Wild Cards – Great or just okay?

I finished the second Wild Cards book (Aces High) a couple of days ago.  I have to say that I wasn’t nearly as impressed with this book as I was with the first.

The characters are mostly the same, with the same stable of authors, but unfortunately, the book centered around a hastily contrived plot device about a biogenic alien invasion that had a Star Trek-style ending.  I starting reading the series because of its fascinating human interactions.  I enjoyed the gritty portrayal of the heroes (Aces) as real people with human foibles, and not some quasi-God of justice and righteousness.  And while the second book still worked with these themes, they were devoted to the advancement of a series of events that was little better than cheap melodrama. I suppose this might be the weakness of a shared world.  You have to come up with some kind of goal that is easy to write in and let your authors go where they will. 

I have higher hopes for the third book in the series, but I’ll be waiting to read that until after I read the new Tolkein book and Scalzi’s latest entry in the Old Man’s War universe.