By Travis Johnson
Wild Cards, the long-running, transgressive superhero series edited by Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, is coming to television.
“We have some exciting new for all the Wild Cards fans out there.” the author wrote on his livejournal. “Universal Cable Productions (UCP) has acquired the rights to adapt our long-running Wild Cards series of anthologies and mosaic novels for television. Development will begin immediately on what we hope will be the first of several interlocking series. Melinda M. Snodgrass, my assistant editor and right-hand man on Wild Cards since its inception, the creator of Dr. Tachyon, Double Helix, and Franny Black, and a seasoned television writer/ producer whose credits include STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (“Measure of a Man”), REASONABLE DOUBTS, THE PROFILER, and STAR COMMAND, is attached as an executive producer on the project, together with Gregory Noveck of RED, Slow Learner, and SyFy Films” [sic]
Spinning out of a long-running role playing game campaign that Martin, Snodgrass, and many more of the original authors played in, Wild Cards posits a world where an alien virus released just after World War 2 mutated a good percentage of the population, resulting in superpowered “Aces” and deformed, alienated “Jokers”. First published in 1987, the series has continued up to the present day in 22 books and numerous comics and RPGs, fleshing out a world where otherworldly powers are the norm, but people, with all their foibles and failings, are still people. Notable authors who have contributed to the project include Walter Jon Williams, Pat Cadigan, Roger Zelazny, Lewis Shiner, Cherie Priest and John J. Miller.
This is exciting. The world of Wild Cards is a rich setting and almost any kind of story can be told there. The anthology format means that, although there is an overarching linear narrative, tracking events from 1946 to the present day, it’s anyone’s guess as to where the focus of any potential TV series will be, or even what time frame it would be setting (although “present day with extensive flashbacks” is a safe bet).
It’s also going to be interesting to see where the series lands tonally. Although nominally a superhero series, Wild Cards is more about people with super powers, rather than super heroes (the TV series Heroes owes a lot to Wild Cards, come to think of it), and at times it’s both incredibly violent and incredibly sexually explicit, sometimes to the detriment of the actual story. In a post-GoT world we’re pretty used to over the top violence and sex in our media – especially our GRRM media – but this will be where that trend converges with the current primacy of superhero narratives. Our hearts go out to all the parents who will have to tell their kids they can’t watch the new super hero series while tiptoeing around exactly why.
