The Wild Cards gag is great, earth gets hit with an alien virus which distributes super powers.

The results are described with a playing card metaphor:

Superman level abilities = Ace
Lower tier = Deuce
Disfiguring mutations = Joker

The brilliant bit is open sourcing the world. Martin doesn’t have to write a word, and hasn’t in years. All he does is edit the stories written by everyone else.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

“thirty-three books have been released through four publishers.”