after an alien virus changed the course of history, the surviving population of Manhattan still struggles to understand the new world left in its wake.
Natural humans share the rough city with those given extraordinaryand sometimes terrifyingtraits, While most manage to coexist in an uneasy peace, not everyone is willing to adapt, Down in the seedy underbelly of Jokertown, residents are going missing, The authorities are unwilling to investigate, except for a fresh lieutenant looking to prove himself and a collection of unlikely jokers forced to take matters into their own handsor tentacles.
The deeper into the kidnapping case these misfits and miscreants get, the higher the stakes are raised,
Edited byNew York Times bestselling author George R, R. Martin and acclaimed author Melinda M, Snodgrass, Lowball is the latest mosaic novel in the acclaimed Wild Cards universe, featuring original fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ian Tregillis, David Anthony Durham, Melinda M.
Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David D, Levine, Michael Cassutt, and Walter John Williams,
Perfect for old fans and new readers alike, Lowball delves deeper into the world of aces, jokers, and the hardboiled men and women of the Fort Freak police precinct in a pulpy, pageturning novel of superheroics and mystery.
Decades after an alien virus changed the course of history, the surviving population of Manhattan still struggles to understand the new world left in its wake.
Natural humans share the rough city with those given extraordinaryand sometimes terrifyingtraits, While most manage to coexist in an uneasy peace, not everyone is willing to adapt, Down in the seedy underbelly of Jokertown, residents are going missing, The authorities are unwilling to investigate, except for a fresh lieutenant looking to prove himself and a collection of unlikely jokers forced to take matters into their own handsor tentacles.
The deeper into the kidnapping case these misfits and miscreants get, the higher the stakes are raised,
Edited byNew York Times bestselling author George R, R. Martin and acclaimed author Melinda M, Snodgrass, Lowball is the latest mosaic novel in the acclaimed Wild Cards universe, featuring original fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ian Tregillis, David Anthony Durham, Melinda M.
Snodgrass, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David D, Levine, Michael Cassutt, and Walter John Williams,
Perfect for old fans and new readers alike, Lowball delves deeper into the world of aces, jokers, and the hardboiled men and women of the Fort Freak police precinct in a pulpy, pageturning novel of superheroics and mystery.
There is little denying that Game of Thrones has made George R R Martin a household name, The books and the television show are massively, insanely popular and rightly so, Ill admit that though I thoroughly enjoy my visits to Westeros, and all of its political machinations, I have always had more of a soft spot for Martins other magnum opus, the Wild Cards books.
Since the late nineteen eighties, this ongoing series of mosaic novels, that Martin edits with Melinda M Snodgrass, has cleverly reinvented the superhero genre on a regular basis.
Smart, often bitingly satirical and insightful, this series has managed to so many thing at once, Its always impressive when genre fiction achieves that most difficult of tasks, to be both entertaining and topical in the same breath.
The Wild Cards novels, like the comic books they expertly play homage to, have had their own golden and silver age and are now were bang up to date in the twenty first century.
As ever, the majority of the action takes place in New York, specifically on the streets of Jokertown, the one place where the less fortunate victims of the virus can live something close to a normal life.
Slap bang in the middle of all this mayhem, the detectives of the local police precinct try to keep some extremely unusual residents under control.
Where Lowball excels, as with the other Wild Cards novels, is in telling the stories of ordinary people who are forced to live in most unusual of circumstances.
It doesnt matter if youre a natural untouched by the virus, an ace a superpowered hero or villain, or a joker those who dont quite make the ace grade, each and every person has to get by in a world where the extraordinary can and does happen.
As multiple authors are involved in the book, each get the opportunity to write their own story and weave that into the larger narrative.
Its great stuff. There were are plethora of highlights scattered throughout that always raised a smile, Its the little things that have always managed to set these novels apart in my opinion, Moments like discovering a joker who just happens to have the same name as my favourite band, or spotting references to jokers and aces from other novels in the series Croyd Crenson and Carnifex for the win!.
These unexpected Easter eggs are a delight to discover,
One word of warning, if youve never read a Wild Cards novel before this probably isnt the place for you to start.
Bare minimum, I would suggest that you read the first book in the series, It acts as the perfect introduction to this shared universe, Once you know the rules there are twenty one other novels, including Lowball, to devour, It really is worthwhile understanding the huge history and intricate backstories that so many talented authors have helped to craft.
There have been rumours of a Wild Card movie floating around for a while now, Ive heard that Melinda M Snodgrass is directly involved, and that can only bode well, To say I am excited by the prospect of this may be the biggest understatement I have ever made.
Moving the Wild Cards to the screen, big or small, could be truly wondrous, Id love to see it happen, There are so many characters and stories, including the ones in this novel, which I would happily kill to see brought to life.
So, way back in the's and's, there was a proliferation of books that were compilations of stories around a certain theme.
There was Thieves' World, where all the stories took place in and around a town called Sanctuary by the way, those at my DampD table: from Sanctuary comes the Vulgar Unicorn, but not the Horeshoe Road Inn that one's all mine, and there was the Escape from Hell books that collected stories from famous evil people in Hell trying to get the hell out, so to speak.
Wild Cards novels were novels in that same vein, but in the super hero genre, Folks, Wild Cards was Watchmen to me before I discovered Watchmen just Wikipediad it and both series began about the same time.
That is, Wild Cards looked at the human side of super heroes and showed them foibles and all.
So, a bit of background for the Wild Cards universe, just so you can understand it: It all began when Jet Boy fought the alien invaders over New York in the's and an alien virus was unleashed.
The virus killedof those with whom in came in contact, Of the remaining,were turned into hideous deformed creatures whilegained cool super powers, This wild card effect called turning your card, therefore, turned people into Jokers or Aces or you drew the Black Queen and were out of the game.
There were a number of collections of short stories before the editors began piecing together a mosaic narrative.
That is, the stories nowadays often feature multiple authors writing about their creations and the story fits together as a whole.
There have been several mosaic novels out this is the most recent,
In this story, we find that someone is abducting Jokers, but no one save the Jokers themselves cares.
Enter Father Squid, the church presence in Jokertown modern day Bronx, I believe in New York, He pushes for an investigation and convinces Marcus the Infamous Black Tonguea Joker with a snake lower half and human upper half and a really long poisonous tongue to help him look.
At the same time, police officer Francis Franny Xavier Black is promoted to detective way too early everyone in the department feels and is given the case to investigate.
Mainly because no other detective will touch it, Eventually, Infamous Black Tongue and Father Squid disappear, Detective Black hooks up with Jamal Norwood the Stuntman because he can bounceback from injuries quicklyexcept in this novel he is sick with something that seems to have taken away his talent, a government agent, and the detective and agent actually beat some leads out of people.
And then the story gets interesting, . .
I thought the story hung together well, Mr. Martin who needs to put this up and work on the next book in the Song of Ice and Fire, dammit and Ms.
Snodgras did a superb job driving the authors in the same direction and keeping consistent characterization, And, I am sure the authors have had a few years of this, too, to get to know the characters and understand the story line.
This is a good read, with enough background that you
do not necessarily need to have read the previous books to pick up the main thread of what has happened in the past.
This story is selfcontained, so in order to understand it, you definitely do not need to have read the previous books.
It will help, but is not absolutely necessary, Disclaimer this is only the second Wild Cards novel that I've read, I really enjoyed 'Fort Freak' but I didn't enjoy Lowball as much, I felt the stories and genre feel were more cohesive with 'Fort Freak', In saying that, Lowball might be popular with long running readers of the series since it presumably is making references to characters and events that happened a long time ago.
This book is also less focused on Jokertown, The action ranges to other counties, cities, countries and brings in the SCARE agency which probably means more to existing readers.
There is an overarching story about the kidnappings in Jokertown but the range of characters and locations means it doesn't have as tight a feel.
I was also a bit disappointed that some of the characters that were interesting like the sketch artist and Lupo drop off the radar while other characters like Michael amp family are included for an admittedly interesting view on their sex amp family life but not for substantial plot reasons.
I also found Stuntman to be a really boring character and investigator which is a shame since he ended up being pretty central.
I did like Gordon the Ghoul getting his own story in this novel,
Unlike Fort Freak, Lowball is not a standalone novel and the 'ending' goes straight on to Highball.
You simply can not enter a stream ofnovels onand hope to follow/like it, despite what flyleaf says.
This seems to be a clever concept, but the fact remains that it is very clear that the novel is a series of sketches brought together with a common story line.
Sometimes multiple authors work, sometimes not, I plan to circle back and try the first book in the series to see if suddenly this series clicks for me as the editors are first rate.
Wild Cards books are very hit or miss, and even the ones that hit are pure genre cheese.
That's why they're so much fun, though, Lowball is a hit for me, for all that it seems confused at times about what kind of book that it is.
Lowball is another Fort Freakcentered Wild Cards novel, picking up after the book of the same name with some, though not all, of the same characters.
Marcus, the Infamous Black Tongue, makes a return, and really all you need to do to get me to like a book is give me a heartofgold vigilante type of dude who is from Baltimore, oh, and also, the lower half of his body is a snake and his tongue can deliver doses of venom.
Awesome.
Unfortunately, my least favorite part of Fort Freak, Detective Stevens, also known as the guy who spent most of that book having threesomes with the dancer ace and the other, different kind of dancer joker, is also back, but blessedly there's little of the threesomes and the parts where you can't avoid him, well, they're few and far between.
Stevens has not much to do with the Aplot of the book at all,
What passes for here are Detective Black and Marcus, Black is a nat and the son of a policeman who was also a nat and also served at Fort Freak.
"Unresolved daddy issues," as he tells another character, At one point, Black reflects for some reason on the day that the Astronomer and Fortunato dueled in the skies, which he remembers because it was the day his father died.
As fate would have it, that was the very last book I read before this, It was sitelinkJokers Wild, I don't remember any police officers named Black, I guess I should have paid closer attention, I didn't like that particular book much, It was a miss.
The Aplot involves missing jokers, because it turns out people are being kidnapped and wouldn't you know, the police brass don't give a shit.
That is the nature of police brass in fiction, and probably real life too, If no one misses the missing, there's no crime there, right But Black, bless him, is real poleece, and though he resembles Jimmy McNulty very little, he is drawn in to this quixotic chase he has been ordered to stop pursuing, oh, but let's just call this Fed buddy Stuntman, making a return from the first of the American Hero/Committee trilogy books and see what they can rustle up under the radar.
As a multiauthor novel, it's a lot of parts of several different short stories broken up and then strung together, but there are a few that are presented without interruption.
The first of these is pretty great, the story of the medical examiner of Jokertown who everybody assumes is a joker it's not clear whether he is and he really, really likes rockets a lot.
There's also the joker/ace who can draw characters into life and he uses them to be a series of Peeping Toms.
Then there are the parts that make me wonder if this book is sure that it knows what it wants to be.
What I liked about the Fort Freak book is that it was this trip into a different world from the highflying aces of the previous trilogy.
Jokertown is definitely a different sort of place, and this was more along the lines of some hardboiled detective stuff.
Fun as it was to read the drunken misadventures as Curveball, Earth Witch, and Drummer Boy plowed through some plot, what do they bring to your world of tentacles and elephant heads and hooves and everything else It was nice to check in on them, but they felt like they belonged in a different book.
Same with Rusty, whose story I also enjoyed, because how can you not like the slightly dim but exceptionally heroic guy whose skin is metal and who, well, rusts things He blunders his way into the mess as well, reminding me very much of a DampD character I once played who was an elf paladin but basically had Rusty's personality and intellect.
This is Black's story, and IBT's and Father Squid's and Stevens' grudgingly and the other cops and jokers' story.
Or that's what I thought it was until all the aces dropped in, charming as their parts were on their own.
For all of its occasional faults and despite/because of its cheesiness, I enjoy the heck out of a good Wild Cards book and this one was one of the good ones.
Oh, and as with Fort Freak, though George R, R. Martin's name is prominently on the cover edited by none of his writing is featured within, I respect the hustle. Everybody is trying to make that dollar, .
Gather Lowball (Wild Cards, #22) Executed By George R.R. Martin Shown As Textbook
George R.R. Martin