would become the Harlem Hammer of the anthologies. Chip Wideman played a succession of surly antiheroes and the sweet-natured Toad Man before devising Crypt Kicker, toxic shit-kicker from hell. John Jos. Miller had Nightmare, who never did make it into the books. And Jim Moore . . . well, I could tell you about Jim Moore’s characters, but if I did the PC police would have to kill you. The first incarnation of Hiram Worchester was pure comic relief: a well-meaning oaf who fought crime from a blimp and called himself Fatman. And the primordial Turtle might have had Tom Tudbury’s name, power, and shell, but he shared none of his history or personality.
Many of these early creations were retired when the players got a better feel for the campaign, and for the nuances of the Superworld rules. Topper hung up her top hat, Black Shadow faded back into the shadows, the Harlem Hammer went back to repairing motorcycles. In place of Shad, Walter introduced Modular Man and his mad creator. Vic Milan unveiled Cap’n Trips and all of his friends, and John Miller brought in Yeoman to displace Nightmare. Some of the gang had gotten it right on the first try, though; Gail never played anyone but Peregrine, and Parris was Elephant Girl from the start; the book version of Radha O’Reilly as pretty much a clone of the earlier game version.
The game was deeply and seriously addictive for all of us . . . but for me most of all. I was god, which meant I had lots of planning and preparation to do before the players even arrived. The game ate their nights and their weekends, but it ate my life. For more than a year, Superworld consumed me, and during that time I wrote almost nothing. Instead I spent my days coming up with ingenious new plot twists to frustrate and delight my players, and rolling up still more villains to bedevil them. Parris used to listen at my office door, hoping to hear the clicking of my keyboard from within, only to shudder at the ominous rattle of dice.
I told myself it was writer’s block. My last book, an ambitious rock ’n’ roll fantasy called The Armageddon Rag, had failed dismally despite great reviews, and my career was in the dumps, enough to block anyone. Looking back now, though, it’s plain to see that I wasn’t blocked at all. I was creating characters and devising plots every day, like a man possessed. It was the opposite of being blocked. I was in a creative frenzy, of the sort I sometimes experienced on the home stretch of a novel, when the real world seems to fade away and nothing matters but the book you are living by day and dreaming of by night. That was exactly what was happening here, only there was no book . . . yet. There was only the game.
I don’t know just when my fever broke, or why. Maybe my steadily diminishing bank account and rapidly increasing debt had something to do with it. I loved the game, I loved all these wonderful characters that my friend and I had created, I loved the ego boost I got from my players after an especially exciting session . . . but I loved having a house to live in too, which meant I had to keep making those pesky mortgage payments. And godhood, intoxicating as it was, did not pay.
Thus it was that one day, while rolling up yet another batch of really nifty villains, I said the magic words—
“There’s got to be some way to make some money from this.”
It turned out there was . . . but for that story, you’ll need to come back next month.
George R. R. MartinMay 15, 2001
Copyright c 2001 by George R. R. Martin
American Hero is All My Fault and I’m Not Sorry
by Carrie Vaughn
Melinda won’t say how long Wild Cards has been around but I will: I started reading the series with Vol. 5: Down and Dirty when I was about sixteen. Thirty years ago now. I’ve grown up with these books.
One of the first things I learned as a Wild Cards writer is that when I tell George and Melinda that I grew up with the books they get this sort of pained Wait how long have we been doing this? expression and that I really probably should not tell the original writers that I grew up with the books.
I loved the series because there wasn't anything else like it on the shelves. I already loved superheroes, I adored Lynda Carter and Superfriends and all the rest. But this . . . this was different. This was real and visceral, engaging with history directly. Comics so often dealt in metaphors, but this? Wild Cards was unflinching. HUAC really happened. Rock stars in a superhero world? Here you go. Gang wars with superpowers? Let’s do it. New York City? Hollywood? Politics? It's all here. Let’s give it all a cost that affects the whole fabric of society and then ask, “What if? What next?” And honestly, diligently answer those questions.
In hindsight, I think Wild Cards had a bigger influence on my writing than I realized at the time. I started writing stories set in an urban fantasy world with vampires and werewolves and other supernatural creatures. One of my pet peeves of the genre (I have several . . .) is that so much of it is supposedly set in “the real world” and then doesn’t really do anything with that. The novels end up building their own closed systems in which to tell stories of angst and adventure that often seem cut off from reality.
I didn’t want to do that, so I looked out: What would a world where vampires and werewolves are real really look like? Well, they’d have their own talk radio advice show, for a start. There’d be an agency in the NIH dedicated to studying them. The army would recruit werewolves and send them to Afghanistan. There’d be congressional hearings. (Just like in Walter Jon William’s first Wild Cards story, “Witness.” See what I mean about influence? By the way, “Witness” isn’t just a subversive superhero story, it’s a great character study.)
So yeah, if you want to write stories set in “the real world” you have to look outward, and Wild Cards has always done that beautifully. Then, at long last, I went to Bubonicon in Albuquerque and met George and Melinda and a bunch of the original authors. To my credit, I managed to politely say, “Nice to meet you,” before blurting, “So, what’s new with Wild Cards and do you by chance need any new writers?” But it’s a good thing I did ask because the answer was yes.
And then I looked out. What’s out there? What wild and crazy things are bubbling in the culture, and what would that look like with superheroes? Heh. As Melinda said, American Hero started out as a throwaway background detail for a character I pitched who didn’t even make the cut. But that’s not where it ended. The TV show turned out to be a perfect way to introduce a bunch of new characters in a hurry. Which meant, suddenly, it was anchoring an entire book.
We joke that American Hero is all my fault. My sixteen-year-old fangirl self couldn’t be happier about that.
It didn’t end there, either. Because the internet is a thing that exists now and provides so many opportunities for extras and bonus material, and George decided that it wasn’t enough to touch on a few episodes of American Hero during the action of Inside Straight. We needed to work out how that entire first season went, every challenge, every elimination, every confessional, every interpersonal conflict.
Since the whole thing was my fault, I got to write it. Actually, that’s not totally true, because just about every author in the consortium came up with characters to fill out the show’s roster, and they were probably all surprised when we turned around and asked them to actually write about them. I did the episode summaries, but most of the confessionals and asides were written by the characters’ own creators. It all ended up being a huge amount of fun. Especially when the posts went live and readers started commenting in-world and in-character . . .
The whole collaborative project of Wild Cards took on a new layer with the American Hero blog. For a while there, we thought the whole thing was going to vanish into the ether, in the ephemeral way the internet often behaves. So I’m very pleased that our work here is getting new life as a companion volume to Inside Straight. You want to know what competitive reality TV looks like with superheroes? Here you go.
Though now I’m suddenly wondering how Earth Witch and Curveball would do as a team on The Amazing Race. . . .