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I'm about to start on this series. A google search resulted in tons of warnings that while this is indeed the work of GRRM. Notable for converting game of thrones into a book format. The series is in no way related or even close to game of thrones. This is no surprise to me. I listened through his biography book thingy that had dozens of his old and early works and GRRM is a turbo nerd. Almost too much of a nerd for me. I don't like super heroes nor pew pew laser spandex stuff but just as I'm about to fall off. He pulls me back in with some well rounded human character. I listened my way through some wildcard thing. It features the adventures of elephant man and some doctor who's super power was to drink a lot and reminisce about space hookers. Together this wacky duo as travel the world on some UN mission and poo poo on pretty much every single culture in the world except Sweden and Canada. It was pretty terrible. Especially when GRRM starts comparing jokers to black people. However as bad as it was, I loved the setting and it had a lot of potential if it could just abandon the grand perspective and maybe get back to some regular humans trying to deal with mutation. Zephyrine fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Nov 25, 2016 |
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Nov 25, 2016 16:52
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Sounds like you listened to the fourth one, Aces Abroad. It's...unfortunate. Zephyrine posted:However as bad as it was, I loved the setting and it had a lot of potential if it could just abandon the grand perspective and maybe get back to some regular humans trying to deal with mutation. You just summed up Wild Cards, right there. So much of it is terrible, but the potential of the premise makes it really hard to give up on. Just a note, this Let's Read isn't dead; I'm still working on it, but a lot of other stuff has been grabbing up my time and attention.
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Nov 26, 2016 10:33
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I'm pretty sure I warned them off actually trying to read the books in another thread so at this point I'm just enjoying the schadenfreude 
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Nov 26, 2016 11:34
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Thinky Whale posted:Sounds like you listened to the fourth one, Aces Abroad. It's...unfortunate. Apparently Israel lost the 6 day war after Assad brought out some surprise Aces  Thinky Whale posted:Sounds like you listened to the fourth one, Aces Abroad. It's...unfortunate. I read Atlas shrugged from start to finish just to see what the big deal was. I can do wildcards. So far wildcards ironically has more humans and less super-humans than Atlas Shrugged.
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Nov 26, 2016 14:13
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Zephyrine posted:I'm about to start on this series. A google search resulted in tons of warnings that while this is indeed the work of GRRM. Notable for converting game of thrones into a book format. The series is in no way related or even close to game of thrones. I will point out that most of that crap was the contributions of other writers -- GRRM's contributions to WIld Cards were generally a lot better than other writers' (excepting folks like Zelazny and Waldrop, who didn't stay involved for long).
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Nov 26, 2016 23:49
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Zephyrine posted:Apparently Israel lost the 6 day war after Assad brought out some surprise Aces Israel also only exists because the Envoy got involved, as I recall.
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Nov 26, 2016 23:53
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Zephyrine posted:I am completely in love with the setting so I think I'll finish as much of the series as I can find. Good luck and godspeed! I'd be interested to hear your thoughts as you go along.
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Nov 28, 2016 14:06
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 WRAITH Jennifer is wandering around New York near naked, shoeless, harassed by fears of being bitten by a lizardman, quote:She had already ignored half a dozen indecent proposals and that could only get worse with the coming of night. and also normal harassed. While looking for a place to hide for a while, she spots a church with the refreshingly honest name of Our Lady of Perpetual Misery, opens the door, and walks into the four armed embrace of mutant two-headed titty Christ. quote:The central figure was a crucified Christ, but a Christ like Jennifer had never seen. He – Jennifer thought of Him as He, though she wasn't exactly sure if the pronoun applied in this case – was naked but for a scrap of linen draped around his loins. He had an extra set of shriveled arms sprouting from his rib cage and an extra head on his shoulders. Both heads had aesthetically lean features. One was bearded and masculine, the other was smooth-cheeked and feminine. Blood trickled down both faces because of the crown of thorns that each head wore. Four pairs of breasts ran down the front of the Christ's body, each pair smaller than the one above. There was a gaping red wound running blood onto the lowest breast on the figure's right side. The Christ was not crucified upon a cross, but rather upon a twisting helix, a convoluted ladder, or, Jennifer realized, a representation of DNA. This mural, besides being something kickass to paint on your van, is the emblem of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker. Winged lady whose boobs are mentioned is of course Peregrine, and the juggler is Golden Boy Jack Braun, the guy who sold out some fellow Aces to HUAC back in the first book. I'm not certain about Labgoat. The closest half-animal I can think of is Finn, the centaur doctor at the clinic, but that's the wrong ungulate. Anyway, it's a nice bit of worldbuilding that the books are always reinforcing their characters' place as celebrities and historical figures. Jennifer has heard of this denomination. They're a new one that some jokers are into, though this was during the reign of the previous less chill pope, so the official Catholic church isn't thrilled about it. quote:nobody who wasn't a joker knew much about it, especially the secret rites that were rumored to be carried on in subterranean crypts This had better not be one of those Da Vinci Code-style orgy of the elderly religions. Jennifer hears some weird, wet noises, and in comes Father Squid. Sure, he smells kind of weird, and as ordered by the Lovecraft estate, any horrible fishman's skin must be described as “glabrous,” but beneath the little tentacle mustache he's actually a big squishy sweetheart. He does have hands and not tentacles, but they have “faint circular depressions, like vestigial suckers” on the palm, which is a neat touch. He also talks funny. quote:Somehow she couldn't be afraid of someone who said things like “I would endeavor to assist you.” He wants to know her story, and says that he'll be acting as a confessor, so it's confidential. They go into the nave to chat. NEXT TIME: Bagabond gets a date and momentarily possesses a wino.
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Nov 28, 2016 14:21
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Thinky Whale posted:This mural, besides being something kickass to paint on your van, is the emblem of the Church of Jesus Christ, Joker. Winged lady whose boobs are mentioned is of course Peregrine, and the juggler is Golden Boy Jack Braun, the guy who sold out some fellow Aces to HUAC back in the first book. I'm not certain about Labgoat. The closest half-animal I can think of is Finn, the centaur doctor at the clinic, but that's the wrong ungulate. If memory serves, at this point Brad Finn is still in Africa. But Labgoat definitely isn't anyone. It's just a typically Boschian image in a mural inspired 100% by Bosch. Father Squid is a great minor character with a lot of backstory, who gets unforgivably wasted in probably the worst written and dumbest storyline in all 22 books (unless there's a dumber one somehow in the most recent, which I haven't read yet).
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Nov 30, 2016 09:11
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Jedit posted:If memory serves, at this point Brad Finn is still in Africa. But Labgoat definitely isn't anyone. It's just a typically Boschian image in a mural inspired 100% by Bosch. Wasn't there a centaur Joker doctor/scientist? edit: Never mind, that IS Brad Finn which Thinky Whale directly referenced now that I looked it up. JediTalentAgent fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Dec 6, 2016 |
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Dec 6, 2016 07:08
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I'm curious about why Peregrine gets a place in the mural when her whole point seems to be 'marketability =/= actual power or relevance for aces.' Then again the whole church of joker Jesus feels like a cool idea one of the writers got hella enthusiastic about for an afternoon one time then lost interest. I'm also curious about why the gently caress this book has so much sewer jack/bagabond/rosemary in it. apart from being the most boring terrible creations in the series themselves they're not even nominally important to the plot.
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Dec 14, 2016 13:24
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Saint Drogo posted:I'm curious about why Peregrine gets a place in the mural when her whole point seems to be 'marketability =/= actual power or relevance for aces.' Then again the whole church of joker Jesus feels like a cool idea one of the writers got hella enthusiastic about for an afternoon one time then lost interest. Short answer: they were the PCs.
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Dec 14, 2016 14:19
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Saint Drogo posted:I'm curious about why Peregrine gets a place in the mural when her whole point seems to be 'marketability =/= actual power or relevance for aces.' Peregrine is a joker, not an ace. Her flight is entirely down to a narrow telekinetic ability, her wings are a deformity. But, y'know, she's pretty so she's an ace. Compare this to, say, Sascha Starfin, who is a decently strong telepath but obviously deformed and so he's a joker.
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Dec 14, 2016 14:37
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Jedit posted:Peregrine is a joker, not an ace. Her flight is entirely down to a narrow telekinetic ability, her wings are a deformity. But, y'know, she's pretty so she's an ace. Compare this to, say, Sascha Starfin, who is a decently strong telepath but obviously deformed and so he's a joker. Thus continuing the real theme of Wild Cards: all the interesting stuff is only in the asides and fridge logic.
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Dec 14, 2016 14:55
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Saint Drogo posted:I'm curious about why Peregrine gets a place in the mural when her whole point seems to be 'marketability =/= actual power or relevance for aces.' Then again the whole church of joker Jesus feels like a cool idea one of the writers got hella enthusiastic about for an afternoon one time then lost interest. That occurred to me too. Her getting a place among all the important social figures in these things is odd once you remember her whole thing is she's a talk show host. You don't usually see Conan O'Brien in murals. I figure it's a combination of being famous and just being a PC. Saint Drogo posted:I'm also curious about why the gently caress this book has so much sewer jack/bagabond/rosemary in it. apart from being the most boring terrible creations in the series themselves they're not even nominally important to the plot. My theory is the less other stuff a writer has to do, the more of the Wild Cards load they end up hefting. They do end up intersecting with the main journal-chasing plot pretty soon, though. whowhatwhere posted:Thus continuing the real theme of Wild Cards: all the interesting stuff is only in the asides and fridge logic. IIRC, in the fourth book Peregrine brings up actually being a joker directly, but it's dropped without much done with it. Which is too bad, because the arbitrariness of the ace/joker distinction is an interesting thing to mine. A couple even get called joker-aces, like the one in a Chris Claremont story who's a horrible blob monster but has the power to telepathically transform women into similar blob monsters so it can have sex with them. I was baffled by that one for a while. Hearing that Chris Claremont is known for having a transformation fetish helped. Well, explained. Not helped.
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Dec 14, 2016 15:31
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whowhatwhere posted:Thus continuing the real theme of Wild Cards: all the interesting stuff is only in the asides and fridge logic. It was brought up several times in Aces Abroad. Once when Peregrine's boyfriend comes over jokerphobic, and again when Digger shows off his article on the World's Strongest Ace that ignores the fact that jokers like Troll and the Oddity are almost as powerful as Jack Braun or the Harlem Hammer. Xavier Desmond also brings up several times that jokers are judged by their deformities and aces by their powers, and people with both are judged by which can most easily be ignored. Thinky Whale posted:IIRC, in the fourth book Peregrine brings up actually being a joker directly, but it's dropped without much done with it. Which is too bad, because the arbitrariness of the ace/joker distinction is an interesting thing to mine. A couple even get called joker-aces, like the one in a Chris Claremont story who's a horrible blob monster but has the power to telepathically transform women into similar blob monsters so it can have sex with them. I was baffled by that one for a while. Hearing that Chris Claremont is known for having a transformation fetish helped. It's a combination of him being famous and not PC. 
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Dec 14, 2016 18:35
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Thinky Whale posted:That occurred to me too. Her getting a place among all the important social figures in these things is odd once you remember her whole thing is she's a talk show host. You don't usually see Conan O'Brien in murals. I figure it's a combination of being famous and just being a PC. Claremont's is still not as bad as Jack Chalker's though...
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Dec 14, 2016 20:35
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Jedit posted:Xavier Desmond also brings up several times that jokers are judged by their deformities and aces by their powers, and people with both are judged by which can most easily be ignored. Thing is, that's a concept that could easily drive an entire book, but doesn't because the conceit of the series means everyone has their own pet characters they want to write about instead.
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Dec 15, 2016 10:31
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Nothing to do with the ongoing posting other than the source material, but it appears that a new/updated <?> site is up that is chock-full of Wild Cards stuff: http://www.wildcardsworld.com/ I like the author pic of Walter John Williams. 
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Dec 15, 2016 18:30
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Walter Jon Williams is cool and his own books are pretty fun. I got the latest volume for Christmas. Too early to report yet, but it's a Melinda Snodgrass standalone so I'm slightly confident it'll be better than the series nadir that was the last book. On the subject of Snodgrass standalones: Double Solitaire and Dealer's Choice have been swapped in the official reading order. It makes for a big cliffhanger at the end of Jokertown Shuffle that takes an age to resolve, but the Rox storyline gets wrapped up more tidily. The 23 books are now arranged into five triads and one quartet with a pair of standalones on either side of the Card Sharks Triad.
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Dec 27, 2016 02:22
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It should be obligatory to refer to Double Solitaire as Teenage Girl Tachyon Vs His Own Grandson (In His Stolen Body) Who Raped Him Pregnant And Is Now Hitler IN SPACE imo 
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Dec 28, 2016 14:00
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Saint Drogo posted:It should be obligatory to refer to Double Solitaire as Teenage Girl Tachyon Vs His Own Grandson (In His Stolen Body) Who Raped Him Pregnant And Is Now Hitler IN SPACE imo Blaise is more Space Stalin, really. One of his big policies was abolishing the Takisian breeding laws and forcing the nobility to interbreed with their inferiors, which is about as not Hitler as you get.
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Dec 28, 2016 16:37
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Saint Drogo posted:It should be obligatory to refer to Double Solitaire as Teenage Girl Tachyon Vs His Own Grandson (In His Stolen Body) Who Raped Him Pregnant And Is Now Hitler IN SPACE imo  I may have to pick up this series where I left off (Card Sharks, I think, it was a while ago..) just to see how that comes about.
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Dec 29, 2016 02:29
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EmptyVessel posted:
The Card Sharks books are 13-15, Double Solitaire is book 10 (technically 11, now). Double Solitaire was quite hard to find if you didn't grab it straight away, though, so you could have missed it.
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Dec 29, 2016 02:47
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God yes you're right. I now remember picking up two Card Sharks books secondhand (Ist and 2nd maybe?) even though I'd stopped reading the series around One-Eyed Jacks (I think, even looking at the titles on Wikipedia isn't helping). I might not even have read them. Vol. 15 Black Trump can never live up to what I now want it to be about.
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Dec 29, 2016 03:07
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EmptyVessel posted:God yes you're right. It's about racist cunts infiltrating the US government and trying to exterminate minority groups. It probably belongs on the non-fiction shelf, centaurs being less outlandish than reality anyway.
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Dec 29, 2016 20:02
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Jedit posted:It's about racist cunts infiltrating the US government and trying to exterminate minority groups. It probably belongs on the non-fiction shelf, centaurs being less outlandish than reality anyway. drat, that's actually pretty close. Hopefully it's not too prophetic.
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Dec 30, 2016 02:54
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EmptyVessel posted:drat, that's actually pretty close. Hopefully it's not too prophetic. Hopefully it is, the plan fails and the racist cunts are either killed or have to spend the rest of their lives in hiding.
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Dec 31, 2016 14:08
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I finished High Stakes over the Christmas period. As expected it's much better than the previous volume, which I think was titled Lowball out of self-aware Irony, but it's a bit jarring tonally. This is Wild Cards as straight up horror novel. No weird sex you'll be glad to hear, but a lot of body horror even by the standards of a series where people push body horror aside walking down the street. Plenty of splatter too.
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Jan 9, 2017 17:21
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Huh. I wouldn't have figured they'd go straight into horror, though like you say there's plenty to work with there. I'm biased, since I find the series more interesting when it has some restraint about the big, splattery melodrama and focuses on the small-scale day-to-day life of Tentacles McGee or whoever.
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Jan 12, 2017 15:17
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Jedit posted:No weird sex you'll be glad to hear  Are you quite sure you didn't get something else confused with a Wild Cards novel?
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Jan 13, 2017 06:26
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So I just picked up the first book of this. I saw the cover of Fort Freak and I loved it, then I ran into the first book. Are each of the books unique on their own, or do I have to read it order?
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Jan 16, 2017 06:54
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GreenBuckanneer posted:So I just picked up the first book of this. I saw the cover of Fort Freak and I loved it, then I ran into the first book. Are each of the books unique on their own, or do I have to read it order? Really, they're put together in long story arcs, and you can pick up or drop at the break points. The first is the Astronomer arc (Books 1-3), followed by Puppetman (Books 4-6). The next arc goes on for way too long and is about Blaise being a little poo poo and all the resulting fallout (I think through Book 11). Then there are three books in the Black Trump cycle, plus one or two standalones (like Deuces Down), and then we're up to the current Tor books. It does help to read in order, because of all the continuity and nods to old characters, but it's not strictly necessary as long as you start at the beginning of an arc each time.
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Jan 16, 2017 08:04
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Yond Cassius posted:Really, they're put together in long story arcs, and you can pick up or drop at the break points. The first is the Astronomer arc (Books 1-3), followed by Puppetman (Books 4-6). The next arc goes on for way too long and is about Blaise being a little poo poo and all the resulting fallout (I think through Book 11). Then there are three books in the Black Trump cycle, plus one or two standalones (like Deuces Down), and then we're up to the current Tor books. It does help to read in order, because of all the continuity and nods to old characters, but it's not strictly necessary as long as you start at the beginning of an arc each time. It is once you get to the Tor books. There's a lot of pivotal characters in the second trilogy who receive no introduction because it's assumed you read the first.
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Jan 16, 2017 08:51
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Help me out here guys I just finished Wild Cards 1. (This post may container minor spoilers) So this hero guy. He's black. He's also a pimp (of course he is) He has magic sex super powers that leave women exhausted in his wake. Complaining that they can't stand any more orgasms. He has magic sperm that can be used for all kinds of things apparently. He recharges his powers by having sex. This leads to scenes with he needs to have emergency sex to restore his powers and save the day. Much like Poppey will discover a can of spinach to help him overcome a difficult situation. Except instead of spinach. This hero has emergency hookers. Finding himself out of options and low on power. He glances down the street and spots a woman in a miniskirt and too much makeup. He pulls down his pants and whips out a hundred dollar bill and I imagine this theme playing in the background. In one scene he's looking to solve a mystery over some dead hookers. He corners the murderer and accidentally kills him while they are fighting. So he turns the murderer over, fucks him in the rear end and then brings him back to life with his magic sperm. So that the murderer can then be interrogated. The murderer may also have been a minor or at least a teenager. I have so many questions but first and foremost... I heard these characters were from some sessions of live RP. Who played this guy and how was he welcome at following sessions? I try to imagine a scene where someone's character is gravely wounded after losing a battle with a monster. And then this guy goes "I got this. Quick! Pull his pants down! I'll restore him with my magic sperm!" Edit: I got the E-book version. Did I get a misprinted version that accidentally had blaxploitation porn in it from other works of literature or is this the real stuff? Edit 2: The scariest part of all is that despite all this. The story was still better than the hour after hour I spent reading a thesis on mccarthyism. Thinly veiled as being about superheroes and monsters. Dejawesp fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jan 21, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 15:08
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Congrats, you've ben wild carded.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:21
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...That's a real wild cards character? E: poo poo I re read the OP, that's Fortunato Tempora Mutantur fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 16:24
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Okay I did read the wiki a bit before going into this. Aliens release a virus that fucks everything up. Except in between that the virus bomb crashes without being released. So these guys pick up the bomb and then explode it on New York city to release the virus. Which is the exact same thing but slightly jarring because now humans released the virus on themselves? But then the rest of the story seems to go on as if "Thirty Minutes Over Broadway" never happened and everyone agrees that the aliens released the virus. Also OP (can I call you OP?) this is a very good OP. Can I buy you platinum for a good OP? How do I send people platinum? Dejawesp fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 16:51
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It's a delight to see someone meet Fortunato. I always wondered about the roleplay aspect of him, too. That must have made for some awkward moments at the table. Actually, this thread is a full Let's Read to go along with the general discussion, though I messed up and didn't put that in the title, so there's in-depth recaps of the first two books, with the third ongoing on the rare occasions I get off my rear end and do some. You can see Fortunato driving me insane in real time. Dejawesp posted:Except in between that the virus bomb crashes without being released. So these guys pick up the bomb and then explode it on New York city to release the virus. Which is the exact same thing but slightly jarring because now humans released the virus on themselves? Jetboy gets memorialized a lot through the series, but yep, the bad guys who stole the bomb are never mentioned again. One of the introductions or afterwords implies that Thirty Minutes Over Broadway was an unrelated story that was reworked to fit into the Wild Cards universe, which would explain why it feels out of place. Interestingly, the series was reworked to fit the story, too - the original plan was to have the outbreak in the 80s, but to fit with the time period Waldrop wanted to write, they moved it earlier, which ended up being a good thing because it allowed for some interesting stuff like guys with superstrength trying to deal with McCarthy and HUAC. Dejawesp posted:Also OP (can I call you OP?) this is a very good OP. Can I buy you platinum for a good OP? How do I send people platinum? That's extremely nice of you! It looks like there's a button in the top bar for it if you'd like to.
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Jan 18, 2017 14:42
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Thinky Whale posted:One of the introductions or afterwords implies that Thirty Minutes Over Broadway was an unrelated story that was reworked to fit into the Wild Cards universe, which would explain why it feels out of place. Interestingly, the series was reworked to fit the story, too - the original plan was to have the outbreak in the 80s, but to fit with the time period Waldrop wanted to write, Which is why Wild Card Day is Waldrop's birthday, incidentally. Smooth Eddy Shiloh does turn up in the first Wild Cards comic series from the early 90s, but it is very bad and stupid. Tod is only ever referenced in relation to his waxwork in the Dime Museum, though. I guess the point is that small-time war profiteers aren't of much importance in the world post-virus.
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Jan 18, 2017 14:59
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