Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm a huge fan of the Wild Cards series of books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

"The series relates an alternate history of the earth after World War II. In 1946 an alien virus that rewrites human DNA is accidentally unleashed in the skies over New York City. It kills 90% of those who come into contact with it (referred to as 'drawing the Black Queen'). However, 9% mutate into deformed creatures (known as 'Jokers') and the remaining 1% gain superpowers (known as 'Aces'). There is also a class known as 'Deuces' - Aces who have acquired useless or ridiculous powers, such as the ability to levitate up to two feet, or to grow body hair at will. The airborne virus eventually spreads all over the world, affecting tens of thousands.
The Wild Cards universe is distinguished from most superhero comic book fiction by several thematic elements. Early on the authors decided to pursue a more realistic, or naturalistic approach to storytelling. Few of the Ace characters in Wild Cards have secret identities, or are traditional crime-fighting superheroes in the mold of Spider-Man or Batman. Wild Cards remained set within a recognizably real world with recognizably real people and pop culture and, because of the historical setting of many of the stories, had characters who aged realistically during the course of the series. The majority of Wild Card victims live in the run-down ghetto of Jokertown, while the fortunate Aces become glamorous celebrities. In addition, Wild Cards took a more graphic approach to violence, and particularly to sex, than most superhero stories do."

They are mostly collections of short stories, but with a central theme and timeline throughout all the books. Some the of the stories are excellent, some are crap, but all of them have very interesting characterisations and take the superhero genre in clever and strange directions.

However, I'm having problems finding the books! I have the first 9 in ebook format (good old torrents) and will happily pay for the rest in ebook format if I could find them, but I can't. I can't even find them available for sale in the UK at a reasonable price in actual book format!

Help me Beex, you're my only hope.

Have you got "Busted Flush"?

You probably have but it says on the torrent I'm looking at that it's book 19? Is that right?

Thanks to a secret benefactor, i'm now just missing 13,14,15,20,21

more likely the lazy twat just hasn't written them.

Actually from what I can see thats part of the problem - he didnt - he only edited them - some were written as short stories by different people and some as whole books by other authors (when you look for them sometimes his name is not even mentioned)

Absolutely, Martin is more of a sponsor and collator of stories set in the universe. Some books are short stories that are unrelated to each other, some are short stories with an overriding theme throughout, some are full novels, others are multi-authored and edited together novels etc...

Hello, I would like a turn on these books, please.

Are they out in the kindle store? (the first ones I mean)

No.

Aw that's crap
I don't know how to get them then.

Trooper gives them to us

There are a large number of them on Demonoid (which is where I pointed Trooper to for a number he was missing)

So do we get them the way people might usually get, say, an episode of a tv series? Then how do we get them onto our Kindle, is it a drag and drop type thing? What's the formatting like?

We get them onto our kindle by using calibre to convert them to mobi format and emailing them to our free kindle email address, or that is what I did anyway. Formatting of the ones I have read is pretty good.

To avoid pussyfooting around the obvious, and arseing about with pm's, just go here https://rapidshare.com/files/2234206962/wildcards.zip and download them...

Mods, feel free to do whatever you want with that link

I just copied them to my Kindle from my laptop - did I gone done wrong?

You could do that of course I think I already converted them to Mobi format in the zip anyway.

I did wonder why 'Play' is always on in the background now.

Jesus

okay, what am I missing, I can't d/l that file.

thank you.