Wild Cards by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So, I understand the need for world building, but this book feels like two books rolled into one.
About half of the book is a dry, so-thin-it's-transparent metaphor for oppression. A virus is let loose onto the city of manhattan. Most are killed, a few are deformed, a very few gain superpowers.
Then McCarthy suspects the ones with superpowers of being communists; then the ones with deformities are forced into ghettos and otherwise marginalized*. Then they riot throughout the 60s and the 70s.**
The other half is a rollicking superhero fantasy featuring a retiring telekinetic who flys around in a armored VW bug, a pimp whose superpowers only come out when he has tantric sex, a badass archer dude and more. This stuff is great, and with some careful writing (maybe, uh, compressing all of the riots into one) and a good director this could be the basis of a grand superhero ensemble franchise. An R-rated avengers with slightly more pertinent social commentary.
As it is, the sheer unevenness of the stories means it lands squarely in 3-star territory, but I have high hopes for the sequels.
* I would love for someone who knows more about the history of these things than I do to work out
whether Wild Card's did it before or after X-men. If it's before, then I will give this a pass, but if not, it's both blatantly derivative of X-men and also less interesting boo.
** One of the main flaws of the book is that there's really not much to differentiate the Vietnam peace riots from the civil rights riots in this book. They were really different things in real life, but, because they fall so closely together in the novels it feels lazy.
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