on to live a full and healthy life. That being said, there’s a wonderful set up in this book, in a story which takes place in the Playboy Mansion over the week the magazine was officially launched, that gives us a perfect ‘future character’ if these novels are still being written in 20 or so years time. Asides from this return to the plot threads of an old storyline, we have appearances by fan pleasing characters like The Great And Powerful Turtle, Fortunato and there’s even an appearance by the Joker Brigade Army Sergeant who went on to become the Jokertown priest Father Squid in later years (a character who, when we last left him, was seemingly killed by being turned into a pew by Baba Yaga a couple of novels ago). There’s also a brilliant story set at the dawn of time where one of the characters bumps into an alien who she thinks is Jube, the news vendor in her street. Jube is a walrus looking character disguised as a Joker who is really an alien from the same species as this new character and who has been on Earth a long time (and is presumably named after The Beatles song I Am The Walrus... you know, "goo goo ga joob"). New possibilities for a future story arc are presented when this alien is also teleported back to the present day by accident so... I’m sure one of the writers will start to pull on some alien invasion threads in a few year’s time (it wouldn’t be the first time in Wild Cards history).

Low Chicago is yet another great set of Wild Cards stories and fans of the series should eat this one up. I’m quite looking forward to reading the next installment which was published in the US in October but, before then, there is already another trilogy started in the form of a British series of Wild Cards books involving British characters... so I’m really not sure of which one to read first, to be honest.