Five Card Draw

The First Five Wild Card books

George R. R. Martin

The First Wild Cards Day or, the Game That Ate My Life

Mon Jun 6, 2011 1:25pm

In the books, Wild Cards Day is celebrated every September 15, in memory of September 15, 1946, the day that Jetboy spoke his immortal last words while Dr. Tod loosed an alien virus over Manhattan. In real life, September 15, 1946 happens to be the day that Howard Waldrop was born…and Howard, coincidentally, wrote “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway,” the opening story of the first Wild Cards book, wherein all these events take place.

In the books, September 20 is a day of no special note. In real life, however, it marks the day of my birth, two years and five days after H’ard. September 20 is the true Wild Cards Day. It was on that day in 1983 that Vic Milan gave me a role-playing game called Superworld as a birthday present, thereby unknowingly planting the first seed of the Wild Cards universe.

As I unwrapped that gift, I was still a relative innocent where role-playing games were concerned. Mind you, I had played plenty of games over the years. I had paid my bills directing chess tournaments in the early ’80s, while trying to establish myself as an SF writer. Before that I had been captain of my college chess team, and of my high school chess team before that. Role-playing had not yet been invented when I was a kid, but we had checkers and Sorry and Parcheesi for rainy days, and Hide and Seek and Ringoleavio and Oh O’Clock for warm summer evenings.

Although my parents never owned a house, that did not stop me from building vast real estate empires across a Monopoly board. There was Broadside and Stratego as well, and all through childhood I never lost a game of Risk (I always commanded the red armies, and refused to play if denied “my” color). After a while none of my friends dared to face me, so I’d set up the board in the bedroom and fight wars against myself, playing all six armies, inventing kings and generals to command them, merrily invading, attacking, and betraying myself for hours. And maybe that was role-playing of sorts, now that I come to think of it.

But it was not until I arrived in New Mexico in 1980 that I began to game regularly. Some of the Albuquerque writers had a small gaming group, and they invited me to come sit in on a session. I was pretty dubious at the time. I had seen kids playing D&D at cons, pretending to be Thongor the Barbarian and Pipsqueak the Hobbit while killing monsters and looking for treasure. I had read too much bad sword and sorcery in my youth for that to have much appeal. And there were all these weirdly shaped dice you had to roll to determine whether you lived or died. I would sooner have joined a weekly poker game or an on-going game of Diplomacy. I was much too old and sophisticated for this role-playing stuff, after all. Still, if this was what the local writers were into, I figured I might as well give it a try.

Famous last words, those.

This Albuquerque gaming group included Walter Jon Williams, Victor Milan, John Jos. Miller, his wife Gail Gerstner Miller, and Melinda M. Snodgrass, all of whom would eventually become important contributors to the Wild Cards anthologies. Royce Wideman and Jim Moore were also part of the group, and my own sweet lady Parris joined in with me. At the time we got involved, the gang was mostly playing a Call of Cthulhu campaign run by Walter, and less frequently Vic’s Morrow Project scenario, so those were the first two games I sampled.

They were great fun…and nothing like I had imagined role-playing to be. I had fallen in with writers, and these games were stories. Playing Walter’s game was like stepping into the pages of an H.P. Lovecraft story, except that the characters were more fully realized than Lovecraft’s ever were. There was triumph and tragedy, heroism and cowardice, love affairs and betrayals, and every now and again a shuggoth, too. Our weekly sessions were part communal storytelling and part Improv Theater, part group therapy and part mass psychosis, part adventure and part soap opera. We created some wonderful characters and lived inside them, and many a night never rolled those funny twenty-sided dice at all.

After a few months, I began to make noises about wanting to try and run a game myself. As much fun as the players were having, it seemed to me that the GM was having even more. He was the creator, the conductor leading the orchestra, the team captain and the opposing team rolled up in one omnipotent package. “God,” the group called our GMs. Who doesn’t want to play god? I finally succumbed to the temptations and designed my own Cthulhu adventure for the gang. Once I had tasted the joys of godhood there was no turning back…even though this particular lot of players were so damned sharp that they unraveled the central mystery of my game about sixteen minutes into the action.

That was more or less where thing stood when my birthday rolled around, and Vic gave me that fatal copy of Superworld. The gang had tried another superhero game before my time and hadn’t liked it much… but this was a new system, and Vic knew that I was a comic book fan from way back. I had cut my teeth on funny books while growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey. Superman and Batman had more to do with me learning to read than Dick and Jane ever did, and the first stories I ever published were amateur superhero “text stories” in the dittoed comic fanzines. Superworld seemed made for me, and me for Superworld.

What happened next was almost scary. I came up with a campaign and my friends came up with characters, and we began to play, and before any of us knew what was happening Superworld had swallowed us all. At first we were playing once a week, alternating Superworld with sessions of Walter’s game or Vic’s. But soon we stopped playing Morrow Project entirely, and then

Call of Cthulhu as well. It was all Superworld. We would assemble at suppertime, play until two or sometimes three in the morning, then post-mortem the game we had just played for another hour or so. Many a time dawn caught me while I was driving home from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Within half a year we were playing twice a week, with one campaign running in Albuquerque and a second in Santa Fe, and the same players participating in both. Once, at an especially dull SF con, we adjourned to my room and played Superworld all weekend, leaving the game to do our panels and readings and then rushing back.

A number of characters who would later grace the Wild Cards books made their first appearances in those games, albeit in early “rough draft” versions significantly different from their later selves. Melinda’s first character was Topper, but a Topper who had only her costume in common with the bit player who would appear in Ace in the Hole. Walter’s firstborn was Black Shadow, with powers and personality both rather different from his later Wild Cards incarnation. In the game, Shad was the brother of Vic’s character, who would become the Harlem Hammer of the anthologies. Chip Wideman played a succession of surly antiheroes and the sweet-natured Toad Man before devising Crypt Kicker, toxic shit-kicker from hell. John J. Miller had Nightmare, who never did make it into the books. And Jim Moore…well, I could tell you about Jim Moore’s characters, but if I did the PC police would have to kill you. The first incarnation of Hiram Worchester was pure comic relief: a well-meaning oaf who fought crime from a blimp and called himself Fatman. And the primordial Turtle might have had Tom Tudbury’s name, power, and shell, but he shared none of his history or personality.

Many of these early creations were retired when the players got a better feel for the campaign, and for the nuances of the Superworld rules. Topper hung up her top hat, Black Shadow faded back into the shadows, the Harlem Hammer went back to repairing motorcycles. In place of Shad, Walter introduced Modular Man and his mad creator. Vic Milan unveiled Cap’n Trips and all of his friends, and John Miller brought in Yeoman to displace Nightmare. Some of the gang had gotten it right on the first try, though; Gail never played anyone but Peregrine, and Parris was Elephant Girl from the start; the book version of Radha O’Reilly as pretty much a clone of the earlier game version.

The game was deeply and seriously addictive for all of us…but for me most of all. I was god, which meant I had lots of planning and preparation to do before the players even arrived. The game ate their nights and their weekends, but it ate my life. For more than a year, Superworld consumed me, and during that time I wrote almost nothing. Instead I spent my days coming up with ingenious new plot twists to frustrate and delight my players, and rolling up still more villains to bedevil them. Parris used to listen at my office door, hoping to hear the clicking of my keyboard from within, only to shudder at the ominous rattle of dice.

I told myself it was writer’s block. My last book, an ambitious rock and roll fantasy called The Armageddon Rag, had failed dismally despite great reviews, and my career was in the dumps, enough to block anyone. Looking back now, though, it’s plain to see that I wasn’t blocked at all. I was creating characters and devising plots every day, like a man possessed. It was the opposite of being blocked. I was in a creative frenzy, of the sort I sometimes experienced on the home stretch of a novel, when the real world seems to fade away and nothing matters but the book you are living by day and dreaming of by night. That was exactly what was happening here, only there was no book…yet. There was only the game.

I don’t know just when my fever broke, or why. Maybe my steadily diminishing bank account and rapidly increasing debt had something to do with it. I loved the game, I loved all these wonderful characters that my friend and I had created, I loved the egoboo I got from my players after and especially exciting session…but I loved having a house to live in, too, which meant I had to keep making those pesky mortgage payments. And godhood, intoxicating as it was, did not pay.

Thus it was that one day, while rolling up yet another batch of really nifty villains, I said the magic words—”There’s got to be some way to make some money from this.”

It turned out there was -- …but for that story, you’ll need to come back next month. 

From Game to Book or, the Birth of a Shared World

Once upon a time — it was September 20, 1983, if you insist on being picky — Vic Milan gave me a role-playing game called SuperWorld for my birthday.

A fateful gift indeed. It triggered a two-year-long role playing orgy that engulfed not only me, but the rest of my Albuquerque gaming circle as well. We had great fun while the addiction lasted, but in the end I came to the realization that the game was absorbing too much of my time and creative energies. You can’t pay your mortgage by rolling dice (well, you can, but the dice better be loaded). The fever dream that was SuperWorld finally broke on the day I said to myself, “There’s got to be some way to make some money from this.” I knew we had some great characters. And I knew there were some great stories to be told about them; funny stories, sad stories, exciting stories. What was needed was a way to get the stories to an audience.

My first notion was to use my Turtle character as the basis for a stand-alone science fiction novel that I proposed to title Shell Games. It would have meant pulling him out of the game milieu and revamping the character thoroughly, but there was a strong story there — the tale of a projects kid from Bayonne, New Jersey, trying to be a superhero in a world where none exist.

That would have rescued one character from our SuperWorld campaign, but would have meant discarding all the rest. Maybe that was why I found the approach ultimately unsatisfying. Besides, the game had been a group endeavor. Much of the fun of our games had come from the interactions between the characters. A novel about one telekinetic superhero wannabe in a mundane world was a very different thing, and somehow duller. This needed to be a group project, a collaborative endeavor.

It needed to be a shared world.

Shared world anthologies are an endangered species in today’s market, but back in the ’80s they were all the rage. The first modern shared world, the Thieves’ World series edited by Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey, had been a tremendous success, spawning not only games, comic books, and film options, but also a host of imitators. Most common were fantasy shared worlds like Liavek and Ithkar and Borderlands, but there were science fiction shared worlds like The Fleet and War World as well, and even an attempt to share a world of horror called Greystone Bay. But there was nothing even remotely similar to what I had in mind — a shared world anthology series in a world in which superpowers are real, set on a present-day Earth and featuring the characters we’d created for the game.

I bounced my idea off Melinda M. Snodgrass, who ultimately became my assistant editor and strong right hand on the project. She was immediately enthusiastic. So were the rest of my gamers when they heard the notion. All the writers in the gaming group were eager to contribute, and our friends who worked for a living were willing to sign up their characters, so they could be a part of the madness.

For much of the previous decade I had been editing New Voices, an annual anthology of original fiction by each year’s John W. Campbell Award finalists, so I knew how to put together an anthology… but a shared world is a whole different animal. Fortunately, Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey were extremely forthcoming when I quizzed them about their experiences with Thieves’ World, as were Will Shetterly and Emma Bull of Liavek. With their help, I was able to construct a Master Agreement that gave us a firm legal basis to build our series on.

There is an undeniable stigma attached to game-related fiction. For the most part that stigma is well deserved. Thinly disguised D&D adventures have become as much a commonplace in today’s slush piles as Adam and Eve stories were thirty years ago. Editors groan when they see them, with good reason. The truth is, the qualities that make for a good game do not necessarily make for good fiction, and in some cases are actually antithetical to it. My SuperWorld crew had enjoyed some splendid evenings, but if we simply wrote up our favorite adventures, as one of my players urged, we would have had nothing but a comic book in prose… and a pretty bad comic book at that, full of all the usual funny book clichés, costumes and super-teams and secret identities, endless efforts by supervillians to conquer the world. Pretty silly stuff, when you stop to think about it. Fine for a game, maybe, but not for a book.

I wanted to do something better, and that meant stepping back for a moment to rethink certain aspects of our characters. Take my own Turtle, for instance. In the game, a player had a certain number of points to buy powers and skills, but the system allowed you to earn additional points by accepting disadvantages, be they mental, physical, or psychological. My players used to have a standing joke — if they came up against a young, handsome, intelligent foe bulging with muscles, no problem, but if a blind deaf pygmy with thalidomide flippers appeared on the scene, run for your lives. Well, theSuperWorld version of the Turtle was the genesis of that joke. To pay for such a high level of telekinesis and forty points of armor as well, I had needed to pile on just about every handicap in the book. It made for a very formidable presence in our games, but in the book such an extreme character would have been ludicrous… and not much fun to read about, either.

I also felt we needed to rethink some fundamental aspects of our world itself. I had been reading comic books all my life, and loved them dearly… but even as a kid, I realized that certain comic book conventions were downright silly. All those skin-tight costumes, for instance. The way that people in comic books always decided to use their superpowers to fight crime.

And the origins of those powers… that was a huge problem. In the funny books, and in our game as well, characters got their powers from a hundred and one different sources. X was hit by a lightning bolt, Y stumbled on a crashed alien spaceship, Z whipped up something in his lab, Q was bitten by a radioactive wombat, M unearthed the belt buckle of a forgotten deity… Any one of these would be a wondrous occurrence all by itself, and when you pile wonder upon wonder upon wonder you strain the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point. To make these characters work in a legitimate SF context, we needed a single plausible cause for all these superpowers.

Melinda Snodgrass was the one who provided it. “A virus!” she exclaimed one morning as we were drinking coffee in her old house on Second Street after a long night of gaming. An alien retrovirus that rewrites the genetic structure of its victims, changing them in unique and unpredictable ways. And her character could be the alien who brought it to Earth! Thus were born the xenovirus Takis-a and Dr. Tachyon, virtually in the same instant.

Melinda’s virus not only solved the origin problem for us, but also turned out to have ahuge and totally serendipitous side effect. We did not want a world in which everyonehad superpowers — that might make for a wonderful premise, but not for the stories we wanted to tell. We had to limit its effects somehow. We considered restricting the experiment to a special time and place — the aliens arrive one day, give superpowers to the population of Dubuque, Iowa, and depart — but that would have made it hard to bring in some of our diverse lot of Superworld creations, not to mention severely limiting our ability to add new characters later in the series.

As we battled around the problems, the answer came to us. Not everyone gets the virus. Of those who do, most die from the violence of their transformations. And even the survivors are not home free. The vast majority of natural genetic mutations are harmful rather than beneficial. So would it be with the wild card; monsters and freaks would be much more likely to result than supermen.

Out of that came our jokers… and that made all the difference. The game we had played had no jokers, no Jokertown, no Rox, no more than the funny books did.

In hindsight, it was the jokers who truly made the Wild Card universe unique. Our aces had their counterparts in the superheroes of the Marvel and DC universes; while we strove to make our version grittier and more realistic, to portray them with more subtlety and depth, those are differences of tone, not of kind… and the comics themselves were becoming darker and grittier, too. In the end, what really set Wild Cards apart from all that had gone before was its jokers.

When Melinda and I told our notions to Vic Milan he grabbed the ball and ran with it, whipping up a lot of the pseudoscience of the wild card, the biogenetics and quantum physics that would eventually be published in the appendix to the first volume. At the same time Walter John Williams, unbeknownst to any of us, actually started writing astory.

Meanwhile, I was putting together a proposal to take to publishers…and recruiting other contributors as well. The Albuquerque gaming group had given me a superb core group of writers, but a small group. To sustain a long series, I would need a larger pool of potential contributors, writers who had not been a part of our marathon SuperWorldgame. New writers would mean new characters, who might interact in unexpected ways with those carried over from the game. New writers would bring us fresh concepts and plot ideas, and would help lessen any lingering temptations to simply write up our games. Besides, there were a hell of a lot of fine SF writers out there who loved comic books and superheroes just as I did, and I knew many of them would jump at the chance to be a part of a project like this.

Not everyone I contacted signed on, of course, but many did. Lewis Shiner was one of the first, and his character Fortunato became a key player right from the start. Ed Bryant brought us Sewer Jack, and also recruited his collaborator, Leanne C. Harper, while Lew brought in Walton (Bud) Simons. I signed on Arthur Byron Cover from L.A.,X-Men scripter Chris Claremont from New York, George Alec Effinger from New Orleans, Stephen Leigh gave birth to Puppetman in Cincinnati, while back in New Mexico, Roger Zelazny gave us Croyd Crenson, the Sleeper, the most original concept of them all. And Howard Waldrop…

Howard Waldrop threw us a curve ball.

H’ard and I had known each other since 1963, when I bought Brave & Bold #28 from him for a quarter and we started corresponding. We both had our roots in comics fandom, both published our first stories in the comic fanzines of the ’60s. I knew Howard still had a lot of affection for “funny books.” I also knew that he had acharacter. Howard always talks about his stories before he actually sits down to write them. Sometimes he talks about them for months, sometimes for years, occasionally for decades. Thus, if you knew Howard, you would have known about the dodo story, the zen sumo story, and the piss-drinking story long before he wrote word one of “The Ugly Chickens,” “Man-Mountain Gentian,” and “Flying Saucer Rock ‘n Roll,” respectively.

As it happened, Howard had been talking about something called the Jetboy story for a couple of years…though being Howard, he hadn’t written it. It seemed to me that this “Jetboy” might be perfect for Wild Cards, so I invited H’ard to join the fun. And he accepted…sort of…

The thing is, Howard does things his own way. He’d write the Jetboy story for me, but he wasn’t at all keen on this shared world stuff. So he’d write the first story for the first book, and kill Jetboy at the end of it. Oh, and by the way, his story took place right after World War II, and climaxed on September 15, 1946.

Up until then, we had planned to start the series with the virus arriving on Earth in 1985. And in fact Walter Jon Williams had already completed the story he had been writing in secret, a novelette called “Bag Lady,” featuring two of the game characters, Black Shadow and Modular Man, chasing an art thief and dealing with an extraterrestrial menace called the Swarm. Walter dropped the story in my lap one day at Melinda’s house, savoring my surprise…and gloating over the fact that he’d already finished his story, while the rest of us hadn’t even started ours.

Unfortunately, Howard Waldrop had just knocked Walter’s plans — not to mention “Bag Lady” — into a cocked hat. Anyone who has ever dealt with Howard knows there is no stubborner man on this earth or the next one. If I wanted him in the book, it would have to be on his terms. That meant 1946.

And I did want him in the book, so…

We couldn’t very well just open with Jetboy in 1946 and jump forward forty years to the present. An event as big as the release of the wild card was going to have huge repercussions. We had to dramatize the release of the virus and show what happened after Jetboy’s death, and the readers would want to know about the intervening years as well. Thanks to Howard, we now had forty years of white space to fill in. All of a sudden, the first volume of the series had become a historical…so “Bag Lady” no longer fit, and poor Walter had to hie back to his computer and start all over again (shows you what happens when you write stories in secret without informing your editor).

Sometimes the process pays you unexpected dividends. Howard’s pig-headed insistence on 1946 not only gave us the Jetboy story to open the book, it forced those of us who followed to deal with themes and times we might otherwise have ignored…most particularly the era of HUAC and the McCarthy hearings, from which arose Dr. Tachyon’s doomed love affair with Blythe van Renssaeler, and Jack Braun, the Golden Boy, the protagonist of “Witness,” the story that Walter Jon Williams was forced to write to take the place of “Bag Lady.” Both added immeasurable richness to our world and depth of our characters, and “Witness” went on to become the only shared world story ever to appear on the final ballot for a Nebula award.

Happenstance? Yes…and no. That’s just the sort of thing that should happen in a good shared world. When writers work together, bouncing off of one another and reacting to each other’s stories and characters like a group of talented musicians jamming, that sort of serendipity occurs more often than you’d think, as the subsequent history of the Wild Cards series was to prove over and over again.

Making a Mosaic, or, Third Time’s the Charm

The great boom in shared world anthologies began in 1979, when Ace Books published Robert Asprin’sThieves World, the first volume in a long-running fantasy series about the imaginary city of Sanctuary and the motley cast of swordsmen, sorcerers, princes, rogues, and thieves who roamed its streets, with occasional guest appearances by an equally motley assortment of gods.

Thieves World had its precursors, to be sure. In comic books, both the Marvel and DC universes were shared worlds, wherein the heroes and villains lived in the same world, constantly crossed paths with one another, and had their friendships, feuds, and love affairs. In prose there was H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft encouraged his writer friends to borrow elements from his stories, and to add their own, and Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and others gleefully took up the game. HPL himself would then make mention of the gods, cults, and accursed books the others had contributed, and the mythos became ever richer and more detailed.

Much later came Medea: Harlan’s World, wherein Harlan Ellison assembled a group of top-rank science fiction writers to create an imaginary planet and work out all the details of its flora, fauna, geography, history, and orbital mechanics, whereupon each writer penned a story set on the world they had created together. But Thieves Worldwas the breakthrough book that defined the modern shared world, and it proved so successful that it soon spawned a whole host of imitators. Ithkar and Liavek andMerovingian Nights had fantasy settings and the flavor of sword and sorcery, as didThieves World itself. Borderlands was more urban fantasy, with its punk elves and contemporary setting. The Fleet and War World brought the shared world format to space opera, Greystone Bay extended it to horror, and Heroes in Hell took it to hell.

Some of these series came before ours; others followed us. Some had long runs; others only lasted for a book or two. In the end, Wild Cards would outlast all of them to become the longest-running shared world series of them all, with twelve volumes from Bantam, three from Baen, two more from ibooks (after a seven year hiatus), and now a brand-new triad from Tor Books. Which means that I now have more experience with shared worlds than any other editor, I suppose.

When Wild Cards was starting out, however, my editorial experience was limited toNew Voices, the annual (in theory) collection of stories by the finalists for the John W. Campbell Award. I knew going in that a shared world was a very different sort of animal, and not one easily tamed, so I set out to learn as much about the beast as I could. Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey were gracious enough to sit down with me and share all the trials and tribulations they had undergone editing Thieves World, and the lessons they had learned from them. Will Shetterly and Emma Bull were equally forthcoming about their own experiences editing Liavek. From the Master Agreements that governed those two series, I was able to devise a Master Agreement for Wild Cardsthat provided a firm but fair legal foundation upon which to build the series.

A shared world also poses some difficult artistic questions, the most crucial one being the mount of sharing involved and the rules that govern it. All of the shared worlds of the ’80s answered these questions in their own ways, I found, but some of the answers were more satisfactory than others. Some books shared only their settings; the characters never cross paths, nor did the events of one story have any impact on those that followed. Each story existed in isolation, aside from a common geography and history. In other series, the characters did make “guest star” appearances in one another’s tales, while the stories themselves continued to stand alone. But the bestshared world anthologies, the ones that were the most entertaining and the most successful, were those that shared characters and plots as well as settings. In those books, and those alone, the whole was more than the sum of its parts. The “shared worlds” that minimized the sharing were missing the point of the exercise, it seemed to me.

Wild Cards would not make that mistake, I decided. We would maximize the sharing. More, we would strive to go well beyond what anyone else had ever done in the shared world game. So much so that when I drew up my “immodest proposal” for the fist threeWild Cards books, I eschewed the old term “shared world” and promised the publishers a series of “mosaic novels.”

That initial proposal was for three books, for no particular reason but that we wanted to do more than one, and no publisher was likely to buy twelve at a shot. That set a precedent, and later on we continued to plot, sell, and write the books in groups of three — “triads,” as we called them, since they were not quite trilogies (the second triad turned into four books and the third one into five, for what it’s worth, but never mind).

The first two volumes of that first triad (which would eventually become Wild CardsandAces High, though they had other titles in the proposal) would feature individual stories, each with its own plot and protagonist, a beginning, a middle, and an end. But all the stories would also advance what we called the “overplot.” And between the stories we would add an interstitial narrative that would tie them all together and create the “mosaic novel” feel we wanted.

But the true mosaic novel would be the third book, wherein we brought our overplot to a smashing conclusion. No other shared world had ever attempted anything quite like what we proposed to do with Jokers Wild: a single braided narrative, wherein all the characters, stories, and events were interwoven from start to finish in a sort of seven-handed collaboration. The end result, we hoped, would be a book that read like a novel with multiple viewpoints rather than simply a collection of related stories.

In my proposal I spoke of Jokers Wild as “a Robert Altman film in prose.” LikeNashville and A Wedding and several other of Altman’s trademark films, Jokers Wildwould feature a large and varied cast of characters whose paths would cross and recross during the course of the book. The setting would be New York City on September 15, 1986 — Wild Card Day, forty years after Jetboy’s death and the release of the Takisian xenovirus over Manhattan. All the action would take place within twenty-four hours, giving us a strong chronological framework on which to hang our story threads. The first two Wild Cards books had featured the work of eleven writers and nine writers, respectively, but because of the complexity of what we were about to attempt, I decided to limit Jokers Wild to six stories (there were seven names on the title page, to be sure, but Edward Bryant and Leanne C. Harper were collaborating, as they had in volume one). Each of the seven viewpoint characters had his own dreams, his own demons, and his own goals, the pursuit of which would take him back and forth across the city, up skyscrapers and down into sewers, bumping into other characters and other stories as he went.

It was seven stories and it was one story, but mostly it was an enormous headache. I did a lot of cutting and pasting and shuffling of sections as the manuscripts came in, striving for the perfect placement of all our cliffhangers, climaxes, and foreshadowings while simultaneously trying to keep chronology and geography firmly in mind. Half a hundred times I thought I had it, until noticing that Yeoman had taken six hours to get to Brooklyn, that Fortunato was in two places at once, that it had been three hundred pages since we’d last seen Demise. Then it was time to sigh and shuffle again. But I finally go tit right, (I think).

In truth, we were creating a new literary form of sorts, though none of us quite realized it at the time. We did realize that what we were doing was an experiment, and there were days when none of us were at all certain that the beast was going to fly. It was the hardest, most challenging editing that I ever did, and the writing was no day at the beach either.

In the end, though, all the effort was worth it. Readers and reviewers both seemed to love the mosaic novel form (although one reviewer amused me vastly by making a point of how seamlessly I had blended the styles of such dissimilar writers, when of course I’d made no attempt to “blend” any style whatsoever, preferring that each character retain his own distinctive individual voice).

And my writers and I agreed: Jokers Wild was the strongest volume in the series to date. The experiment had been a success. The full mosaic was too difficult and time-consuming a form to be used in every volume, but every third volume was just about right. So the template was set: all the Wild Cards triads to come would also conclude with a climactic mosaic, fully interwoven in the same manner as Jokers Wild.

Now, I presume that all of you reading these words (yes, I’m talking to you, don’t look over your shoulder, there’s no one here but you and me) have already read Jokers Wild. If you haven’t, STOP. Right here. Right now.

What follows is in the nature of a spoiler, and not meant for your eyes. Go read the book.

Are they gone?

Good. Now I can tell you about Kid Dinosaur and the Howler.

Over the course of Wild Cards, probably the single thing that upset our fans the most was the Astronomer’s hideous murder of Kid Dinosaur in Jokers Wild. For years thereafter, whenever we did a Wild Cards panel at a convention, one of the questions would inevitably be, “Why did you kill Kid Dinosaur? He was my favorite character.” The Howler was less prominent and far less popular, yet he had fans as well, some of whom wrote us in dismay when Roulette did the nasty with him.

The truth is, both characters had been marked for death from the day they were created. Remember, we plotted the Wild Cards book in triads. We knew, even before we started writing our stories for volume one, that come volume three the Astronomer and the surviving Masons would be trying to hunt down and kill all the aces who had smashed them at the Cloisters at the end of Book Two. A number of our major ongoing characters would be on that hit list, of course, and we wanted the readers to feel as though their lives were in desperate peril, the better to keep them on the edge of their seats.

But superheroes don’t die. Not in comic books, not really, not for good.

We needed to establish that Wild Cards was something different, that this danger wasreal, that we were playing for keeps here, that even our good guys could indeed die, and die horribly. With that in mind, early on in the going I sent out a call for “red-shirt aces” (anyone who’s ever watched the original Star Trek will get the reference), secondary characters that we could introduce in Book One and include in the Cloisters raid in Book Two, thereby setting them up to be Astronomer fodder in Book Three.

A number of my writers obliged by creating throwaway aces. One such was Steve Leigh’s Howler. Another was Kid Dinosaur, introduced by Lew Shiner in the epilogue to Volume One. The poor Howler had, I seem to recall, exactly one line of dialogue in the first two volumes, before Roulette got him into her bed in Book Three, so to this day I don’t understand how our readers could get attached to him. Kid Dinosaur was pushier, though. The little snotnose managed to force his way into several juicy scenes in Aces High — including one wherein the Turtle warned him what was going to happen if he kept trying to play with the big boys.

Is it my fault that the kid wouldn’t listen?

Shuffling the Deck or, Book Four and the World Tour

{HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! You do notwant to read what follows until after you’ve finishedAces Abroad and the three books before it}

Wild Cards began with a three-book contract, but the series was always intended to be open-ended. So when the first three volumes were published to excellent reviews and very strong sales and Bantam asked me for more, my writers and I were pleased to oblige. We loved this world and the characters who peopled it, and knew we had many more stories to tell about them.

The question was, where should we go from here?

Jokers Wild had brought the first triad to a climactic close. The Astronomer was dead, his Egyptian Freemasons smashed and dispersed, and out in the dark of space the Swarm had been tamed and turned away from Earth…but our characters remained, and damned few of them had been left to live happily ever after. Yeoman was still on the streets with his bow, fighting his one-man war against the Shadow Fist. Croyd Crenson still woke transformed every time he surrendered to sleep. James Spector remained on the loose, his eyes brimming with death. The Great and Powerful Turtle had been killed in Jokers Wild…or had he? Was the Turtle sighting that evening authentic? Just what had happened to Tom Tudbury after the Astronomer’s minions had sent his shell crashing into the Hudson?

And we had larger issues to deal with as well. We’d had some fun pitting our aces against the menace of the Swarm and the evil of the Astronomer, but we were plowing ground that had been plowed a thousand times before. Aliens and supervillians had been staples of the funny books since the first one came rolling off the press. Our versions had been grittier and more visceral, perhaps, but there was nothing really new in those types of adventures.

The most widely acclaimed story in the first three books had been Walter Jon Williams’ Nebula finalist, “Witness,” a powerful tale of human frailty where the villain was neither the Swarm nor the Astronomer, but rather the House Un-American Activities Committee (a few of our readers seemed to think that Walter made up HUAC, but never mind). There was a lesson there, if we wanted Wild Cards to be all that it could be. Plenty of comic books had featured superheroes fighting supervillians and alien invasions, but very few had seriously explored the deeper issues that would arise if a handful of superhumans had “power and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.” The responsibilities and temptations of great power, randomly bestowed. The ways society would deal with those who were more than human, and with the new underclass, the jokers. Aces as objects of hero worship and aces as objects of fear. The cult of the celebrity. All this should be grist for our mill, and the thematic heart and soul of theWild Cards.

We also wanted to broaden our canvas. The first triad had been very tightly focused on New York City. Oh, we got some glimpses of what was happening in the rest of the world during the Swarm War, and earlier as well, when the Four Aces were chasing Peron from Argentina and losing China to the Communists…but that was all they were, glimpses. For the most part our eyes remained fixed on the towers of Manhattan and the mean streets of Jokertown. It was time we showed what the Takisian virus had done to the rest of the world.

Last time I talked about my belief that the most effective shared worlds were those that maximized the sharing. That was a lesson that carried over into the second triad. We wanted a series where the whole was always greater than the sum of its parts. I had been fortunate enough to assemble the most gifted group of writers ever to work together on a collaborative project of this nature, and in the first three books they had given us a richly textured world with its own history, full of fascinating characters and conflicts…but to build on that foundation we needed to start working together more closely than we had previously. I wanted to draw our plot threads together, and make the second Wild Cards triad much more tightly woven than the first.

In later years, much of the planning for the Wild Cards books would be done on line, in a private category on the Genie BBS service, but back then the series and the Internet were both still in their infancy. Instead the New Mexico Wild Cards contingent assembled in the living room of Melinda Snodgrass’s old house on 2nd street, where we argued over coffee, and from time to time phoned up some of our out-of-town contributors to draw them into the dialogue as well.

As with the earlier triad, we decided that the first two volumes would feature a series of individual stories linked by an interstitial narrative, while the third and concluding volume would bring everything together in a full mosaic novel along the lines of Jokers Wild. The Astronomer and his Masonic cult had been the major overarching threat in the first three books. In this new triad, that role would be filled by Senator Gregg Hartmann, a wonderfully complex character who showed a noble, idealistic face to the world as he led the fight for joker rights, while concealing the sadistic ace Puppetman within. Hartmann’s 1976 bid for the presidency had failed in book one, but there was no reason he should not try again.

The Hartman story would be the major unifying thread of these next three books — the overplot, we called it — but there would be other conflicts going on as well. Both John Miller and Leanne Harper had given us a glimpse into New York’s criminal underworld, and it seemed inevitable that John’s Asian mob and Leanne’s old line Mafia family would come into conflict. So that became a second major plot thread, the focus of the middle book of this triad, volume five in the overall series, which would eventually be titled Down & Dirty.

The fourth book would be built around the global junket led by Senator Hartmann, its stated purpose to investigate the impact of the wild card virus on other parts of the world. That would serve to reintroduce Hartmann and Puppetman and get the overplot rolling, while simultaneously allowing us to tell some stories we would never have been able to tell had the series remained tightly based in New York City.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. With Wild Cards, nothing ever was. I have sometimes likened Wild Cards to a big band or a symphony, but writers are not accustomed to following a conductor. In this band, sometimes two people would leap in to play the same solo, determined to drown each other out. At other times, while most of the band was attempting Beethoven’s Fifth, there would be one oboe off in the corner stubbornly playing Mozart instead, and another guy on the harmonica doing the theme song to “My Mother, the Car.” As editor, sometimes I felt as if I were herding cats. Big cats, and me with neither a chair nor a whip…though I did have a checkbook, which works better than a whip on writers.

The triad which began with Aces Abroad was indeed much more tightly plotted than the first…though not nearly as tightly plotted as some of the later triads would be. Wild Cards was more interwoven than any shared world series that preceded it (or that followed it, for that matter), but that meant we were exploring virgin territory, so none of us really knew the way. No, not even Your Humble Editor, though editors are usually infallible, as is well known. Looking back on Aces Abroad all these years later, I think that perhaps I should have cracked my checkbook-whip a little more often at several points in the proceedings. Having Hartmann kidnapped twice during the same tour was a bit much, really, and I should have insisted that my writers juggle with the balls theyalready had up in the air before allowing them to toss up so many new ones. It is all very well when the plot thickens, but if it gets too bloody thick you’re likely to throw your wrist out stirring.

Still, it all worked out in the end, more or less. And if perhaps there were too many new characters being introduced, well, many of them would go on to greatly enrich the series in later books. It was here we first met the Living Gods, and Ti Malice, here that Mackie Messer first cut a bloody path into our hearts, here that the Hero Twins and the Black Dog and Dr. Tachyon’s darling grandson Blaise made their debuts, and Kahina and the Nur al-Allah as well. Polyakov came on stage for the fist time, as did Ed Bryant’s aboriginal shaman Wyungare…though the new character destined to play the largest role down the line was not actually new at all.

That was Jerry Strauss, introduced in the first book as the Projectionist, before becoming a Great Ape for a decade and a half. It was only after he was restored to humanity in Aces Abroad that our readers, like Dr. Tachyon, found themselves slapping their heads and remembering that the wild card never affects animals. As the Projectionist and the Great Ape, Jerry was just a bit player, but later as Nobody he would become somebody. So to speak.

Aces Abroad was a book for goodbyes as well. Lew Shiner’s heroic pimp Fortunato had been a Wild Cards mainstay since the first volume. In those early days he was one of our two most popular characters, judging from the mail we got and what our readers told us at conventions. (Dr. Tachyon was the only character to equal Fortunato’s popularity, but the readers who loved Tach inevitably hated Fortunato, and vice versa. “The Wimp and the Pimp” dichotomy we called it.) Lew had sent Fortunato off to Japan after his climactic battle with the Astronomer in Jokers Wild, to give the character some closure. But Gail Gerstner Miller threw him a curve ball when she had Peregrine turn up pregnant by Fortunato…and then we brought the tour toJapan, right to his doorstep. That managed to coax one last Fortunato story out of Lew…after which the pimp shuffled offstage once more, leaving the wimp to reign in solitary splendor for a time.

Aces Abroad also marked the end of my own Xavier Desmond, the “Mayor of Jokertown,” whose voice I used for the interstitial narrative. Writing the interstitial segments was always one of the most challenging assignments in doing a Wild Cards book. Not only did you need to tell a good story of your own, you also had to tie together all the other stories, bridge any gaps your fellow writers might have left, and patch up holes in the overplot. Later in the series, I would farm out the interstitials to various other brave souls, but in the beginning I did them all myself. “The Journal of Xavier Desmond” was the best of my interstitials, I think, and one of the most powerful things I ever wrote for Wild Cards.

All in all, the second Wild Cards triad got off to a flying start when our aces and jokers boarded the Stacked Deck for their trip around the world, little realizing what storms lay ahead for the characters, writers, and editor alike — the madness that was Down & Dirty and the monstrous runaway growth of book six.

But those are tales for another day.

Neither Fish Nor Fowl, or, How Down Got Dirty

WARNING: excessive editorial honesty ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Editing Down & Dirty almost drove me mad.

You’ve read the book by now (if not, shame on you for reading this part first—there’s a reason we call them Afterwords, you know). I hope that you enjoyed it. Many of the stories are first rate, as good as those in any other volume of the series. There are some fabulous scenes, characters, moments. The rise and fall of Typhoid Croyd. The murder of Kahina, among the most chilling ever depicted in Wild Cards. Modular Man’s battles against the reborn Snotman. Water Lily’s enslavement to the vile Ti Malice. And more…

Good stories are enough for an ordinary anthology, no doubt, but shared worlds demand something more, and Wild Cards was meant to go a step beyond even shared worlds. Our intent was always for the books to be more than just a collection of individual stories, however excellent. We called them “mosaic novels,” and set out to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

Usually we succeeded…but not in this case, I fear.

The Wild Cards books were plotted in groups of three. “Triads,” we called them. Each triad had its “overplot,” the main story thread that bound the three books together. But each book also was intended to have its unifying theme, and of course every individual tale had its own plots and subplots as well. So we were always working on three levels in Wild Cards, at minimum.

The overplot of our second triad was Gregg Hartmann’s quest for the presidency, which would climax in the sixth volume, our second full mosaic, Ace in the Hole. The two preceding books needed to set the table for that, and put in play certain characters and plot threads to be paid off in volume six. And below the overplot, on the volume level, the WHO world tour was the spine of volume four, Aces Abroad. In Down & Dirty, the gang war between the Gambiones and the Shadow Fists was originally meant to occupy center stage.

But when our rough outline for the second triad was delivered to Bantam, our editor balked. A gang war was too mundane for a SF/Fantasy series, she objected. It was trite as well; gang wars were a staple of movies and TV shows beyond count, they were old and tired. We tried arguing that our gang war would be rather different, since the Shadow Fists and the Gambiones would be using aces and jokers to settle their differences rather than car bombs and tommy guns, but to no avail. Our editor at Bantam insisted that Down & Dirty needed something else, something that was more distinctly Wild Cards than a fight for control of New York’s underworld.

I believe it was Vic Milan who came up with the answer, when half a dozen of us got together at Melinda Snodgrass’s house to brainstorm a solution to the crisis. Viruses are notoriously prone to mutation, he pointed out. What if xenovirus Takis-A was to mutate into a form capable of re-infecting aces and jokers? Such a mutant strain would put all our major characters at risk, not to mention throwing the whole city into a panic. The idea seemed to offer all sorts of juicy dramatic possibilities. Roger Zelazny stepped forward to offer the Sleeper as the source and carrier of the mutated virus. And thus “Typhoid Croyd” was born, Bantam was satisfied, and Down & Dirty had itself a new spine.

The problem was, it still had its old spine as well. We could not simply forget about the gang war, after all. Kien and his Shadow Fists were on stage, as were Rosemary Muldoon and the Gambiones. We had conflicts to resolve, storylines to pay off, loose ends to tie up, characters whose further growth and development hinged on experiences that were supposed to befall them in the book…during the gang war. Moreover, while some of my writers responded enthusiastically to the new Typhoid Croyd overplot, others showed no interest, preferring to write about the Mafia and the Shadow Fists as they had been planning all along.

My contributors were also deeply divided over when the book should take place. In Aces Abroad, the Stacked Deck had taken half a year to complete its circuit of the globe…during which time all of the aces and jokers on the junket had been absent from New York City. Some of my regular contributors had sent their characters on the tour; others had kept theirs at home. The first group wanted Down & Dirty to open after the travelers got back; the second bunch thought it should take place simultaneously with the tour. Life in Manhattan was not likely to stop just because a few people were out of town, they argued; Down & Dirty should tell the tales of what took place at home while the travelers were way. Yes, the others countered, but many of our most popular characters had been delegates on the tour. Did we really want to leave so many of our stars out of this volume? The readers would be expecting Dr. Tachyon and Hiram Worchester and Chrysalis and Puppetman, we ought not disappoint them.

Both sides made valid points. So with the wisdom of Solomon, I decided that I would solve the dispute by splitting the baby. The first half of Down & Dirty would take place while the tour was away, the second half after the Stacked Deck returned home. Volume five would thus overlap volume four, but would also carry the action forward, to help lead up to volume six. All my writers were happy.

If there are any aspiring editors reading this, take a lesson. Anything that makes all your writers happy is probably a bad idea. Your goal should always be to make yourreaders happy.

As the manuscripts started coming in and I sat down to assemble Down & Dirty, problems soon became apparent. The chronology was pure chaos. Story X had to come after Story Q, but Story Q took place while the tour was gone, and story X after it came home. Story Y followed both of them and led to Story Z, but Story Z had to go before Story X, or else a certain subplot made no sense. My own Turtle story had been written with the idea that it could act as a bridge between the two halves of the book, which would have worked fine…except that several other writers had done the same thing. Which should go first, which second, which third? No matter how I arranged them, these episodic stories ended up jerking the readers back and forth in time.

I was out in Hollywood during all this, and I spent most of the weekend sitting all alone in my office at Beauty and the Beast, reading and rereading the stories and arranging them first one way and then another. Nothing worked. By Sunday night I was almost ready to toss the manuscripts up in the air and print them in the order they landed (the New Wave approach). Almost, but not quite.

Instead…well, if you’re read the book, you know what I did instead. Considerable rewriting was involved (my happy writers became unhappy very quickly), along with an even more considerable amount of restructuring. The only way to give Down & Dirtyanything approaching a beginning, middle, and end (preferably in that order) was by pulling apart some of the stories, and arranging the sections in and among the other stories and each other.

From the very beginning, we had used two very different structures for the Wild Cards books. The climactic volume of each triad was always a full-blown mosaic novel, a six-or seven-way collaboration wherein all the storylines were woven through each other, to make a seamless (we hoped) whole. However, that structure was so difficult, demanding, and time consuming that we would only attempt it for one book in three. The other volumes were more conventionally organized into individual stories joined by sections of interstitial narrative that worked to link them all together into a whole. Beads on a string; the stories were the beads, the interstitial was the string them turned them into a necklace.

Down & Dirty started out as beads on a string, but the chronological confusion caused by my compromise required me to turn the book into something that was halfway toward being a mosaic novel. It worked after a fashion, I suppose; Bantam seemed happy enough, and our readers as well.

But the book will never be my favorite. The jerrybuilt organization offends my sense of structure. And the plot is all over the place. Some stories are built around the gang war, some are about Typhoid Croyd, some try to juggle both, while others ignore almost all these goings-on to pick up on the Ti Malice and Puppetman threads from Aces Abroad.It ain’t elegant, and I like a little elegance in the way a fiction is structured. The truth is,Down & Dirty is not quite finny enough to be a fowl, and not quite feathery enough to be a fish, so it neither flies nor swims.

My mistake was trying to please everyone, to find a compromise for every crisis. In hindsight, I should have either fought Bantam on the issue of the gang war, or else jettisoned it entirely in favor of the new Typhoid Croyd idea. Trying to deal with both at once, while simultaneously moving forward the Puppetman overplot that would be so crucial in the books to follow, was an invitation to chaos. I should also have settled the chronology issue one way or the other. That’s why us shared world editors get the big bucks, after all; for making the hard decisions. Instead, I tried to give all my writers what they wanted, and the book suffered as a result. Sometimes, when you cut the baby in half, all you get is two half-babies.

We all stumble from time to time, especially when trying something different…and Wild Cards was nothing if not different. We live and learn as well, however, and I learned some important lessons from Down & Dirty that would make me a better editor in the future. I would never make those mistakes again.

(I would, of course, make some entirely new mistakes, but those are tales for another month).