For the Cocoa Brovaz song, see The Rude Awakening

The Rude Awakening

The Rude Awakening is the second album from rappers Tek and Steele, their first under the name Cocoa Brovaz. The duo was forced to drop their original name, Smif-N-Wessun, after they were sued by the Smith & Wesson firearms company. The album received moderate reviews and sales. The lead single...

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The fifteenth volume (dubbed "Book III of a New Cycle") in the Wild Cards

Wild Cards

Wild Cards is a science fiction and superhero anthology series set in a shared universe. The series was created by a group of New Mexico science fiction authors, but it is mostly pulled together and edited by best-selling author George R. R. Martin with assistance by Melinda Snodgrass, also a...

 shared universe

Shared universe

A shared universe is a fictional universe to which more than one writer contributes. Work set in a shared universe share characters and other elements with varying degrees of consistency. Shared universes are contrasted with collaborative writing, in which multiple authors work on a single story....

 fiction series edited by George R. R. Martin

George R. R. Martin

George Raymond Richard Martin , sometimes referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his bestselling series of epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted for their dramatic pay-cable series Game of...

. Published in 1995, it is the final book in the "Card Sharks" cycle, with the completion of the Black Trump virus (fatal to anyone with the Wild Card infection) and its release in the world. Unlike the two previous books, Black Trump was a mosaic novel, much like Jokers Wild and Ace in the Hole.

Characters

Black Trump features the following characters as the main focus of the various storylines:

Character	Author(s)	Plot
Gregg Hartmann	Stephen Leigh Stephen Leigh Stephen W. Leigh is an American science fiction and fantasy writer, artist, and musician. He also works as a lecturer at Northern Kentucky University, teaching creative writing.Steve Leigh lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.- Works :...	An ace turned joker, Gregg struggles between being a hero and a villain.
Jay Ackroyd	George R. R. Martin George R. R. Martin George Raymond Richard Martin , sometimes referred to as GRRM, is an American author and screenwriter of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his bestselling series of epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted for their dramatic pay-cable series Game of...	With his partner Jerry "Mr. Nobody" Strauss, conducts a personal investigation on the Card Shark matter.
Billy "Carnifex" Ray	John J. Miller John J. Miller (author) John Joseph Miller is a science fiction author known for his work in the Wild Cards shared universe. He has published four novels, as well as a handful of short stories. He also wrote GURPS Wild Cards, a supplement for the GURPS role-playing system published in 1989...	Is hired by the president himself to find a criminal presumed dead.
Zoe Harris	Sage Walker Sage Walker Sage Walker is a science fiction writer based in New Mexico. She contributed to the Wild Cards series and won the Locus Award for her first novel, Whiteout. She was one of several science fiction authors who attended a United States Department of Homeland Security conference on science and...	Teams up with Croyd Crenson The Sleeper (Wild Cards) The Sleeper is a fictional character from the Wild Cards series of books.In September 1946, ninth-grader Croyd Crenson, native of an unspecified borough of the New York City metropolitan area, was one of the first victims of the alien virus dubbed "the Wild Card", which generates random mutations...  to obtain the means of negotiation for the Wild Cards.
Captain Trips	Victor Milán Victor Milan Victor Woodward Milán is an American writer known for libertarian science fiction and an interest in cybernetics. In 1986 he won the Prometheus Award for Cybernetic Samurai. He has also written several shared universe works for the Forgotten Realms, Star Trek, and Wild Cards Universes...	Is coerced by the Sharks in finishing and replicating the Black Trump virus, and ends up meeting a dear old "friend".