This Wild Cards installment is a full length novel, not an anthology. The main character is Mark Meadows, an idealistic hippie. He is on the run from law enforcement types from the USA, as well as the odd ace, and is forced from place to place around the world, and finally settles in Vietnam. This country has decided to set itself up as a Wild Card refuge, where all jokers are welcome.

Mark doesn't find everything to his liking, and with the help of Belew, Croyd and others, decides to run some things on his own, or, rather, Moonchild does. When Moonchild falls for someone, will she lose her powers if she has sex?

It's odd, that with all of the great SF writers who took part in the Wild Cards series--editor George R.R. Martin, Chris Claremont, Walter Jon Williams, even the late, great Roger Zelazny--the two people who got to write entire books by themselves were the two most irritating writers in the entire series, Victor Milan and Melinda Snodgrass. Both writers are technically accomplished hacks whose characters and themes echo some of the most tired cliches of science fiction and fantasy fan-written stories, aka fanfic.

Milan is one of these people who tries to come off as knowing a lot more about the world and how it works than he really does. He does this mostly by filling his stories with the sort of details that you could find by years of reading Soldier of Fortune magazine--if there is a gun in one of Milan's stories, you not only find out the make and model of the gun, but also which previous guns it was based upon--and assorted other tidbits. He also occasionally comes up with an effective line or two. Unfortunately, it is all in the service of a plot that serves mostly to emphasize the studly studliness of Milan's own personal Mary Sue (look it up on Wikipedia if you're not familiar with the term), J. Robert Belew.

J. Bob is a middle-aged soldier of fortune who makes love to college-age women like they've never been made love to before, tricks his straw-man opponents with a strategic gambit that would make the writers of Scooby-Doo would blush at, and has a plan for winning the Vietnam War, using about as many people as would fit in your living room. The spoiler ban forbids me from giving Milan's ridiculous plot away, but suffice it to say that it's based on the premise that the Vietnamese are a superstitious and cowardly lot. The saddest thing about all of this is that Mark Meadows, the only creation of Milan's that I can halfway stand, becomes a second banana in his own book.

The whole point of the Wild Cards books were to see how comic-book-style superpowers would realistically work in a world like our own, and in turn change that world. Thus, the worst parts of the entire series are those in which the writers' reach far exceed their grasp, with regards to political and social aspects. Thankfully, the mistakes of this book were somewhat corrected in later volumes.

Not the best of the Wild Card books but if you're a lover of the series, it is certainly still worth the read.

Dr. Mark Meadows (Captain Trips) has always been one of my favorite characters in the WC series, and in this book, he FINALLY gets the full treatment he deserves. If you like Dr. Meadows and/or any/all of his various chemical incarnations, you will thoroughly enjoy this book.