Extrait :
"Newsarama: George, for those who aren't familiar with the books, could you tell us a little bit about what the world of Wild Cards is, and how you ended up creating it?
George R.R. Martin: Wild Cards is a shared world anthology series set in an alternate universe in which superpowers exist, thanks to an alien virus released over New York City in 1946 that rewrites the genetic code of its victims to create both deformed “jokers” and superpowered “aces.” The first Wild Cards book, Wild Cards, was published in 1987 by Bantam. The latest, Suicide Kings, came out in December. There have been twenty volumes in the series to date, featuring stories by more than thirty different writers.
The world and series had its roots in a role-playing game that I ran for a group of writer friends back in the early '80s. The group included Melinda Snodgrass, John Jos. Miller, Victor Milan, and Walter Jon Williams, among others. They were a very creative bunch who came up with some great characters, but the game became such an obsession that it was eating up our lives. Mine especially. So finally I said, “There has to be some way to make some money off this,” and hit on the idea of the shared world. Numerous brainstorming sessions followed, in the course of which I reached out to other writer friends I knew to be comics fans, including Roger Zelazny, Lewis Shiner, Edward Bryant, Stephen Leigh, and Howard Waldrop, and brought them aboard as well. It was Melinda Snodgrass who came up with the notion of the wild card virus as a single root cause for all our aces, rather than the hodgepodge of miscellaneous origins (aliens, gods, radioactive spiders, stray lightning bolts, etc) you found in the existing comic universes. Once we had settled on a retrovirus, the jokers were a logical extrapolation... but a fortuitous one. Jokertown soon became our most iconic and unique location. Howard Waldrop insisted that his story had to take place in 1946, which is why the first book became a historical... another happy accident, since it allowed us to give our universe a backstory. "
(...)
"Nrama: Daniel, for you, what's the appeal of a story like Wild Cards?
Daniel Abraham: The Wild Cards universe has always been appealing to me because of the incredible variety of stories that it invites. Before I found Wild Cards (which was, admittedly a long damn time ago), I'd read superhero comics (X-Men, Moon Knight, etc.) and critiques of superhero comics (Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns), but Wild Cards was the first time I really saw a superhero universe that was built to accommodate stories that were about . . . well, anything, just with superheroes. "
