WARNING: excessive editorial honesty ahead. Proceed at your own risk.

Editing Down & Dirty almost drove me mad.

You’ve read the book by now (if not, shame on you for reading this part first—there’s a reason we call them Afterwords, you know). I hope that you enjoyed it. Many of the stories are first rate, as good as those in any other volume of the series. There are some fabulous scenes, characters, moments. The rise and fall of Typhoid Croyd. The murder of Kahina, among the most chilling ever depicted in Wild Cards. Modular Man’s battles against the reborn Snotman. Water Lily’s enslavement to the vile Ti Malice. And more…

Good stories are enough for an ordinary anthology, no doubt, but shared worlds demand something more, and Wild Cards was meant to go a step beyond even shared worlds. Our intent was always for the books to be more than just a collection of individual stories, however excellent. We called them “mosaic novels,” and set out to make the whole more than the sum of its parts.

Usually we succeeded…but not in this case, I fear.

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The great boom in shared world anthologies began in 1979, when Ace Books published Robert Asprin’s Thieves World, the first volume in a long-running fantasy series about the imaginary city of Sanctuary and the motley cast of swordsmen, sorcerers, princes, rogues, and thieves who roamed its streets, with occasional guest appearances by an equally motley assortment of gods.

Thieves World had its precursors, to be sure. In comic books, both the Marvel and DC universes were shared worlds, wherein the heroes and villains lived in the same world, constantly crossed paths with one another, and had their friendships, feuds, and love affairs. In prose there was H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft encouraged his writer friends to borrow elements from his stories, and to add their own, and Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, and others gleefully took up the game. HPL himself would then make mention of the gods, cults, and accursed books the others had contributed, and the mythos became ever richer and more detailed.

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In the books, Wild Cards Day is celebrated every September 15, in memory of September 15, 1946, the day that Jetboy spoke his immortal last words while Dr. Tod loosed an alien virus over Manhattan. In real life, September 15, 1946 happens to be the day that Howard Waldrop was born…and Howard, coincidentally, wrote “Thirty Minutes Over Broadway,” the opening story of the first Wild Cards book, wherein all these events take place.

In the books, September 20 is a day of no special note. In real life, however, it marks the day of my birth, two years and five days after H’ard. September 20 is the true Wild Cards Day. It was on that day in 1983 that Vic Milan gave me a role-playing game called Superworld as a birthday present, thereby unknowingly planting the first seed of the Wild Cards universe.

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