William Gibson's opinion of Shadowrun, ...ouch... Options

[A Clockwork Lime]

[I Eat Time]

And the Lovecraft Mythos is little more than the paranoid delusions and elaborate fantasies created by a man strung out on various opiates. It's still good writing. And some of the best horror writing out there.

Cyberpunk came out of the 80's, which is enough to cause it some discredit, I know, but there's not really any other writing around from the 80's that I could even name. The genre can't really happen, I agree, and it's not a prediction of what actually came through, granted, and it is semi-paranoid (though there was really nothing frantic about Gibson's writing), but what bearing does this have on how good it was?

[A Clockwork Lime]

Any work that involves a hacking dolphin in any way equals bad writing as far as I'm concerned. When it's translated to the screen, by the author himself, and has said dolphin living in a the husk of the Brooklyn Bridge with a bunch of gangers, well, that equals really bad writing. Especially when the entire story revolves around a stupid concept to begin with -- a data courier who had to give up his long-term memory in order to carry some data inside him. Because, obviously, there wasn't anything more efficient (or cheaper) for doing the same thing. Especially when they sent the damn decryption key over the phone.

Is it the entirity of his work? No. Does that excuse it? No. As far as I'm personally concerned, the majority of his ideas and concepts are on the same level.

[blakkie]

I personally found the data courier aspect of it the one moderately believable parts. Or at least not the toughest to suspend my belief over. I agree sending of the key over phone lines was a hard one to swallow though.

[I Eat Time]

ACL - It's obvious that you simply don't like Gibson, or cyberpunk. What can I say? I personally can't stand Dragonlance, and I just finished Something from the Nightside, which was pretty awful. I can't tell you to like Gibson, and I hope I haven't come off as someone who'd try.

I do disagree for your reasons for disliking Gibson. They don't make a lot of sense. The dolphin thing? Is it really that implausible? It's silly, yeah, but do a quick Google search and you'll find some pretty idiotic things our government has spent money on. Like seeing if plants can talk and feel pain. Or conducting a survey to see why prisoners want to escape prison. Thousands of taxpayer dollars on the last one, thank-you Lewis Black.

I can't really defend the guy for endorsing Johnny Mnemonic, which had all the themes right but sucked ass as a movie compared to the short story. All I can say is that a lot of movies look a lot better on paper. Anyway, if you're going to let one idea in one book portrayed in one really poor movie spoil you on Gibson, that's your right and prerogative, but I think giving him more of a chance (I.E. reading the Bridge Trilogy or Neuromancer) would be advised before you make a broad opinion, then start espousing it all over the place.

[Garland]

[Bearclaw]

You guys are seriously bashing a fiction writer because so far his possible vision of one future in one series of three books isn't dead on accurate? You same people who play shadowrun? I am saddened by the complete lack of sense it makes.

[A Clockwork Lime]

No. We're bashing a writer who's bashing other writers for bastardizing "his" genre by introducing fantasy into it. Nevermind that said basher's works are chock full of fantasy and paranoid delusions way beyond the basic premise (the Awakening of the Sixth World) he's bashing. And if you read between the lines, he's mostly whining because no one consulted his brilliance on the matter.

[Bearclaw]

You should go back and read what he said. He didn't complain about not being consulted, he said he had nothing to do with it. Some of his concepts were ripped off, just as he ripped off other peoples concepts. He could probably sue, and he could be sued. He said in fact that it was a good thing that he was being ripped off. It just proves he's doing good work.
Everything else is paranoid delusions and persucution complex so common to gamers.

[I Eat Time]

[TinkerGnome]

Actually... what's wrong with the dolphin thing? We're already using dolphins to detect and mark underwater mines, patrol against and "tag" swimmers approaching naval vessels, and even conduct underwater surveillance with a camera held in their mouths.

How is it not logical to take this a step forward and implant weaponry and/or advanced detection gear into the dolphin to make this even more effective?

[msde]

Another thing you should consider is that the cyberpunk genre was short lived. By the time Shadowrun came out, it was pretty much dead. Even books like Snow Crash aren't considered cyberpunk, as they get classified as post-CP or something. CP was pretty closely tied to real world events of the time, and once things changed, the writers moved on.

I'm inclined to agree with Gibson, actually. Shadowrun is a huge, cobbled together, disjointed mess of a game world. Presented as a standalone background, it's not much. You can try to sum it up as cyberpunk + fantasy + half a dozen other things. There's just too many ideas crammed into it, that many creative attempts in the background come out disjointed or shallow. (That, and gaming fiction frequently isn't particularly well-written)

Presented as a starting framework for something creative, it can't be beat. I've never seen someone have trouble writing a fairly solid background for their SR character, and carefully chosen elements of the background can be woven together for compelling creative works. You can take pretty much any concept and translate it into the SR world, which to me is its biggest strength.

The only limitation we ever ran into was coming up with reasons to maintain the standard method receiving runs through contacts. A typical shadowrun from a typical GM looks so unappealing that I have to keep coming up with new personality disorders for my characters to accept them. It's not really the GM's fault, either. Unless runner teams are regularly making it big and retiring, there's quite a bit of suspension of disbelief.

[A Clockwork Lime]

[blakkie]

[hobgoblin]

to me it looks like he is saying that had nothing to do with it what so ever and dont want to be asosiated with it in any way expect that they have a genre in comon...

personalyhe dont like it but its not like he own the cyberpunk genra so he cant sue, and cyberpunk is so wide a genre that cyberware and a worldwide computer network dont qualify as copying his writeings...

replace the japanese with whatever nation or generic area is most likely to threaten amerikas economic might at the moment and your not that far from what cyberpunk realy is about a implotion on the social level where everyone only care about himself and whoever is close to him (family and girlfriend/boyfriend mostly) and the rest are either enemys or assets depending on the moment.

the real question is, will the goverments be replaced with super corporations? hard to tell. right now its more effective for them to manipulate goverments under the table then to tell them to go fuck themselfs but this may well change and change fast as you have to remeber that there are 3 forces in this world: money, militaryand religion. and military can be bought...

[Jimmy_the_Fixer]

Clockwork lime, you have obviously never read any of his work, stop typing the stupid crap that falls out of your inept, shallow mind, you close minded, ignorant, illiterate waste of space.

as for Gibson, he's a genious, Shadowrun has an inordinate amount of material in the setting that have almost exact parallels in his books.

the metahumans and magic is great for awhile but they are more novelty than anything. If I could go back in time I would start my first campaign off with none of it.

Cyberpunk is too old and out of print, there needs to be an RPG that has a solid cyberpunk theme, without any of the fantasy stuff.

don't get me wrong, I love Shadowrun, and love the setting, but the system needs work and the fantasy stuff should have been a campaign setting in which to add to it. :nuyen:

[tjn]

Jimmy, you might want to delete your post. before you force a moderator to do it for you.

[Adam]

[MrSandman666]

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Guys, hey, stop the fighting! It's only a movie, ok? I mean, I'm personally a big fan of Gibson's work and don't even find the movie so bad (yea, yea, sue me...). I find it far more believable to have mind-hacking dolphins (which was, even in my oppinion, the worst part of the movie) than dragons elected presidents or the awakening of magic or having all kinds of mutants who "accidentaly" look like trolls, elves, dwarfs and orks out of the old legends and fairytales. The japanacorps where very believable back in the day when this was created and still isn't so far off. Just look at Sony or Yamaha. Right now it looks more like China could develop some potential in the future but that's too cloudy for any halfway usable visions yet, in my oppinion.

And it still strikes me as odd that someone who proclaims that he "can't stand" cyberpunk plays a game that is best known as "cyberpunk meets fantasy". I mean, sure, you can play SR without caberpunk but you can also play StarWars without science fiction... Still I see no one picking up Star Wars for a low tech campaign...

Whatever... I originally wanted to stay out of this but I find it a bit upsetting to have someone outright bash an author of whom he hasn't ever read a book. It's not like you said "I don't care much for him" but more "everything he's done is totally absurd and not worth the paper it's been printed on".

Sorry.

[Kagetenshi]

[Bearclaw]

I say that if you want REAL cyberpunk, you use GURPS rules, and make your own stinking, distopic, acid raining, corp owned, crime riddled world.

[Adam]

Well, I suppose GURPS is somewhat of a harsh, acid-rain filled, morale destroying system. . . ;-)

[Black Isis]

So ACL's big problem is that GIbson's cyberpunk seems really silly and outdated looking back at it 20 years later....

ACL, out of curiosity, how much science fiction from the 30s, 40s, and 50s have you read? Because by and large, it _all_ seems really outdated (mostly because it is, duh). I would say that most of it probably seemed pretty outdated in the 70s and 80s too. Read some P K Dick and half his stories are post-apocalyptic "nuclear war is bad" stories. That doesn't make them bad stories -- it just makes them products of their time.

Gibson's stuff comes from a time when the US was crashing into a recession, Japan was eating our lunch in every industry from cars to electronics, and no one really understood computers or how they would evolve (Gibson admits he didn't even have a computer before he wrote Neuromancer, and when he did get one he was surprised at how primitive it seemed). Trying to blame him for that is like blaming Dick for thinking the world was going to be a radioactive desert, Orwell for thinking we'd have a totalitarian technocracy in the 1980s, or Clarke for thinking we'd have Pan Am flying to the moon regularly by the turn of the century.

As for the dolphin thing -- like someone else said, the Navy did a lot of experiments training dolphins for surveillance and other tasks during the Cold War, which is all the dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic had been trained to do (if you read the story instead of seeing the crappy movie, this is a little more clear). If you think that destroys the credibility of the story....well, I don't know what do tell you.

I will ask that if you don't like any of the cyberpunk elements of Shadowrun -- exactly what do you like about Shadowrun more than say -- just a modern-day fantasy game?

[Xirces]

I don't think Gibson is outdated or irrelevant, but then I still think that Asimov, Clark, Orwell and Dick (amongst others) can still tell us things about our own society and where it's heading.

Hell, I still think people can learn from reading Shakespear and Dickens because that's the point of literature - the author nearly always has a point to make. Take a topical example of Tolkien and re-read with a critical eye... (I know with most DSers that's teaching to suck eggs, but I've said it before that we're an exceptional bunch of people and that the rest of the world needs to open their eyes.)

Just because exact details don't come true in the same time frame doesn't make the writing irrelevant - 1984 is still just around the corner (more so now than when it was written). Everyday things happen that have been predicted in some sort of fiction and, like it or not, we are still moving towards the distopian societies that are the staple of cyberpunk.

In a sense SR does dilute the fiction (after all I'm willing to bet that magic doesn't return to the earth) which does remove the impact of the message, but it's only a game (and a damn good one too). There are still things that we can learn from the fiction and the game and possibly have fun too - the issues of wealth distribution, segregation, freedom humanity and the environment all are strong in SR, and these are the staple issues dealt with in the cyberpunk genre.

Quite simply the best sci-fi or fantasy should be satire of the state of the human race.

Anyone who thinks that I'm wrong can bite my shiny metal ass :)

[hobgoblin]

from what i recall about that dolphin it was originaly trained and equiped to try and mess with submarine computers from the outside useing ultrasound or microwaves or something. basicly it was trained and equiped to be a kind of living computercracking torpedo. no wonder it was used to take over mediasats :)