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.

Wild Cards - Knaves Over Queens

Knaves All Gazing

Wild Cards
Knaves Over Queens
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Harper Voyager ISBN: 9780008283599

Knaves Over Queens is the 27th in the series of editor (and, once upon a time, contributing writer) George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards mosaic novels. It’s an absolutely brilliant series of books and I’ve written numerous reviews of the more recent tomes in the series on this review blog. The stories tell of an alternate historical timeline which splits off from our own after Jetboy fails to stop the release of an alien virus from the planet Takis in the 1940s, known later as the Wild Cards virus. Humanity is changed in the wake of the virus which leaves behind superheroes (known as Aces), hideous malformed freaks (known as Jokers), Knaves (who are a kind of combination of both… Joker Aces if you will), nats (naturals... those left with absolutely no change) and a lot of people who just die when their ‘card turns’ (when the virus finally manifests itself in their body at some point in their lifetime), which is known as ‘drawing the black queen’, naturally.

This new novel, though, is not a continuation of the various characters who have been living in this universe in the more recent of the novels from the last decade or so (this series of books has been going since the 1980s). Instead, this new one goes right back to the times of the very first book of the series but gives us the various interlocking short stories of what was happening in the United Kingdom at the same time. So this is, essentially, a British Wild Cards novel but, even though some of the contributing writers are the same (including the queen of the Wild Cards writers herself, Melinda M. Snodgrass), it perfectly captures the spirit and fluctuating tone of the rest of the series and it’s one of the more interesting of the series I’ve read recently… although they’re pretty much all good, it has to be said.

Now, there’s one thing I suspect the original writers of the Wild Cards series did without considering the consequences of success too much with their very first novel and over the years I’ve come to look at it as a mistake, with the gift of hindsight. And that is the fact that, in that first volume, the writers flew through the decades from the 1940s to what was then the present of the 1980s all in one glorious gulp… so many of the subsequent novels had to be set, more or less, all around the same time. However, having said that, I can’t qualify that as an accident on the latest collection of stories because Knave Over Queens, sadly, does exactly the same thing. There are single stories set one each apiece in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s… a few in the 1980s and then onto one or two stories of each of the intervening decades from then until the present decade… and this is a great shame, I feel. Not that it isn’t a lot of fun, for sure but, it would have been nice if some of the new characters and scenarios developed in these wonderful shorts could have been maybe explored in more detail with, say, one decade per novel or some such.

That being said, it certainly doesn’t hurt the tome any and it’s as furiously fast paced as some of the best Wild Cards novels. There are, as usual, some rich character ideas and situations so you have some interesting origin stories ranging from what was happening aboard the Queen Mary, stopped from entering New York harbour when the Wild Card virus was first released in the 1940s, an alternate look at the reign of terror perpetrated by The Kray Twins in the 1960s and a heck of a lot of stuff about various ‘terrorist’ groups such as the IRA and the Twisted Fists (who long time readers of the Wild Cards series will certainly remember).

There’s also the usual interesting characters peppered throughout with Alan Turing, for instance, drawing an Ace of sorts and going by the code name Enigma. Or Mick Jagger who, we are told, would sleep with anyone but who is also, in addition to being a pop star, a werewolf. And all this is set in a world where, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Princess Elisabeth drew the black queen and Princess Margaret was crowned queen. A world where Winston Churchill’s ace allowed him to lead an extended life, including a long political life, where he set up The Order Of The Silver Helix… which is the British equivalent of the aces who work secretly for the government. Another character proves himself fairly useful in the ‘Falklands Conflict’ which I remember seeing all over the news in the 1980s.

As usual, the various characters and incidents either connect to or, at the very least, have consequences in other stories in the novel although, like the very first novel all those years ago, it’s less of a single story arc coming together so much as a few story arcs clashing and sustaining the weight of the various mini adventures throughout. So there are three sets of characters who appear at different times or are at least mentioned in a number of, often unconnected stories, who are there to give a little glue to the thing as a whole. One character starts off his adventure from the Queen Mary in the 1940s and is still going strong by the last stories set in contemporary times. Another character, a nasty goddess who weaves a spell of quite gory death as she plays off the various sides of ‘the troubles’ has her own story arc which leaves the novel with a chilling climax rather than anything a little more upbeat. A third character starts off his adventures as a spin writer for the alternate history version of Margaret Thatcher before his card turns and he ends up having to go undercover for Winston Churchill, in order to infiltrate an organisation which will mean something to regular readers of the series. These are all woven into the fabric of the novel and often find themselves on various sides of conflicts going on in various stories.

There are some nice Easter eggs and bonuses for regular readers too.  Now my mind is a bit fuzzy on all the characters in the Wild Cards universe I’ve read over the last 30 odd years but I will say that there’s a least one story that took me by surprise, somewhat, as being the origins of a character who occasionally makes some dramatic and violence filled appearances over the years. And, although there are a few crossovers with characters from the earlier novels, there aren’t all that many blatant crossovers (at least not as blatant as the aforementioned Miss. Snodgrass’ wonderful contribution to the novel). There are, however, a fair few mentions (and probably a lot of little cameos I didn’t pick up on) so frequent followers of the series will, as I said earlier, have a richer experience with this particular tome than people who are just jumping on at this point. That being said, I didn’t catch one Croyd Crenson reference in this one but... I guess you can’t have everything.

And, as you might expect from these stories by now, there is a rich variation of the kind of interlocking tales showcased from here… from 1960s London gangland to a Hatton Garden heist by way of John Le Carre style spy stories, pulp horror and even the horrors of war. So if you’re a fan of postmodernist, eclectic tale spinning with a vaguely super-powered tint and, of course, if you’re already an avid reader, then you will want to grab a copy of this one, for sure. Wild Cards - Knave Over Queens is another triumph for the series and I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be the final novel in the sequence. These books are precious jewels of the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres and they deserve to be cherished for generations to come.

Wild Cards - Mississippi Roll

Emotional Roll-ercoaster

Wild Cards - Mississippi Roll
Edited by George R. R. Martin
Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9052-3

Mississippi  Roll is the 24th in the series of the long running Wild Cards mosaic novels which I’ve been reading since they first started getting published, sometime back in the 1980s if I recall correctly. Now, after that initial spurt of amazing early novels, the entries in the series have been rather sporadic in their releases over the decades, spanning multiple publishers and sometimes having as much as seven years between new novels. Indeed, I seem to remember one of the novels was only out a week or so before the publisher went bankrupt and the novel became very hard to get hold of. It was an important linking novel too, where something significant happened which, as far as I was concerned, was important info for future novels (all I can say about that one is… thank goodness for eBay and for the writer who sold his last spare copy and signed it for me). Although I believe it’s going to be back in print at some point.

It seems amazing to me, then, that in less than a year since this 24th novel in the series was released, two more new Wild Cards novels have been released with another already on its way. So… definitely a bumper year for Wild Cards then and one wonders if the fairly recent purchase of the TV rights to the series meant that the team of writers who put together these interlinking story arcs thought they would get some more source material out there while the property is slightly hotter than it has been in a while. Of course George R. R. Martin’s name on the cover as editor, though I don’t think he’s written any of the sections of Mississippi Roll himself, can’t hurt sales of the books.

Bearing in mind the drip feed publication schedules the series has had in the past, one thing that isn’t sporadic, despite being written by multiple (and extremely talented) writers is the quality of the stories. The Wild Cards novels, chronicling the last 70 years of the Wild Card alternative history of our planet, since the Takisian virus ravaged the Earth and separated people into super powered aces, hideous jokers or nats (naturals), have always been absolutely gripping in the way the characters of this alternate world have been portrayed. Mississippi Roll, I’m happy to say, is certainly no exception to this rule… it’ a real page turner.

The way this novel works is with a framing story which starts and finishes the main tale and inserts a chapter between each of the plug in chapters, which follow an individual set of characters created by the specific writer of that chapter… although those characters do, of course, appear often in all of the stories, interconnecting with each other to build up the main arc of the novel. The novelty of this particular Wild Cards novel is that around 90% of it is set on a paddle steamer that is, quite possibly due to certain plot points, on it’s last ever entertainment cruise before being put out to pasture. Something which the original captain doesn’t want to happen.

And when I say original captain I mean his ghost… or more probably the Wild Card ‘turned’ version of the captain after his death over fifty years before. A man barely visible to most and who is condemned to walk the decks of the beloved steamboat he built and to which his ‘spirit form’ is somehow bound, unable to leave. As you meet 'Steam Wilbur', as his occasionally glimpsed 'ghost' has come to be known, you slowly see just what’s at stake and how he helps out the various guests in the stories for their small parts of the tale. 

The bigger picture, that is to say the ‘other’ bigger picture, is the fallout from the doomsday adventure which reached its peak in the last Wild Cards novel High Stakes (reviewed here). The various refugees, or at least a small portion of them, are smuggled aboard the steamer and are being hidden by the current captain because they are not being welcomed in America, whose government are trying to ensure they are being shipped off to a Joker Island in Ireland (hmm... I can’t think but this treatment of refugees by the Americans is reminiscent of something familiar right now). As the steamer docks at various points along the river over the week or so the boat takes until the tale reaches its epic conclusion, various refugees - jokers, aces and nats alike - are being illegally hidden on board and then dropped off with various people along the route who can grant them at least a chance at a safer life.

And that’s the main set up and it also gives you the chance to remake the acquaintance of some of the more recent characters who have joined the Wild Card universe… such as ex-Fort Freak copper Leo, who now, along with the love of his life, works as an insurance agent and is on board trying to solve the possible mystery of a recent death on the steamer. And, as usual, each and every story in the compendium is absolutely brilliant in its own right and adds weight to the main event going on in the linking narrative.

As you would expect, the detail and emotion of the various characters and their relation to the world around them is unparalleled but the background history of Wilbur, which gets frequent revisits in the linking chapters, is truly tragic and as the story goes full steam ahead to its conclusion, you’ll wonder what this poor ghost’s final fate will be. All I’m saying is that the ending of the novel is a real humdinger but at the same time leaving the fates of some of the regular characters… such as Billy Ray, The Angel and the Infamous Black Tongue… open ended enough that they can presumably be picked up in the next two books, which I’m informed will form a trilogy with this one.

It’s the final couple of pages, however, that really give you the emotional kind of gut punch I associate with the series and all I will say is that, when I read… literally the last sentence of the novel… there were tears in my eyes and they were soon running down my face waiting for some kind of mop up crew. I can’t tell you why though because, in some ways the ending doesn’t go where it’s been threatening to go and, while not entirely optimistic, it’s certainly a soppy and sentimental one so… yeah, if you know me then you will probably be able to guess I would be a blubbery by the end of his one.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Mississippi Roll. Another outstanding story from the Wild Cards universe and I’ll be reading the next couple sometime over the next few months. So, yeah, more Wild Cards reviews coming to this blog fairly soon, I’m happy to say.

High Stakes - Wild Cards 23

Frandemonium 

High Stakes - Wild Cards 23
edited by George R. R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass
Tor Books ISBN: 9780765335823

Well, here I go again. Almost 30 years since I started reading the first Wild Cards books (in those wonderful Brian Bolland covers), the Aces, Jokers and Nats are back in the 23rd of the mosaic novels to date.

Looking in the ‘previous books in the series’ style listing in the front of the volume finds that the publishers have now split up different chronological groups into subsets that, despite all the novels overlapping and making up the same timeline, are obviously arranged to allow people to peruse the shared Wild Cards universe in an easier manner. So we have little subsections like The Puppetman Quartet, The Rox Triad, The Card Sharks Triad etc. This new novel, High Stakes, is apparently the final part of The Fort Freak Triad but, I really couldn’t care, truth be told. After the cliffhanger ending of Lowball (reviewed here), I couldn’t wait to find out if the apocalypse had been ushered in and the world was about to end for the collective of characters in this particular literary universe.

I put a pretty high profile 'spoiler warning' in that last review where I predicted that the old enemy The Astrologer would be back and that the streets would be running red with blood. Well, I have to say, I got it dead wrong about the return of the astrologer but the absolute carnage in this particular tome is certainly on a level with some of the blood baths of the very early days. This one is a battle royale like no other in the series and I was almost surprised, whenever I looked away from the words on the pages, that the leaves of the book themselves weren’t running crimson with the blood of lost souls. It’s an apocalyptic battle, to be sure.

This novel carries on directly from the end of the last book, with Marcus the snake man (aka The Infamous Black Tongue) fleeing the botched rescue showdown of the last volume with his new girlfriend, after the death of a very much loved character in the last novel who he does return for... at some point. The Wild Cards writers have never been shy at killing off their characters and the last novel was no different. You get a sense of finality and closure here, to some of the characters that were lost in the last novel. So we have Marcus trying to get out of Talos, as does Franny (Detective Francis Xavier Black) who had travelled to Talos to stop one abomination only to find, once he stopped it, that in doing so he automatically unleashed the ensuing apocalypse. And he has to get out of Talos too... but this time as the puppet-pet of the lead villainess of the last book, Baba Yaga, who he slowly builds a certain bond of understanding with. Kind of.

High Stakes pretty much focusses on the relatively new characters of the recent Wild Cards volumes, although there are still some old timers ‘in the mess’, so to speak, as key players in this novel. There’s even an uncredited Croyd (aka The Sleeper) sighting in this one again, although this story has nothing to do with his character this time and he’s not even mentioned in the ‘end credits’ of the book (I believe he was originally created and written by late great sci-fi writer Roger Zelazny in the earliest Wild Cards books). However, readers still know this generation of characters well and it’s completetly suspenseful to read about some much loved fictional people being pushed and ripped asunder, both mentally and physically, as they try to stop the sheer dread of an advancing army of a surrealistic terror realm slowly creeping across the world.

Early on in the novel, the writers drop in an almost Mothra-like incident which is something they could call on to save the day in the final battle as it plays out here. All the way through I was waiting for a certain character to ‘pop’ out into the world in a new form and drop back into the plot all 'deus ex machina' in the last act. To their credit, the writers didn’t actually use that strand at all and, in the end, a different resolution.... or a different kind of resolution (take your pick)... is introduced into the text. I’m not going to say whether it’s a good or bad resolution but... yeah, there is at least a sense of closure to the unspeakable evil that is slowly destroying the world.

The book doesn’t let up in the pacing department from the get go... which is not actually that surprising since we are basically dropped back into the middle of a story which we’d already started but, I have to say, just keeps speeding up and getting more ugly and darker as it carries on towards its conclusion... which is just what I would expect from a team of writers who have woven together such special characters and situations over the years. And, as usual, interjected into all this mayhem are some great little concepts and some nice explorations of the machinations of the unique powers of some of the characters which, sometimes, may have you laughing out loud, just like me when I was reading this. For all its grotesque insanity and high stakes bedlam, the book still manages to find time for a lot of humour within its pages and, all I can say is that the writers, as always, do a fantastic job.

There is also an epilogue section in the novel, which shows some of the characters once their ‘final solution’ has been played out. Now I don’t want to put any spoilers in here for anybody but I will say that one of my favourite characters out of the last few books definitely has a slight shift in personality here. There is a certain vengeful part of the epilogue which, almost, signals a loss of innocence or, at the very least, an unwillingness to stick to a more heroic code from one of the main players of the last two books. I felt sad about this scene but, if the writers of this series know anything, it’s how to write drama and I can only imagine, ten years from now, how this fictional person’s arc will play out. After all, I remember when Mark Meadows was one of the heroes of the books, for people who can recall back to the early novels and how his character turned out 40 or so years later in the shared chronology of the Wild Cards universe. No, Mark Meadows is not in this one... I was just using it as an example for long time fans of the series but... yeah... the point is that there’s a shift in tone towards the end and one wonders how this will play out for a certain character in the future of the series.

For almost thirty years now I’ve been saying that the Wild Cards stories should be made into a high budget TV show. Not a movie because, frankly, that wouldn’t have the scope and breadth required in a mere two or three hours to even begin to cover the contents of the first novel. Well, fairly recently it looks like Hollywoodland have finally agreed with me and, after the success of a certain other George R. R. Martin property on the airwaves, it looks like a Wild Cards TV show is finally...well... on the cards, if you’ll forgive the pun. This fills me with both hope and trepidation. Hope because, well, modern CGI special effects are finally at a point where they might be able to cope with something of this nature. Trepidation, however, because I hope they’ll give the earlier novels a fair crack and, when all is said and done, they really are going to have to throw a huge amount of money at each and every episode to make this thing work properly, methinks.

Either way, getting back to the subject at hand, High Stakes - A Wild Cards Novel is certainly going to keep fans of this long running literary sensation happy. For people who aren’t long running fans, however, it might not make the most sense and I can only urge you to start at the very beginning if you want to get into these amazing adventures. Either way... excellent book and bravo, once again, to all the writers who are able to magically juggle all these character strands without getting lost in the fray. I applaud you all.