The germ of the notion went back years and years, but for most of that time it remained no more than a few lines in my files. A kid like me, raised on comic books, finds himself blessed (or is it cursed?) with an actual superpower. What would he do with it? Ignore it? Exploit it? Try to don a spandex costume and fight crime? How would it change his life? How would the real world react to someone who actually did possess powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men?
(That was my working title: “With Powers and Abilities Far Beyond Those of Mortal Men.” The phrase is from the old Superman TV show, of course, and I later learned that DC Comics had trademarked it, so it was just as well that I never used it.)
Precisely what those powers and abilities should be I never did work out, which may be why I never wrote the story. For a long time I leaned toward pyrokinesis, until Stephen King came out with Firestarter in 1980. Not only did King’s novel feature a girl who could ignite fires with her mind, but it also gave her father a superpower of his own, a kind of mind control. Though my handling of the theme would have been very different, I could not help feeling as though King had beaten me to the punch.
My life was changing in more important ways in 1980, though. At the end of 1979, I had left my teaching job at Clarke College and moved from Iowa to New Mexico to try and make a go of it as a full-time writer. My marriage had ended in the course of the move, so I arrived in the Land of Enchantment a single man again. Santa Fe has remained my home ever since. Though I ended up spending years in Los Angeles working in television and film, I never truly moved there. Instead I would rent a furnished apartment in one of the sprawling Oakwood complexes, or a guest house in someone’s backyard, but the moment my current project wrapped I would be on the road again, headed home to New Mexico. Santa Fe was the place where I hung my hats and paid my taxes, the place where I kept my books and my funny books and the old double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket that had not fit me for a decade.
And Santa Fe was where Parris was too, holding down the fort. We’d met at a convention in 1975, a few months before I entered into my ill-considered marriage. I knew I liked her the moment she told me that “A Song for Lya” made her cry (well, she was a stone fox too, and we were both naked when we met, but never mind about that, it’s none of your business). Parris and I stayed in touch after that con, exchanging occasional letters through all the years when I was teaching Catholic girls and she was selling sno-cones and shoveling elephant dung for Ringling Brothers. In 1981 we got together at another convention, and she came to Santa Fe to stay with me a while. That “while” will have lasted twenty-two years by the time you read this. Now and again one of my readers will ask me why I don’t write sad stories of unrequited love any longer, the way I did so often in the ’70s. Parris is to blame for that. You can only write that stuff when your heart is broken.
When I first moved to Santa Fe in the wake of my divorce, I knew no one in the city but Roger Zelazny, and him only slightly. Roger took me under his wing. On the first Friday of every month we would drive down to Albuquerque to lunch with Tony Hillerman, Norm Zollinger, Fred Saberhagen, and the other New Mexico writers. I also dropped in on the Albuquerque SF club, where I met the local fans and still more writers and aspiring writers. Before very long, I found myself gaming with some of them.
Though I had been a serious chess player from seventh grade through college, and enjoyed Risk and Diplomacy and other board games, I had never played Dungeons & Dragons or any other role-playing game until I moved to New Mexico. Parris had, however, and she convinced me to give it a try. The bunch that we fell in with were mostly hardcore fans, and half of them were writers. At the time Parris and I joined the group, they were playing Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, so I felt right at home. Since the rest of the party were all intrepid adventurers determined to save the world from the Cthulhu cults, I played a journalist who was yellow in both senses of the word. As my friends died screaming or went insane, I would run away to cable my story to the Herald. Our sessions were like some madcap improv theater, with shuggoths.
Before the year was out, I had become so enamored of gaming that I was running a Call of Cthulhu campaign of my own. I’d found that I enjoyed being a gamemaster even more than being a player.
Which brings us to September 1983, when Vic Milan presented me with a new game for my birthday. SuperWorld reawakened the frustrated comic book writer inside me, and soon replaced Call of Cthulhu as the group’s favorite game. We played it obsessively for more than a year, two or three times a week, and no one became more obsessed than me. As gamemaster, I found myself dusting off old characters like Manta Ray and coming up with new ones, villains chiefly…plus one hero who floated around in an iron shell, and called himself the Great and Powerful Turtle. My players, half of whom were writers, created some unforgettable characters of their own; Yeoman, Crypt Kicker, Peregrine, Elephant Girl, Modular Man, Cap’n Trips, Straight Arrow, Black Shadow, Topper, and the Harlem Hammer were only a few of the strange and wondrous folks who first made their appearance in our SuperWorld sessions.
The tale of how SuperWorld ultimately begat Wild Cards is one that I’ve told numerous times before, most notably in my afterwords for the iBooks reissues of the early volumes of the series. I won’t repeat myself here; the reissues are easily available, for those who would like to read the grisly details. Suffice it to say that a number of us fell in love with our characters, and began to think they might have possibilities beyond the game.
Shared worlds were all the rage in the early ’80s, thanks to the tremendous success of the Thieves World anthologies edited by Bob Asprin and Lynn Abbey. The format was perfect for what we wanted to do with our SuperWorld characters, so I pitched the idea to my fellow gamers, filled out our ranks by recruiting Roger Zelazny, Howard Waldrop, Lew Shiner, Stephen Leigh, and half a dozen other writers from all across the country, and drew up a formal proposal for a three-volume anthology series called Wild Cards. Shawna McCarthy bought it, her first day on the job as an editor at Bantam Books.
All shared worlds are collaborations, to a greater or a lesser extent. Looking over Thieves World and its imitators, I realized that the shared worlds that worked the best were those that shared the most, where the story lines and characters were the most tightly intertwined. Right from the first, therefore, we resolved that Wild Cards would be more than just a collection of loosely connected stories set against a common background. We wanted to take the art of collaboration to a whole new level. To signal our intent, we called the books “mosaic novels” rather than anthologies.
I do think we succeeded for the most part…but as with any new form, there were bumps in the road, and lessons that we had to learn the hard way. Editing the series, I often felt like the ringmaster at a nine-ring circus, trying to keep order with a whip made out of spaghetti. Some days it was fun and some days it was frustrating, but it was never ever tedious. When everything was going smoothly, I liked to compare us to a symphony orchestra, with me as the conductor, but a better metaphor might be a herd of cats. We all know how easy it is to herd cats, don’t we?
So here’s to all the members of the Wild Cards Consortium, as zany and talented a bunch of cats as any editor could ever hope to herd: Roger Zelazny, Howard Waldrop, Walter Jon Williams, Stephen Leigh, Gail Gerstner Miller, Lewis Shiner, John J. Miller, Victor Milan, Walton (Bud) Simons, Arthur Byron Cover, William F. Wu, Laura J. Mixon, Michael Cassutt, Sage Walker, Edward Bryant, Leanne C. Harper, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Steve Perrin, Parris, Royce Wideman, Pat Cadigan, Chris Claremont, Bob Wayne, and Daniel Abraham. And most of all, here’s to Melinda M. Snodgrass, my tireless assistant editor, without whose diplomatic intercessions I would surely have killed and butchered at least four of the aforementioned.
Wild Cards was a hit right from the first, and not only by anthology standards. The sales of the first volume exceeded the sales of any of my novels to that date, save Fevre Dream alone,
and the later books would be almost as successful. The reviews were excellent, by and large. Walter Jon Williams’ story in the first book was a finalist for the Nebula, one of the few shared-world stories ever accorded that honor, and the series as a whole was nominated for the Hugo Award, losing in 1988 at New Orleans to Alan Moore’s splendid graphic novel Watchmen.
Bantam was only too pleased to make an offer for three more volumes after the first three had been delivered. Our advances rose and rose again. The series became a popular topic for worldcon panels, and two regional conventions chose Wild Cards themes, and brought all the authors in as Guests of Honor. Marvel Comics did a Wild Cards miniseries under its Epic imprint, and Steve Jackson Games issued a role-playing game, bringing us full circle. Hollywood was heard from too. Disney Studios optioned the film rights to the books, and Melinda Snodgrass and I wrote several drafts of a Wild Cards screenplay in the early ’90s.
The series began at virtually the same time as my association with The Twilight Zone, and continued my three seasons on Beauty and the Beast, through all my feature assignments and television pilots. That steady stream of books with my name on the covers undoubtedly helped to keep me alive in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Just as I had to return to Santa Fe from time to time during my Hollywood years, to remind myself of who I was and where I lived, I had to keep publishing books and short stories as well. If I hadn’t…well, readers have short memories, I fear, and in recent years they have only grown shorter.
Given the long hours and high stress levels so typical of Hollywood, the last thing any television producer needs is a second job, but I had one, courtesy of Wild Cards. Not only did I edit the books, but I wrote for them, as often as I could find the time.
“Shell Games,” my principal contribution to volume one, had antecedents that went way back. The bones of the story were ones I’d been gnawing on for years before I ever heard of SuperWorld; this was “With Powers and Abilities Far Beyond Those of Mortal Men,” reworked to fit our new shared universe. (Never throw anything away.) I’d intended to use pyrokinesis for my hero’s power, until Firestarter, but telekinesis worked just as well. The Great and Powerful Turtle began life as a minor character in our SuperWorld campaign, but would soon become quite a major one in Wild Cards. Mind you, a story and a game have very different needs, and what works splendidly for one may not work at all for the other, so the Turtle changed quite a bit before he hit the page.
“Shell Games” was not his tale alone, though; he shared the stage with Dr. Tachyon, a character created by Melinda Snodgrass. Working with other people’s characters is one of the challenges of doing a shared world. It is often a lot of fun, and often a huge headache. Sometimes it is both at once. In her story “Degradation Rites,” which preceded mine in Wild Cards, Melinda told how Dr. Tachyon had inadvertently destroyed the mind of a woman he loved in an effort to protect the identity of his ace patients from HUAC. The experience had destroyed Dr. Tachyon as well, and thereafter he had collapsed into a decade-long orgy of guilt, self-recrimination, and alcoholism. It was my job to drag him out of his funk in “Shell Games,” and set him back on the path to recovery…while also introducing my own characters.
If you have read this far, you will soon realize that Thomas Tudbury is far and away the most autobiographical of all the characters I’ve ever created. That being said, there are important differences as well. Though I cannibalized many elements of my own childhood for Tom’s, I also changed some crucial things. In real life I never had a friend like Junkyard Joey DiAngelis, though many was the time I wished for one. (Especially one like the Joey of the screenplay, who Melinda and I changed into a girl.) I had two terrific sisters, while Tom was an only child. Oh, and the real me never developed kickass telekinesis either, more’s the pity.
Not all of the characters in Wild Cards had antecedents in our SuperWorld campaigns. Many were entirely original. Among those were Howard Waldrop’s Jetboy, Lew Shiner’s heroic pimp Fortunato, Steve Leigh’s sinister Puppetman, and Roger Zelazny’s Sleeper, Croyd Crenson, who drew the wild card during a long walk home from school one day, and never learned algebra. Jay Ackroyd (aka Popinjay), my other major character in the series, was one of those as well. Jay was first mentioned in Aces High, our second volume, but did not come on stage until the third, Jokers Wild, where he teams up with Hiram Worchester for most of my story line. As the series went on, Ackroyd came more and more to the fore, and starred in several stories of his own. By the end of our Bantam run, Jay had become almost as popular as the Turtle.
Tom and Jay were not the only arrows in my quiver. From time to time I would choose to tell a story from the viewpoint of one of my myriad lesser characters. The focus of my interstitial narrative in Aces High was Jube the Walrus, an alien in a Hawaiian shirt and porkpie hat. In Jokers Wild my story featured Hiram Worchester, the urbane and portly proprietor of the restaurant atop the Empire State Building. For Dealer’s Choice I used a character created by Bud Simons, the bodysnatcher Zelda, to give the readers a better picture of what the bad guys were up to on the Rox.
“The Journal of Xavier Desmond” is the story of another of my secondary players, a joker activist who had first appeared in “Shell Games” as the maître d’ of the Funhouse. Des had risen in the world since then, and as the de facto “mayor of Jokertown” he seemed a natural choice to become one of the joker delegates on the global fact-finding tour that provided the spine for our fourth volume, Aces Abroad. The Turtle could not very well go, since he never left his shell. Nor was Jay Ackroyd likely to be invited. Hiram Worchester would be, of course, and I could have chosen him to be my protagonist…but I had just done Hiram in the third book, and I wanted to try a joker perspective.
The interstitial narrative was one of the toughest assignments in any Wild Cards book. In a mosaic novel, you want the whole to be more than the sum of its parts. If each story was a brick, the interstitial was the mortar that made them a wall. Whoever wrote the interstitial had to wait until the other stories were done, read the first drafts to see where the holes were, and then try to patch them over…while also telling a good story of his own. If the interstitial was just filler, the book would fall apart.
Later in the history of Wild Cards, other writers would step forward to do the interstitials. Bud Simons took a crack at it, and Steve Leigh let himself be drafted more than once. In the early volumes, however, the task usually fell to me as editor. “The Journal of Xavier Desmond” is my favorite of those interstitial stories, and represents some of the best work I did for Wild Cards. This is the first time it has been presented by itself, shorn of the stories it originally wove around and through.
Nothing goes on forever. After a good long run the Wild Cards series began to lose steam. The books had gotten darker (and they had been pretty dark to begin with), and sales were declining with each volume, slowly but steadily. Some of our best writers had gone on to other projects; popular characters had died or retired. The books were still out-selling most paperbacks by a healthy margin, but we were definitely on the downslope. When our contract came up for renewal, Bantam offered us the same terms for the next triad that we had received for the last two.
Foolishly, perhaps, we rejected that offer, and took the series to a smaller publisher for a substantial raise. It was a bad mistake. Though we got more money in the short run, our new publisher lacked both Bantam’s resources and Bantam’s commitment to the series. Without new titles in the pipeline, Bantam soon allowed the first twelve books to go out of print. Not only did our backlist sales dry up, but new readers no longer had an easy entry to the world by way of volume one. We tried to get around that by scrapping the old numbering and promoting volume thirteen as “book one of a new series,” but Card Sharks remained a confusing read for readers not familiar with all that had gone before. Sales dropped precipitously, and after the publication of the fifteenth volume in 1995, we found ourselves without a publisher.
And that was the end of that. r />
Or was it? With strange aeons even death may die, said H. P. Lovecraft. As of 2001, Wild Cards returned with a brand-new publisher, iBooks. After a seven-year hiatus, Deuces Down, the sixteenth volume in the series, was released in 2002 with all new stories. Our seventeenth volume is in the pipeline, and the old books are being re-released for a new generation of readers. Once more we’re hearing talk of games and comic books and movie options.
Will any of this come to pass? Will there be an eighteenth book, a nineteenth, a twentieth? Damned if I know.
I wouldn’t bet against us, though. There’s a certain turtle that I know who has already had more lives than any cat.
SHELL GAMES
WHEN HE’D MOVED INTO THE DORM BACK IN SEPTEMBER, THE FIRST thing that Thomas Tudbury had done was tack up his signed photograph of President Kennedy, and the tattered 1944 Time cover with Jetboy as Man of the Year.
By November, the picture of Kennedy was riddled with holes from Rodney’s darts. Rod had decorated his side of the room with a Confederate flag and a dozen Playboy centerfolds. He hated Jews, niggers, jokers, and Kennedy, and didn’t like Tom much either. All through the fall semester, he had fun; covering Tom’s bed with shaving cream, short-sheeting him, hiding his eyeglasses, filling his desk drawer with dog turds.
On the day that Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Tom came back to his room fighting to hold the tears. Rod had left him a present. He’d used a red pen. The whole top of Kennedy’s head was dripping blood now, and over his eyes Rod had drawn little red X’s. His tongue was sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
Thomas Tudbury stared at that for a long, long time. He did not cry; he would not allow himself to cry. He began to pack his suitcases.