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This one was a double feature, so we'll make it two reviews in one.
Book #18: Wild Cards VI - Ace in the Hole
Author: George R. R. Martin (ed.)
Provenance: Bought off eBay (and shipped to Japan)
Book #19: Wild Cards VII - Dead Man's Hand
Author: George R. R. Martin and John J. Miller
Provenance: Bought off eBay (and shipped to Japan)
I've had a fairly checkered past with the Wild Cards series, as Nicolas could probably attest. I got the first three of these shared-world books as a present when I was in Japan the first time, and I actually read them a couple of years later, when I was in Japan the second time. They were good enough that I went and picked up 4-8, and read 4 and 5 fairly soon afterwards. Unfortunately, 4 was pretty bad, and 5 wasn't good enough to make me want to drive on and finish the rest of what I had, and so despite Nic's insistence that 6 was really good, I ended up stopping there until recently.
We talked about the series some while I was down in Toronto recently, and so I decided to go back and finish this pair. They were originally supposed to be one novel, I'm told, but then it would have been too big, and so it was split into two, with the first dealing with the 1988 Democratic convention and being largely a political book, and the second dealing with the murder of one of the more prominent characters in the previous installments of the series, and being largely a mystery. However, the main characters in each book show up in the other one, as well, so to not read them together would probably be a bad idea.
Ace in the Hole is about the attempt by one of the main villains in the series, Sen. Gregg Hartmann (D-N.Y.) to become the presidential nominee. Hartmann has the power to manipulate the emotions, reactions and thoughts of anyone he's ever touched, provided they're within a fairly close proximity. Needless to say, this was useful as a politician; however, the price of the power is that it requires feeding on negative emotions fairly regularly, and so Hartmann manipulates people into violent acts, or into despair, to get that energy. This was a secret, largely, until this book.
The book's pretty even, for a shared-world book with a lot of authors, and the different authors' voices basically can just be attributed to the different characters' viewpoints in the world. Without the worse authors from the previous books, there aren't any egregiously bad portions, although some of them are better than others. The workings of politics in a world where there are lots of people with superhuman powers, and lots affected badly by an alien virus, were interesting, and the power-brokering behind the scenes with the real candidates (Jackson and Dukakis are featured) were pretty cool. This one was a lot of fun.
Dead Man's Hand was even more well-edited, probably because there were only two authors, and both of them good ones. Thing is, even if Martin got the style down for his cynical PI, these guys still don't know how to write a good mystery. I think I figured it out around the first appearance of the murderer in the book, probably about 50 pages in or so. Ah well; stylistically, the book is good, and it's in some ways a better take on the mysteries-with-superhuman-suspects than Powers of Detection was. I enjoyed this slightly less than Ace in the Hole, but it was still good.
So these two are probably worth reading, but to get here, there's a pretty high entry cost; you'd miss a lot, just jumping to this point in the series.
Next up: Hmmm... Snow Country or Eight Skilled Gentleman. Something Far Eastern, one way or another.
Book #18: Wild Cards VI - Ace in the Hole
Author: George R. R. Martin (ed.)
Provenance: Bought off eBay (and shipped to Japan)
Book #19: Wild Cards VII - Dead Man's Hand
Author: George R. R. Martin and John J. Miller
Provenance: Bought off eBay (and shipped to Japan)
I've had a fairly checkered past with the Wild Cards series, as Nicolas could probably attest. I got the first three of these shared-world books as a present when I was in Japan the first time, and I actually read them a couple of years later, when I was in Japan the second time. They were good enough that I went and picked up 4-8, and read 4 and 5 fairly soon afterwards. Unfortunately, 4 was pretty bad, and 5 wasn't good enough to make me want to drive on and finish the rest of what I had, and so despite Nic's insistence that 6 was really good, I ended up stopping there until recently.
We talked about the series some while I was down in Toronto recently, and so I decided to go back and finish this pair. They were originally supposed to be one novel, I'm told, but then it would have been too big, and so it was split into two, with the first dealing with the 1988 Democratic convention and being largely a political book, and the second dealing with the murder of one of the more prominent characters in the previous installments of the series, and being largely a mystery. However, the main characters in each book show up in the other one, as well, so to not read them together would probably be a bad idea.
Ace in the Hole is about the attempt by one of the main villains in the series, Sen. Gregg Hartmann (D-N.Y.) to become the presidential nominee. Hartmann has the power to manipulate the emotions, reactions and thoughts of anyone he's ever touched, provided they're within a fairly close proximity. Needless to say, this was useful as a politician; however, the price of the power is that it requires feeding on negative emotions fairly regularly, and so Hartmann manipulates people into violent acts, or into despair, to get that energy. This was a secret, largely, until this book.
The book's pretty even, for a shared-world book with a lot of authors, and the different authors' voices basically can just be attributed to the different characters' viewpoints in the world. Without the worse authors from the previous books, there aren't any egregiously bad portions, although some of them are better than others. The workings of politics in a world where there are lots of people with superhuman powers, and lots affected badly by an alien virus, were interesting, and the power-brokering behind the scenes with the real candidates (Jackson and Dukakis are featured) were pretty cool. This one was a lot of fun.
Dead Man's Hand was even more well-edited, probably because there were only two authors, and both of them good ones. Thing is, even if Martin got the style down for his cynical PI, these guys still don't know how to write a good mystery. I think I figured it out around the first appearance of the murderer in the book, probably about 50 pages in or so. Ah well; stylistically, the book is good, and it's in some ways a better take on the mysteries-with-superhuman-suspects than Powers of Detection was. I enjoyed this slightly less than Ace in the Hole, but it was still good.
So these two are probably worth reading, but to get here, there's a pretty high entry cost; you'd miss a lot, just jumping to this point in the series.
Next up: Hmmm... Snow Country or Eight Skilled Gentleman. Something Far Eastern, one way or another.
