Jokertown Shuffle
WTF happened to this series? It's like the authors all got together and decided to ignore all my favorite characters (the ones that are still alive, anyway) and come up with ridiculous plots that aren't hardly believable, even in the Wild Cards world of the late 80's. The "jumpers" are so contrived and unbelievable it's painful to read about them. The conspiracy around them and the Shadow Fists finally has a chance to finally die; I hope since they killed off major players in that plotline we can finally move on to something new. These last two books really miss the point of alternate history, IMHO, by focusing too much on wild card characters and not taking the characters and the storylines into the broader world around them.
Part of the book falls into torture porn, another part dips dangerously close to self-serving navel gazing, and the whole book is dreary and unsurprising. Maybe that was the tone of the time it was written; I was too self-absorbed to notice what the rest of the world felt like. They did introduce a new joker who promises to be interesting if only because he's the only new multifaceted character in the last few hundred pages, but again the amount of disbelief they're asking me to suspend makes me feel this series is tipping towards fantasy and away from scifi.
