Inside Straight Edited by George R.R. Martin

384 Pages

Inside Straight is part of an interesting set of books known as the Wild Card series. The series is on its 20th book now and involves an ever changing list of characters and authors that write the books. This is the only book I have read of the series and it seems that you can grab any book and it will be able to stand alone. I have a feeling that the first book might open your eyes to a lot of things. Here is the basic premise from Wikipedia

"The series relates an alternate history of the earth after World War II. In 1946 an alien virus that rewrites human DNA is accidentally unleashed in the skies over New York City. It kills 90% of those who come into contact with it (referred to as 'drawing the Black Queen'). However, 9% mutate into deformed creatures (known as 'Jokers') and the remaining 1% gain superpowers (known as 'Aces'). The airborne virus eventually spreads all over the world, affecting tens of thousands."

Inside Straight is set in the current day. A TV show American Hero is set up to show off the abilities of the various Aces that compete to win a million dollars. It is very similar to the “real” TV show Survivor. Rather than ordinary people doing extraordinary things American Hero has extraodinary people doing unbelievable things. They rescue people from burning houses, navigate mazes that normal people couldn’t and stop bank robberies from happennig. The Aces are divided into four teams. The Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades teams are made of unique charecters all with different abilities. Each one trying to use their skills to best help the team.

Typically an author has “their” character, so when you get to a chapter by that author it is usually from “their” character’s point of view. This made things really choppy for me. It felt like starting a new book about 5-6 times while you adjusted to the new author/charaters point of view. (WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD) This was most apparent when a few of the people on the show had been voted off and then were drawn into a Egyptian conflict. So the story goes from a happy go lucky TV show with mini rivalries to an all out military and refugee conflict in the middle of the desert. It was jarring and made it seem like the book was set up to go in this direction and that the beginning of the book was pointless (other than some character introduction.)

As you can tell I wasn’t overly impressed with the book. I found some of the writers to be very engaging (Martin was the best by far), others were unimpressive.

Emotional: 1 Nothing inspiring. I wasn’t that drawn to the book. The interpersonal relationships seems contrived.

Intellectual: 2 I found the idea of the aces and an alternate “comic book” reality to be a really great idea, but the reality wasn’t what I had hoped for.

Long Term: 2 This could be more depending on the other books in the series. Since there are 20 books obviously people are reading them, which has me inclined to check out other books in the set.

A total of 5 out of 13. That is my worst rating yet. George R.R. Martin is a great author and it bothers me to put such a low rating on a book with his name on the cover. I was rating just the part that he wrote this would be much higher. I want to do a little more research and find out if I would like the earlier books more. For now I would pass on this book.