A long time ago in a youth hostel in Beijing, on a table of accumulated backpackers’ books, I found the mass market paperback of the first Wild Cards book. I may have told this story on this channel before. The story focused on a world much like ours, at least at first, and the consequences of the emergence on that world of a virus that killed a bunch of people, mutated a bunch of others, and gave a small minority superpowers. The list of authors in that collection was a who’s-who of a certain moment in genre, and of course even though this was before the HBO series and A Song of Ice and Fire becoming a global multimedia property, I recognized the big name on the front cover. But the reason I picked it up was because of the Roger Zelazny story.

At that time, Zelazny made my sparks go off in my brain’s happy place like no other pure genre author. I don’t know if I can describe the feeling of cracking one of those books as a kid: my favorites (Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Jack of the Shadows, Night in the Lonesome October, the short fiction, I dig you and respect you Amber fans and I have read those books a million times too but they’re not the books of my heart) felt the way a good bouldering problem feels, a set of beautiful suggestions at the limit of your capacity, assembled with care for the sole purpose of inviting you, the reader, to have a really good time.

Roger Zelazny only contributed one story to the Wild Cards universe: the origin of a character called the Sleeper, who went on to become one of the backbones of the series, rarely the focus of any series of events but so often involved. The Sleeper sleeps, you see, and when he wakes up (some indeterminate length of time later) he has a new power. Sometimes he’s a force for good, sometimes he’s just trying to get by. Often he’s in a bit over his head. Like most of us.

Much, much later, I was honored to be asked to join the Wild Cards collective: the gang that keeps the series muddling forward. I contributed a small band of goofy residents of Jokertown, designed to get involved in low-stakes superpower NYC hijinks: a high school guidance counselor who ate the gum-gum fruit, a sleezeball former chef who turns into any animal he eats, an electro-powered conspiracy theorist with a heart of gold. You can read some of their adventures on tor.com.

Now, imagine me in the middle of the Pandemic. Lots of child to care for. Mounting book deadlines. Waking up at 4 a.m. to get a bit of writing in. Absolutely no room whatsoever for an additional project. Certainly not an additional Wild Cards project, likely to involve more overhead than a customary story, many rounds of careful edits and a decent amount of coordination with other authors: can I use your character, what do you think about this interaction, etc etc.

And an email lands in my inbox. A call for pitches on a Wild Cards collection.

About Roger Zelazny’s Sleeper.

Reader, I pitched him.

And I got in. Sleeper Straddle contains stories from, Christopher Rowe, Carrie Vaughn, Cherie Priest, William F. Wu, Walter Jon Williams, Stephen Leigh, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and, you know, me. I never read customer reviews but in the act of copying the TOC over from one of those big bookstore websites I stumbled on one saying that there were points where I was “channeling the spirit of the great Roger Zelazny,” which, I’ll be riding that feeling for a few hours now, particularly since that was exactly what I’d hoped to do. I wrote the story as close as I could manage to the hardboiled beat-down poetry Zelazny rides in Amber and NitLO and The Dead Man’s Brother and Home is the Hangman, and built out from there. Gratifying to hear that came through. Particularly as I developed that voice and register a bit in another story I hope to share with you soon…

Now, this is the embarrassing part: all this was brought to mind by my receiving this new hardcover edition of Sleeper Straddle, perhaps from the UK? But the book actually came out in late ‘24 in the US!

Perhaps you’ve already tracked this down. I don’t see a reference to it in the archives of this newsletter, which means I was terribly remiss, distracted, sick, or busy when it came out. In fact it was probably the latter: in addition to all the, um, well, everything about late ‘24 that was The Big Pneumonia for me. But the great thing about books is, they don’t have a best-by date. So, if interested: hie you to the bookstores, the library, all the usual places! Sleep on!