I admit I only read this book because I saw George R.R. Martin on it. Didn't matter that he was just the editor. I was a little nervous jumping into this series since this is #25 in the Wild Cards series and I had not read any of the previous books. But it had time travel and poker so I was all in :) This can definitely be read as a stand-alone. There were a lot of characters but I didn't feel lost. It was entertaining and a fun read. Each story was written by different author but they flowed nicely together.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for a copy of "Low Chicago" in exchange of an honest review.

Low Chicago is the 25th book in the Wild Cards series, the longest-running shared universe series in science fiction. A shared universe series is one in which multiple authors write in the same universe, often using each other's characters and settings. Wild Cards began in 1986 when George R.R. Martin, then a mostly unknown author, and some of his friends, decided to make some money off of all the time they spent on a superhero role-playing game by turning their games into a book.

Since then, over forty authors have contributed stories, and some novels, into this universe. Many Wild Cards books are braided novels in which related short stories are tied together by the main plot (and sometimes carved into pieces woven together like a novel with different characters' point of view). Also, as the success of Game of Thrones has led to the optioning of everything with Martin's name on it, Wild Cards is being developed for television by Universal Cable Productions (owned by NBC).

Wild Cards takes the premise that in 1946, an alien virus killed ninty percent of the infected, turned nine percent into monstrous creatures called jokers, and left a lucky one percent, the aces, with superpowers. What began as mostly standard superheroics with aces using code names and colorful costumes, has evolved into a more sophisticated, occasionally horrific, treatment of the concept. Previous books have explored most of the comic book conventions--secret identities, heroes turned villains, would-be gods, etc.--but, until now, not time travel.

Low Chicago is the time travel book. In the main story holding the others together, "A Long Night at the Palmer House" by John Jos. Miller, John Nighthawk, a black man with the power to use other people's life force to extend his own, is hired to bodyguard Charles Dutton, a joker who looks like the traditional image of Death, at a high stakes game of poker hosted by a Chicago crime lord. Many of the players and their bodyguards are aces or jokers with powers. When a stumble turns to violence, an ace bodyguard protects his client by sending everyone else into the past, threatening history. So each story in the book describes what a present-day character does in the Chicago of the past followed by another piece of Miller's story telling how Nighthawk and Croyd, the ace with time traveling powers, fix history by rescuing or otherwise dealing with those lost in time. But, they have a time limit as Croyd, aka the Sleeper, will lose his time traveling abilities as soon as he falls asleep.

The stories make good use of the history of Chicago, especially the Chicago mob. Authors include Kevin Andrew Murphy writing about the origins of the Playboy Bunny, Christopher Rowe with a story about Hardhat (who fought The Radical way back in the first book), Paul Cornell about aliens and dinosaurs, Marko Kloos about a half-tiger joker preventing the mob's St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, Melinda M. Snodgrass on the violence around the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, Mary Anne Mohanraj about dancers at the 1893 World's Fair, and Saladin Ahmed with a story of a villain who saves a prehistoric tribe. Miller gets to cover the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. If not for the copious amount of profanity in one story, I could see this book being a good way for Chicago students to learn their local history.

Readers do not have to have read all of the previous twenty-four books, nor even the seven published since Tor revived the series back in 2008 with Inside Straight. It would help the reader to have read the first book for the origins of Croyd, Golden Boy, and the Turtle as well as some of the cameos appearing in a couple of the stories.

Overall, I felt this volume was a bit repetitious as most stories followed the formula of time travelers changing the past and then Croyd and Nighthawk fixing it. This did lead to a running gag as to whether Asimov or Heinlein wrote the story about time travel and the butterfly effect (with the last line of the book being, "Tell him it was Bradbury"). I also think the writers could have done more with showing the reactions of pre-1946 people to aces and jokers with superpowers.

Fans of Wild Cards and superhero stories generally will enjoy this book. But I would rank it as just average in this series.

These books are always fun. Despite being stories written by multiple authors, this one felt more coherent than some of the Wild Cards books.

Its kinda fun to read a book with many different authors writing about the same thing. It's like fan fiction, but so much better. Each story was unique, with its own take on the same world. Even though I haven't read any of the other books in this series, I was able to jump right in without any problem with the world building. I'm excited to start the series from the beginning.

I was a little dubious about reading this one, because it's not set in New York, with a lot of the old familiar characters, and I was also slightly disappointed in the last book, Mississippi Roll, but I really enjoyed this. You get to meet all new characters and some very interesting (and unexpected) new superpowers. I feel like this book had a bit more of the gritty adventure I expected from this anthology. I also liked the time travel angle because I'm just a sucker for that particular trope, and it also helped that I'm a fan of books set in Prohibition Chicago.

The Wildcards series is still one of the best, long running, superhero anthologies still going, and though I was a tiny bit reticent about picking up this one, I'm on board if the writers decide to move to new venues and eras. as they did here.

Low Chicago is a collection of interrelated wild card stories. It begins with a high stakes card game that descends into a Wild Card firefight. Players and their companions, Wild Cards and Jokers alike are transported to different times in the past. But as a result, a time storm develops making it necessary for the remaining pair of Wild Cards to travel back to the past and prevent history from changing too much. As a premise it has a lot of potential. The authors do a decent job of weaving Wild Card history with US history, and the stories are competently written, but somehow I found the end result lacking. The characters are shallow, making it difficult to care what happens to them. That is the biggest weakness of this anthology. I wasn’t given much reason to care one way or another.

Low Chicago trades upon George R R Martin’s fame. His name alone will attract readers. I don’t think Low Chicago would be nearly as successful if he wasn’t associated with the project. The stories in Low Chicago are decent if unexceptional, and the anthology is one way of getting Martin’s name associated with the upcoming tv series.

3 / 5

I received a copy of Low Chicago from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.

— Crittermom

I am a lover of Game of Thrones so when I saw George R.R. Martins name come up I jumped at the opportunity. I had no idea this series had been going on for this many years. I feel my biggest downfall will be that I don't understand cards so I may have an issue understanding this book a little bit. But so far from what I've read just as an introduction of the many characters and their background to Nighthawk they are very interesting and complex. I really do hope that card games to not mix into what happens in this book or I will be questioning my boyfriend at every turn as my knowledge of card games is limited to Kings Corner, solitaire and go-fish and the like. It is very interesting to have a world based off of a society names after jokers, queens and such. The crazy characters are kind of cool. Some portions of of the first authors story doesn't make much since. Some parts remind me of Austin Powers. I hope these stories tie together because it kind of just drops off after the first story portion. The second one starts very slow and was more difficult for me to get into. Once it started explaining more I got into it. However, but had slow starts and then built up just before going into the next story. I feel like for the second one there was something I had read that actually given some information away about a character so that was slightly unfortunate for me. I want to like this book this book so much. But it was honestly so hard for me to read. I think I will love it as a show as much as I loved Games of Thrones as a show. At this time I suggest anyone who loved reading Game of Thrones to read this series and I will have to come back to this book at another time.

It seems very odd to jump into a series at book 25, but this isn’t the kind of story where that matters too much. Sure, I had to do a quick google for the underlying premise: an alien virus hits the Earth, and while most of the infected die, those that survive are altered. Known as the Wild Card event, most of those whose ‘cards turned’ become ‘jokers’ – cursed with some kind of abnormality, like the woman with rabbit ears. Some are ‘deuces’, granted low-level, party-trick kind of powers. But a very few are the ‘aces’, those with real superpowers.

The whole series has been collections of short stories, and this latest volume is no different. We start with a framing tale – very Canterbury Tales 😉 – of a high stakes poker game. Each player is allowed to take two bodyguards in with them, be that physical muscle or ace-skills, or both!

The human mutation premise isn’t exactly novel, but I think it’s a nice take on things here, feeling different enough from, say, X-Men.

When something goes awry during the card game, it turns out that one of the superpowers in the room is the ability to send people to different time periods. So, with regular interludes back to our framing tale, we then get a series of stories written by different authors detailing the ‘adventures’ of one or more of the party, flung into the distant or recent past.

I’m not sure I would have noticed the different authors if it hadn’t been made clear at the start, but once pointed out then yes, I caught a few differences in writing styles. That works well, though, given the range of eras the stories are set in: Jurassic to 1980s, with stops at several quite famous events – and with a few famous faces, to boot!

I really enjoyed both the premise of the stories here, and the individual time travel tales. There were a few times when I thought, “This is probably a reference to a previous story”, but nothing to detract too much. If I did have a complaint, it’s that this book gives a bit of a glimpse at a clearly well-established universe, but we don’t get to spend a great deal of time with character development or deeper explanations.

Still, that just gives me an even bigger reason to check out the rest of the series!

Having never read any of the books in this series, I love that I could jump right in and not feel the loss of not being as familiar with the world as I should be. As always, George R.R. Martin delivers in SPADES! (no pun intended!)