Knaves Over Queens

I'd have to say that one weakness of the Wild Cards books has been that the sections set in Britain or with British characters tend to lack verisimilitude; the authors are, after all, American and don't always seem to get the culture. (This may well also be true of sections set in Congo or Kazakhstan or wherever, but it's not as if I could tell). This book is a reversal of that, doubtless due to the fact that, this time, many of the authors are themselves British.

It's an anthology, somewhat in the style of the very first Wild Cards book, with each story set at a different point in Britain's history in this alternate reality. There's less of an interstitial than usual, although a set of three short stories featuring an immortal character spreading discord in Northern Ireland comes close to filling that role. Otherwise, we have a couple of stories about London gangsters (including the Kray Twins), one about espionage that's more Harry Palmer than James Bond, the Falklands War, pro-Joker terrorism, and two that put a superhero spin on everyday tragedies.

The characters are mostly new, or have only shown up in passing before. The exception is Noel Matthews, who here receives what's effectively an origin story set in the '90s, well before his appearances in earlier books. Which has the advantage that you don't need to know his backstory, and, more generally, means that you don't need to have read the previous books to follow this one. While there are some characters that appear in multiple stories, they mostly stand alone, with British post-War history (or this alternate version of it) as the backdrop. Indeed, while there are two books to go in this triad, I suspect some of the characters here won't show up again, except perhaps in minor roles.

It's a good twist on the format of the first book in the series, looking at a different country. I didn't find that any of the stories in it missed a beat, although some are more memorable than others. As an anthology, it may not quite have the strength of the interweaving narratives of the mosaic novels, but there's pathos and peril and the great feel of placing superheroics against a mundane, realistic background that the series as a whole often does so well at.