{"id":6798,"date":"2021-01-04T08:10:29","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T15:10:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=6798"},"modified":"2020-12-30T17:03:22","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T00:03:22","slug":"the-deuces-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2021\/01\/04\/the-deuces-return\/","title":{"rendered":"The Deuces Return!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The deuces are back.\u00a0 Puddleman and Chuckles, Cash Mitchell, Gary Bushorn, Father Henry Obst, the Jokertown Boys, the Myth Patrol, and all their friends will be returning&#8230; with Croyd Crenson and Demise, and some brand new characters that Wild Card readers need to meet.\u00a0 Come <strong>January 5<\/strong>, Tor will be releasing a brand new edition of DEUCES DOWN, one of the scarcer volumes in the Wild Cards series&#8230; with three brand new stories, published for the first time.<\/p>\n<p>The wild card virus, as all readers of the series know, affects every victim differently.\u00a0\u00a0 Ninety per cent of those stricken draw the black queen, and die.\u00a0\u00a0 Those who survive their transformation are generally classified either as jokers, twisted and malformed by the xenovirus, or aces, who emerge with superpowers of one sort or another.\u00a0\u00a0 But there is a fourth category: the so-called deuces, whose powers are trivial, seemingly useless, sometimes ludicrous.\u00a0\u00a0 DEUCES DOWN tells their stories.<\/p>\n<p>The Wild Cards series got its start in 1987 with a twelve-volume run at Bantam Spectra.\u00a0\u00a0 Then we moved to Baen for three books, the &#8220;Card Shark&#8221; triad.\u00a0\u00a0 After that, however, there was a seven year break in our publication history, until Byron Preiss picked the series for iBooks.\u00a0\u00a0 Preiss reissued a number of the early Bantam volumes in new editions, and also published two brand new installments in the series: DEUCES DOWN and John Jos. Miller&#8217;s solo novel DEATH DRAWS FIVE.\u00a0\u00a0 When Byron was killed in a tragic automobile accident, however, iBooks did not long survive him.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With the company going under, neither DEUCES DOWN nor (especially) DEATH DRAWS FIVE received much in the way of distribution.\u00a0\u00a0 Brick Tower Press later acquired the iBooks backlist, but the two iBooks originals have remained very difficult to find&#8230; so all of us in Wild Cards are thrilled that the two books will now reach the readership they deserve with these new Tor editions.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-6801\" src=\"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown-678x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"678\" height=\"1024\" srcset=\"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown-678x1024.jpg 678w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown-199x300.jpg 199w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown-768x1160.jpg 768w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown-1017x1536.jpg 1017w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/DeucesDown.jpg 1356w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 678px) 100vw, 678px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The original iBooks edition of DEUCES DOWN was pretty much a straight anthology: a collection of stories about deuces largely unrelated to one another, save by theme.\u00a0\u00a0 The contributing authors were Melinda M. Snodgrass, Walton (Bud) Simons, Stephen Leigh, Michael Cassutt, Kevin Andrew Murphy, Daniel Abraham, and John J. Miller.<\/p>\n<p>The new Tor edition will include all that and more.\u00a0\u00a0 We&#8217;ve added new stories from Mary Anne Mohanraj and Caroline Spector&#8230; and an original linking interstitial narrative from Carrie Vaughn than brings all the tales together, to transform the book into a true Wild Cards mosaic novel.\u00a0\u00a0 I loved the new content, and I hope you will as well.<\/p>\n<p>DEUCES DOWN will be on sale at your local bookstore, and from your favorite on-line bookseller&#8230; and of course autographed copies can be had from Beastly Books in Santa Fe at <a href=\"https:\/\/jeancocteaucinema.com\/beastlybooks\/\">https:\/\/jeancocteaucinema.com\/beastlybooks\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The deuces are back.\u00a0 Puddleman and Chuckles, Cash Mitchell, Gary Bushorn, Father Henry Obst, the Jokertown Boys, the Myth Patrol, and all their friends will be returning&#8230; with Croyd Crenson and Demise, and some brand new characters that Wild Card readers need to meet.\u00a0 Come January 5, Tor will be releasing a brand new edition [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[47,37,7],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6798"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6814,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6798\/revisions\/6814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}