Game of Heroes

This would hardly be worthy of the title ‘Quantum Rumba’ if I didn’t occasionally talk about alternate universes. Since I haven’t been able to get funding yet for the Quantum Rambler Mark 1, we’ll have to settle for an imaginary trip.

Today’s fiction isn’t new and many of you will recognize the name behind it: George R.R. Martin. A couple decades back, Martin decided to tackle that quintessential American genre, the comic book super hero. Of course, this is George R.R. Martin we’re talking about, so he did it gritty and hard-hitting and above, he did it good.

I have mixed feelings about The Song of Ice and Fire series, but I want to be very clear about one thing: George R.R. Martin is a master of the craft. What’s more, with the Wild Cards series (beginning with Wild Cards I), he demonstrates he’s a masterful editor as well.

Wild Cards received some attention back in the ‘80s but went out of print. I was familiar with it due from the role playing game GURPS, which printed the tabletop system for it. I’d been watching out for a copy whenever I hit a used book store but hadn’t found any. Game of Thrones changed everything. Anyone who has ever published something by Martin is now scrambling to put out his old stuff while his name is front-and-center. I say that in a snarky way, but it made things easier for me.

Although Martin didn’t write every story in Wild Cards, his realistic tastes and writing talent show up in the editing. There are a few stories I wasn’t too fond of, but all of them were readable, which to my mind is high praise for an anthology.

Most of them are more than readable, though. Most of them kick ass. They’re dark, of course. That’s a given when Martin is involved. Some get really dark. I’d seen warnings about “adult content” in a GURPS book. When I encountered stuff about drugs and violence, I figured the editors at GURPS had overreacted when they issued the warning. Then I reached the scene where an avenging pimp sodomizes a dead man. And the pimp was a good guy. Yeah, the whole series isn’t like that. But there are some grisly surprises for the unprepared.

Dark as the series is, not all of the stories have dreary endings. Some of them are even happy (more or less)…including one by the Character-Slayer himself.

I felt I should mention this book on the Rumba because at its core, this book is an alternate reality. What if super heroes (and nasty mutants) were a reality? Wild Cards may be inspired by comic books, but in many ways it is a sort of thought experiment about how modern society would react to super powers. That means some things get better. Gandhi doesn’t catch that bullet, for instance. But JFK still does. In the end, super powers can’t stop evil—especially if evil gets them too. And nothing seems to stop human stupidity: Joe McCarthy proves a more formidable opponent than kryptonite.

The jump from comic book to other genre can be problematic but Wild Cards manages. If you’re looking for a novelized string of super hero stories or just a look at another universe, you could do worse.