There had been talk of the Wild Cards shared universe series being made into a TV show. It was to be a joint project between Universal Studios and Syfy, with Melinda Snodgrass doing the screenplay and her and George R. R. Martin executive producing the series. That announcement came out in 2011, and I haven’t heard a single mention of it since, so my hopes are getting pretty faded now. That is a shame, because the Wild Cards books are my favorite shared universe (the short stories) and mosaic novels, and was one of the first portrayals of super heroes as if they were real people with all the real life baggage that entails. Authors in the first 1986 volume included George R. R. Martin, Howard Waldrop, Roger Zelazny, Walter Jon Williams, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Lewis Shiner,Victor Milan, Edward Bryant, and John J Miller. They re-released the original Wild Cards I in 2010 in an expanded edition with new stories from a handful of authors, including Carrie Vaughn. Volume 23 of the series is coming out soon, and it continues to be excellent.
The premise of the series is simple; aliens from outer space want to take over the Earth with all the buildings and infrastructure intact, but without all those pesky Humans around to dispute ownership with them. Or perhaps one renegade Mad Scientists from the aliens wants to use the human race as a testing ground to see how the virus they have created to rewrite DNA actually spreads through a live population. I tend to remember it both ways, since one plot line seemed to be the hidden agenda behind the other. Either way, a space ship arrived to carpet bomb the world with the infection just after WWII has ended. Except… WWII has just ended, and War In The Skies is something humans have gotten pretty good at. Especially Jet Boy, a normal person who has become, in Batman-esque fashion, the most dangerous person in the air. When the ship arrives at Earth and begins the bombing run, he immediately recognizes an attack pattern and starts fighting back. It is destroyed, but not before it drops a single viral bomb on NYC, and they both fall burning from the sky.
The sole virus delivery bomb to reach the ground wrecks unimagined destruction and havoc on the population of the City That Never Sleeps. 99 out of every 100 people die outright. Of the 1% of the survivors, 99 out of every 100 of them become Jokers, with twisted mutant bodies looking not very human at all, although about half of them have some power to compensate them for their loss. The final 1% of 1% become Aces; people with normal or enhanced appearance, and some superpower they can use for themselves. They break down another layer deep, because they are, after all, people. Some become heroes and champions of justice, some become villains, and others are only in it for themselves; like everyone through the ages, they have to decide who they each want to be.
I should mention that my favorite character from this series is Croyd, The Sleeper, and that he was created by one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny. Croyd isn’t like any other Joker or Ace; they are all who they are. Croyd, on the other hand, is only who he is at the moment. Once he falls asleep, he could wake up as anyone, Joker or Ace or Human, and that gives him a flavor no one else in this shared universe has. It also gives him a problem no one else has, with its own set of issues; such as being terrified of falling asleep, since he never knows who or what he might wake up as. The solution he usually chooses for that problem is to consume massive amounts of no-doze and other sleep avoiding chemicals, which has its own drawback. After the first 48 to 72 hours of being awake, one’s mind starts to get a bit flaky. When you hit one week of being awake, you have begun to enter the realm of the psychotic, and things go rapidly downhill from there. So even when he starts out as one of the Aces with full superpowers and an intention of doing only good, within a week or so he is doing demented things with no rhyme or reason, and LOTS of unintended consequences.
And that is just one character and his basic issues. Wait until you meet Tom Tudbury, the Great and Powerful Turtle, who’s lineage appears as the House of Tudbury in George’s Game of Thrones series. Every author who came to play in the Wild Cards shared universe created one or more characters, and every character was a human being first with all that might entail, and a hero or monster second, using their abilities to write their personal self large on the world stage.
You can, of course, read any book in the series as a stand alone volume, but you will get a lot more out of it if you gather a selection of the books in a specific subset and read them all in a row. For myself, I would recommend starting with the first one in the set, Wild Cards, and then continuing through the next 9 volumes. If you have done that already, grab the second set starting at volume 11 and read from there. Often a set of 3 book will tell a complete story, even when it is a subset of a larger arc; each book is self contained, but the first 3 books are a single story, residing inside the first 10 book story arc, as an example.
Want to read a few of the stories online for free, before you decide if you should dive into this shared universe? Tor has made a number of them available, so here are a few to check out:
When We Were Heroes by Daniel Abraham
The Rook by Melinda Snodgrass
Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan by Carrie Vaughn
The Elephant in the Room by Paul Cornell
The Button Man and the Murder Tree by Cherie Priest
Drop by George R. R. Martin’s Blog to catch up on a lot of the news and ongoing details.