| Tuesday, December 12, 2000 |
 | Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Allow me to explain my profanity. While cleaning out a bunch of old stuff recently, I happened upon the six Wild Card books I had bought and read between about 82 and 86 (probably less time than that - they are production-line stuff). Set in a "realistic" world in which an alien virus has conferred superpowers or hideous deformation upon the inhabitants of Manhattan, New York, America, and the Earth, in approximately that order of priority. Yes, that kind of realistic world. Mmmmm-mmmm.
So, anyway, I was struck with a wave of nostalgia at their Brian Bolland covers, and thought "Hey! I remember these fondly, why not take them home with me and re-read them. It'll be a laugh!"
See me laughing? Three weeks on I have finally dragged myself past the finishing line, and I feel like somebody shat in my brain. A fairly bright start, and an intermittently entertaining premise, manipulated more and more lazily, with that faclity for shit dialogue and paper-thin characterisation only science fiction authors seem to be able to pull off.
So bits of it were quite fun. Bits of depression are quite fun. Still, I guess I was asking for it. Never go back to anything you read as a child unless you remember every word and sincerely know it to rock.
So, run down the curtain. Except that, while researching for this post, I discovered that:
a) I need to get out more.
b) There are nine more of the fuckers.
Nine more. I thought that six was quite enough. And I imagine that the "names" - Pat Cadigan, Lewis Shiner, Walter John Williams, Roger Zelasny, not themselves exactly the world's finest, but equipped with the odd trick - jump ship, and the faceless, Dragonlance Chronicles stringers take over. Sweet Jesus. Luckily, they all seem to be out of print, so I am at least safe from my completist instinct forcing me to plow through them, just to get to the end of the plots.
But it doesn't end there. Once set on this course to Hell, there is no getting off. For you are on....the HELL TRAIN.
Wild Cards fan fiction crossovers with X-Force. Wild Card action figures, in the name of the God of Fuck.
Still, if it weren't for the action figures, we would be denied this beautiful evocation of the dangers of seeking novelty in an exhausted format:
Edward St. John Latham was an attorney who earned the nickname Loophole because of his ability to acquit his shady clients of almost any charges, no matter how solid the prosecution's cases seemed to be. He later became the head of a cult of bodyjacking teen criminals.
Well, of course.
0 Comments:
| |
