Our current story opens with the blog entries of one Jonathan Hive, an Ace who is also a journalist. Jonathan is about to take part in a reality show called American Hero. Twenty-eight superheroes divided into four teams will compete and be "discarded" one by one, until a final winner of the essentially trivial and pointless ratings-boosting contest remains. (Jonathan's entries, written by Daniel Abraham, will be interspersed among the other story segments.) The first half of the novel focuses almost exclusively on this contest, as we shall see. But we get a taste of the larger plot in a prelude by Melinda Snodgrass titled "Dark of the Moon." Herein, an Ace named Lilith assassinates the Caliph, reigning Middle Eastern potentate, triggering a disturbance that will be elaborated later.

"Chosen Ones," by Carrie Vaughan, introduces many of the 28 contestants and chronicles the soap-opera interactions among them, as well as the results of the first competition and discarding process. Michael Cassutt's "Looking for Jetboy" details the outcome of the scavenger-hunt portion of the show. "Metagames," by Caroline Spector, gets into the head of the female Ace called Bubbles. Meanwhile, Jonathan's interchapter sections propel the plot toward the Middle East. His friend John Fortune becomes inhabited by the spirit of Egyptian goddess Sekhmet and is told by the Living Gods of Egypt of his new role in the global power struggles. Soon Jonathan, Fortune and bunch of other Discards are involved in a real shooting war.

Snodgrass's "Star Power" reverts to the reality show setting, but "Wakes the Lion" by John Jos. Miller returns to Fortune and his affairs. By the time we get to George R.R. Martin's "Crusader" section, the Middle Eastern focus has assumed dominance in the tale, interrupted by "The Tin Man's Lament" by Ian Tregillis (more reality show doings), before S.L. Farrell unveils some heavy battle action in "Incidental Music for Heroes," followed by a wrapup by Snodgrass ("Blood on the Sun") and codas by Cassutt and Abraham.

Deconstructing the superhero mythos

First, let me offer a paradox: I am at once the worst and the best possible reviewer for this new volume (the 18th!) in a long-running series, since I have not read a single previous installment in its entirety. In fact, I believe the only piece of the whole huge corpus I have sampled is Howard Waldrop's tale from volume one, "Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!" This fact means that I cannot possibly comment on all the undoubtedly clever ways the new book dovetails with the vast continuity, or how it rates in comparison to its predecessors. On the other hand, I can approach the book as if it were a standalone novel, judging it on its own merits, just as thousands of other novice readers will approach it, if they are not daunted by the long tail behind it.

It seems to me right off the bat that any novel trying to do postmodern riffs on comics has to satisfy on several levels.

First, it must comment dramatically on the tropes of the field, examining with fresh insights both the vices and virtues of the standard superhero motifs.

Second, it must then actually provide some superhero thrills in an updated fashion.

And in the case of this special type of book, which postulates an actual SF alternate-history scenario, it must deliver uchronia-type frissons.

Unfortunately in this case, I found Inside Straight only a lukewarm vehicle in all three areas. The main reason, I think, is the same flaw I detected in my review of Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain.

Wild Cards as a concept is now 20 years old. It debuted the same year as Alan Moore's Watchmen, which revolutionized the field and led to two decades of "dark and gritty" revisionist comics. The comics field has done within itself so much to deconstruct its Golden Age and Silver Age tropes that a prose writer has to really stretch to say something significantly new and insightful, and I'm afraid the roster of writers here just don't add that much to what, for example, Kurt Busiek has done in his Astro City series. The faintly parodic superpowers and the way superheroes have been integrated into society here just don't ring particularly fresh anymore. As for superheroes in the Middle East—Marvel and DC can both say, "Been there, done that."

I am not impressed by the alternate-history speculations either. Any timeline where such titanic changes have been in effect for six decades and yet that still produces Brad Pitt and YouTube is not playing with a real hard-SF deck.

To give the book credit where due: The level of the actual prose is high, the melding together of parts is seamless, the characters are empathetic, and the action does not have any real longueurs. But it's a tale we've all heard before.