The name of George Martin became iconic even before the appearance of his famous “A Song of Ice and Fire.” “Wild Cards,” a multi-volume mosaic novel, brought him fame—a genre whose invention is the personal merit of the writer. The plot of the novel is both complex and simple. The Earth becomes a testing ground where one of the opposing parties that dominate the Galaxy is testing a new gene virus. A representative of the other party, Tachyon, is trying to prevent an experiment whose consequences are unpredictable. He fails, and a planetary catastrophe breaks out on Earth, as a result of which most of the population dies, and the rest become either aces - owners of superhuman abilities who have retained their previous appearance, or jokers - superhumans, physically disfigured. The story of the irreconcilable war between aces and jokers is the content of the books of the cult mosaic novel “Wild Cards.”