Today is release day for LOW CHICAGO, the twenty-fifth Wild Cards volume, which means today is my second book release day of 2018 because I have a novella in that book. The novella is called “Stripes” and features my joker-ace Khan (the half-tiger dude on the cover). He’s shunted back in time to 1920s Chicago where he gets to rewrite a bit of Roaring Twenties history in the only way a 300-pound mob bruiser can: with claws and fists and Tommy guns.
LOW CHICAGO is a stand-alone novel in the Wild Cards universe. While it features characters that have appeared in other volumes, it’s a mosaic novel with a self-contained narrative. You can jump in and read it without any prior knowledge of the Wild Cards universe, and I’d be super happy if you did because that means I’ll get to write more Wild Cards stuff in the future.
The other contributors to LOW CHICAGO are Melinda Snodgrass, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Saladin Ahmed, Christopher Rowe, John Jos. Miller, Paul Cornell, and Mary Anne Mohanraj. All of them are amazing writers, so chances are good you’ll get your money’s worth out of the book. If you decide to pick it up, let me know what you think in the comments!
Diane, the original Wild Cards series ran 12 books, which are the ones being reprinted now. Volume 8 is out in August.
All of the other books follow on in basically chronological order from there, with the 3 Baen books and a couple from iBooks, then Tor picked up the series and Low Chicago is the eighth volume from them but the 25th overall. The Wild Cards wikipedia page has a pretty good rundown of the whole series.
Agh! This series confuses me so…I’ve read WC I-VII, with volume VIII due out this August. So how do the other myriad books in the same universe fit in? Stand-alones around the events in the numbered volumes? A little OCD here. Will pick up Low Chicago momentarily, as I can’t wait until August without a dose.