None
3 stars
Volume 2 of the extensive and long running shared universe Wild Cards series. We mostly have the same authors as volume 1, and most of the characters made at least some appearance in volume 1 no matter how small, though there are a few new characters.returnVolume 2 takes place entirely within the 80s, mostly divorced from real world events at the time, which I think the book suffers for to some extent. Social commentary is one of the strong suits of alternate history, and of the first volume. Volume 2 also diverges in that it tries to focus on a single over-arching plot across the various short stories by different authors. In fact, it tries to focus on more than one single, over-arching plot, which again is a bit of a detriment. We have a big bad in the form of Dr. Tachyon's people coming back to earth, but wait, …
Volume 2 of the extensive and long running shared universe Wild Cards series. We mostly have the same authors as volume 1, and most of the characters made at least some appearance in volume 1 no matter how small, though there are a few new characters.returnVolume 2 takes place entirely within the 80s, mostly divorced from real world events at the time, which I think the book suffers for to some extent. Social commentary is one of the strong suits of alternate history, and of the first volume. Volume 2 also diverges in that it tries to focus on a single over-arching plot across the various short stories by different authors. In fact, it tries to focus on more than one single, over-arching plot, which again is a bit of a detriment. We have a big bad in the form of Dr. Tachyon's people coming back to earth, but wait, that's not really the big bad...we have a masonic cult!...but that's not really the big bad, they're just trying to call down their god to ravage the earth who is in fact...another alien species (think starship troopers bugs or starcraft zerg)!...but wait there's also a whole bunch of alien races who actually tried to engineer the situation from a few hundred years back...Interspersed with smaller scale bad guys and situations that while typically more interesting all somehow end up connected to aforementioned big bad. Its...tiresome. There's also a bit of a red herring in the form of a black sphere that features in what initially is a pretty amusing series of almost slapstick comedy-of-errors sequences but which also becomes tiresome as it keeps coming back up throughout the book.returnThe smaller scale stories, when divorced from the over-arching plot, are easily the most interesting, with the most character development. There's some great stuff with the Turtle and Croyd. It was fun learning more about some barely mentioned characters from volume 1. Even the material expanding on the Takisians and the Walrus was satisfying and expanded the world. But the book either needed to less focused and give us more snapshots of the world, or more focused and lose the bizarre and overly intricate plot. The stuff with the masonic cult was especially repetitive, unengaging, and frustrating. The book was slow to start because of this, as it felt like it was desperately trying to pull together disparate threads in an ineffective way, it almost lost me 25% in. returnIf I find subsequent volumes cheap in the wild like I did the first 2, I'll keep reading, but I desperately hope they don't involve the stupid Egyptian/Masonic cult.
