Just got a peek at the final cover for SUICIDE KINGS, courtesy of the good folks at Tor Books. The art is by Michael Komarck.

SUICIDE KINGS will be the twentieth overall volume in the Wild Cards series, and the third and concluding book in the current “Committee” triad. Written by S.L. Farrell, Ian Tregillis, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Caroline Spector, and Victor Milan, and edited by yours truly.

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For all you Wild Cards fans out there, I’ve changed the WC sample on my website, replacing the BUSTED FLUSH scene with a cool one from SUICIDE KINGS, written by Ian Tregillis (look for his his novel next year from Tor!) and featuring Rustbelt.

You can check it out at http://www.georgerrmartin.com/wc-s.html

SUICIDE KINGS will be published at the end of the year. This is the concluding volume of the Committee triad. Besides Ian T, the writers are Caroline Spector, Melinda M. Snodgrass, S.L. Farrell, Daniel Abraham, and Victor W. Milan. Featured viewpoint characters will be Rustbelt, the Amazing Bubbles, Double Helix, Gardener, Bugsy, and the Radical, but the rest of the gang will be on hand as well.

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WILD CARDS is headed back to its roots.

The early volumes in our long-running shared-world anthology series largely centered around Manhattan, especially the parts of the Bowery and Lower East Side that became known as Jokertown. More recent entries, however, have been wider in scope, often international. But I’ve signed the contracts for another brand new, all-original Wild Cards mosaic novel, and I’m pleased to announce that with FORT FREAK the series is coming home again.

Manhattan’s 5th precinct has seen it all. Its historic precinct house on Elizabeth Street is the oldest in the New York City, and the cops and detectives based there are charged with keeping the peace in Chinatown, Little Italy, the Bowery, and parts of the Lower East Side.

In our alternate universe, the jokers !“ deformed, twisted victims of the alien virus known as the wild card !“ began moving into tenements of the Bowery and Lower East Side in the late 40s and early 50s, driving out the !œnats! (naturals) and transforming the area into a colorful, dangerous, and often surreal slum district that soon became known as Jokertown. The 5th precinct became the Jokertown precinct. It did not take long before the city’s police began calling the precinct house !œFort Freak.!

Fort Freak and its cops and detectives have figured in many of our older Wild Cards stories, albeit usually in the background. But with this new volume, we’re finally going to tell the stories of the brave men and women who walk the mean streets and strange alleys of Jokertown, and the unique and dangerous challenges that face.

FORT FREAK is the title, and Tor will once again be our publisher. The lineup of contributors for this one includes Cherie Priest, Melinda M. Snodgrass, David Anthony Durham, Stephen Leigh, Paul Cornell, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Victor Milan, and John Jos. Miller. The featured characters will be a mix of old favorite and new creations.

This will be the twenty-first volume in the Wild Cards series, first launched in 1987.

Look for FORT FREAK in your favorite bookstore in late 2010 or early 2011. We’ve just started work on this one.

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Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a blimp!! No, it’s FIVE blimps strung together!!! And here comes Jetboy…

That was how the Wild Cards series began, way way back in 1987 before some of you were born. Here we are in 2009, and the series is still going strong. The new books, INSIDE STRAIGHT and BUSTED FLUSH (and don’t forget SUICIDE KINGS, coming this December from Tor) have drawn a lot of new readers to our world of aces and jokers, and many of them have been emailing me to ask where they can find the old books. But with the original series long out of print, the best I could do was suggest that they search on ebay and ABE in hopes of turning up some used copies at a not-too-outrageous price.

Well, all that is about to change. I’m pleased to announce that the response to the new Wild Cards books has been strong enough that our friends at Tor Books are going to start doing new editions of the original series — starting right at the beginning with the first three volumes: WILD CARDS, ACES HIGH, and JOKERS WILD. Our first triad.

Nothing is set in stone yet, but we’re talking about bringing the books out as hardcovers (the old editions from Bantam and Titan were paperback originals, though the Science Fiction Book CLub did reprint volumes one through six as hardcovers)and possibly as omnibus editions. Details on that remain to be explored, but I’ll be sure and keep you posted.

But that’s not even the best part yet.

Longtime fans of the series may recall that the first book, WILD CARDS, was our historical volume, with stories that took us all the way from Dr. Tachyon’s arrival on Earth in 1946 right up to the Wild Card “present,” which back then was 1986. We had forty years to cover, and I like to think we covered it pretty well… but of course, there were gaps. Years and even decades of Wild Card history that we simply did not have the space to dramatize.

Tor’s new edition will help rectify that. We’re not just reprinting the original WILD CARDS, as it was first published; we’re adding three brand-new, original, never-before-published stories set during some of the “lost years” we couldn’t cover last time around. So this edition of WILD CARDS will be the director’s cut, if you will, fortified and expanded with original content, extra fiber, and three news tales:
– Michael Cassutt will take us back to 1956 with, “Captain Cathode v the Secret Ace,”
– David D. Levine will visit 1960, to tell us about “Powers,” and,
– Carrie Vaughn will show us 1981, as “Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan.”

We think these will be three terrific new additions to the Wild Cards saga, and we’re excited about the chance to present them to you. Look for the new expanded WILD CARDS some time in 2010. More details when I have ’em.

We can’t die yet. We haven’t seen THE JOLSON STORY.

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The Wild Cards series began in New Mexico in the mid-80s with a group of writers and friends who all gamed together, players in an epic years-long campaign of the role-playing game SUPERWORLD. That gaming group included me, Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, John Miller and Gail Gerstner Miller, Parris, Chip Wideman, and Victor Milan… but when we decided to pitch Wild Cards as a shared world anthology, I reached out to some other writers who shared our love of comic books and superheroes, and Roger Zelazny, Steve Leigh, Lew Shiner, Bud Simons, Pat Cadigan, Edward Bryant, Leanne C. Harper, Arthur Byron Cover, and Howard Waldrop came aboard. So did Steve Perrin, the creator of the SUPERWORLD game that had inspired us. That core group of writers and creators produced the first seven books in the Wild Cards series.

It’s always been my feeling, however, that any long-running series risks growing stagnant after awhile unless it’s freshened up from time to time… and the best way to do that is by regularly adding new characters, new concepts, new conflicts… new writers. Wild Cards has had a long tradition of dragging new inmates into the asylum (some of them kicking and screaming). Over the years, the original founding members of the Wild Cards consortium were joined by others: William F. Wu, Michael Cassutt, Chris Claremont, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Bob Wayne, Laura J. Mixon, Sage Walker, Daniel Abraham… and most recently the Class of 2007, made up of Caroline Spector, Christopher Rowe, Carrie Vaughn, Ian Tregillis, and S.L. Farrell.

Renewal is a never-ending process, however. With SUICIDE KINGS in the pipeline and the Committee triad wrapped up, the time was ideal to go out and recruit some more poor damned fools for the Wild Cards projects to come (which I can’t talk about, not just yet, but watch this space, we’ll have news for you soon).

So let me introduce all you Wild Cards fans (and those who aren’t yet, but soon will be) to the Wild Cards Class of 2009.

DAVID D. LEVINE

David is the Hugo-winnning author of “Tk’tk’tk'” and many other fine short stories, a graduate of Clarion West and the Writers of the Future contest, a Nebula and Campbell Award loser, hailing from Portland, Oregon.

CHERIE PRIEST

“Southern gothic historical horror fantasy” is as close as I can come to describing Cherie’s work. She was born in Tampa and schooled in Chattanooga, but lives in Seattle at present. She’s also an associate editor for Subterranean Press.

MARY ANNE MOHANRAJ

Born in Sri Lanka, Mary Anne presently lives in Chicago (my old stomping grounds), where she’s a Ph.D. candidate. She’s written novels and short stories, edited anthologies and a Hugo-nominated ezine. Her work includes science fiction, fantasy, poetry, erotica, even a cookbook.

DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM

A two-time Campbell Award nominee for Best New Writer, David has written both fantasy (ACACIA) and historical novels (THE PRIDE OF CARTHAGE). He lives in Fresno, but he’s getting out as soon as he can.

PAUL CORNELL

Novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and comic book scripter, Paul comes to us from England, where he’s written episodes of DR. WHO and TORCHWOOD. He’s currently scripting Captain Britain and MI-13 for Marvel Comics.

I could tell you about their cool new characters as well… but I’d rather make you wait and meet them in the books. But we’re all excited to have them aboard, and we expect they’ll make some great contributions to the future of Wild Cards.

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Thought I’d share a few pictures from last month’s mass signing for BUSTED FLUSH at Page One Bookstore in Albuquerque. We had a good crowd, lots of enthusiasm, and the whole gang had a great time. And afterwards there was barbeque at Powdrell’s, nothing wrong there.

We signed a lot of extra stock before we left, so if there’s anyone out there who’d like to get an autographed copy of BUSTED FLUSH in hardcover, contact Darrek at Page One Bookstore in Albuquerque.

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Make it a Wild Cards Xmas this year.

Tor informs me that SUICIDE KINGS has been scheduled for release in December.

So this year, stuff Rustbelt, Gardener, Double Helix, the Amazing Bubbles, Jonathan Hive, and the Radical in your stocking.

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