Bruce Sterling is in many ways very much opposed to the idea that technology removes much of the meaning, passion, and, paradoxically, human order from human existence. His comlinks bridge culture gaps and form otherwise impossible social networks. His corporations are paragons of selflessness in stark contrast to the selfishness exhibited by crooked bankers worldwide. A corporation travels back in time to stave off the French Revolution, give motorcycles and uzis to the joyfully payrolled mongol horde, and tell off Thomas Jefferson for having slaves. Technology, in Bruce's world, is a wonderful, wonderful thing.

In Gibson's world, technology is banal self-interest incarnate. Its intrusion into society makes human existence into a struggle for survival that is thinly hidden by prostitution, drugs, and simsense. The lives of its poor are steeped in simsense, violence, social posturing, and drugs they can barely afford. The lives of its rich are also steeped in simsense, violence, social posturing, and drugs they can barely afford. Han Virek is described as completely inhuman.

Which viewpoint wins out in Shadowrun? You lose essence for cyberware, but everyone who gets it is all "Cool, AR." The NAN beats the banal bureaucracy of the US, but it in turn balkanizes into a bunch of self-interested and petty city-states. And so on, and so forth.

Nothing wins in SR. Technology, magic, money and mankind are just tools put to any use a mind desires.

I'm not saying one aspect of gameplay is better than any other; I'm just wondering which approach to future shock people judge to be the basis of
SR.

i wouldn't say that Sterling views technology as an ultimately good thing. he also wrote Holy Fire, remember. i think it's more accurate to say, from my reading of him, that Sterling doesn't view technology as a good or bad thing--it's just a(nother) force pushing human history. it can be used as a tool to achieve good or bad results, but it doesn't by its own merits destroy or justify humanity. in the cases where technology appears to save or improve society, it is actually humans using technology to accomplish this. witness Schismatrix: humanity fell into a dark age for several hundred years despite the feverish pace at which technology continued to advance. it was only when a small group of humans decided to try to use technology to better humanity as a whole, rather than bettering their place in humanity the way the Shapers and Mechanists did, that humanity began to evolve to a higher order.

in SR, technology is generally a destructive force. so is magic, to a subtle degree. in SR, to become transhuman is to become less human.

I have to read those books; all I've read are Zeitgeist, Mozart in Mirrorshaes, and Maneki Neko.

Schismatrix and Holy Fire are the most clear-cut treatments of technology/humanity interaction that i've read, of Sterling's stuff. some of his short stories follow similar patterns of thought, but i can't find the two collections i bought.

Gibson, to me, is very moralistic in his themes. technology has changed the world, in Gibson, and the world is now a dark, bitter place. with Sterling, the world is just the world, and technology is simply another means of expressing things that the world already expresses. the battles of ignorance versus knowledge, life versus death, selfishness versus selflessness--they've all been done before, and Sterling is showing how they iterate in the medium of progressive technology.

there's value in both methods of dealing with cyberpunk. SR tends to lean towards Gibson's method, though it's slowly gravitating towards Sterling--or, more accurately, Stephenson. Stephenson's more 'cool', i guess.

The way I see, the problem ends up being that human thinking doesn't mature fast enough to keep up with advancing technology. Thus the world with technology, can be darker than it 'should' be. Possibly because there's enough of a portion of humanity that's first impulse would be 'how can I exploit this?'.

Sci-fi has that sorta argument as well, mostly when they do something equivalent of explaining why you don't just give high tech to non-high tech cultures. (Star Trek prime directive, etc etc). The 'what happens when a civ is given a super energy source' example, for every 4 people that think up the 'ooh we can make sure no one has to pay for heat in winter ever again! or the like, there's going to be the 1 other guy who goes 'oooh I could kill alot of people with that'.

In more real world situations, we can see it today to a degree, with our great computer tech and access to the internet, there's an amazing ability to find info, communicate with others, and learn new things. On the flipside, there's now an increase of "I steal your ID and your life", increase of people isolating themselves in their solitary lives to be online, substituting the mundane, but necessary real world, for the make believe fantasy online world, even to the point where it KILLS them.

I would like to think, that viewing history, it seems we outgrow certain phases, evolve past certain things and use them more responsibly, but I think it still sorta shows that there's a disconnect between responsible/productive thinking and advances in technology.

It's kinda a boogyman kinda story, but I shudder to think at what would happen today if humanity was confronted with the sudden 'super energy source' gift from aliens or whatever.

In a sad, frightening way, I wonder if we HAVE to experience horror to encourage a new mindset. Will we have to experience a world war 3, or a great economic crash or something, to change existing mindsets?

I guess shadowrunners would count as people with the "How can I exploit this?" mindset.

It's hard to say who Gibson'd find more repugnant: shadowrunners for their exploitation of technology, or corporations for forcing them to with their selective social engineering.

the very term cyberpunk codifies people that use tech in ways that the original inventors did not intend, for disruptive effect.

in the end it kinda boils down to the expression "because we can". ie, why do people today write viruses that shut down x number of computers? because they can.

a punk in the original sense is a youth with to much time on his hands and no sense of morals. the cyber can be both cyberware and cyberspace, either being a way of giving release to the punk mentality.

in many ways, there is a diffrent text thats more informative then any other about the term cyberpunk: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/cyberpunk/

its a short story where supposedly the term first appears.

oh, and that site contains some other cyberpunk texts to, including much of gibsons works. legal? most likely not...

But isn't it about more than that, than "Dude, let's totally rebel against the system with... computers!" There's a sense of meaninglessness and fear that pervades the whole genre, or at least when it's done right.

Yep, and particularly the Shadowrun-style criminals-for-hire subgenre. You're the runners out there with your day-glo mohawks, fighting the power of the corporations…

…on the payroll of the other corporations.

~J

meaninglessness, sure. thats one of the hallmarks of the punk thinking, that all is meaningless (so lets party. or in the case of the goth offshot, lets sulk about it).

fear? maybe if you fear being without control of your own life...

As to where my own preferences lie, let me put it this way. I prefer Star Wars over Star Trek because I feel that Star Trek is too saccharinely utopian and feel-good, whereas Star Wars has t3h evil and the inherent fallibility of the hero.

Crystal Express is an excellent collection of Sterling short stories, including Green Days in Brunei, one of my favorites by him.

What would Gibson think of Shadowrunners? Well, we know what he things about Shadowrun... what's the quote, "Gag me with a spoon?"

Methink he didn't really get Shadowrun much.

Elves? Magic? Yeh, but they do not make the world CUTE, and it WORSEN things more than anythings. Sans that, it's a very generic cyberpunk. perhaps.

What do you mean when you say Neal Stephensonism is taking over more? All I've read are Snow Crash and Spew.

Stephenson's tech tends to be slick and cool and neat. Sterling's tech tends to be clunky and strange and cobbled-together.

I should REALLY read more of their stuff.

Is Sterling's stuff more customizable? He did invent the spime, or at least the vague concept of it.

Sterling is more into using tech for purposes other than what it was intended for.

And how isn't SR4 like that?

tech in SR4 is generally used for its intended purpose.

Yeah, I guess. You won't mount a chaingun on a car to change your neighbour's curtains.

I prefer Gibson's view. The technology might be looked on as a 'Good Thing™', but it's removing humanity from humans (and metahumans).

Am I smoking crack or was there a book of short stories by Bruce Sterling?
I could've sworn there was one, Mirrored Shades, or something to that effect.
Has that name been changed in subsequent reprints?

there are at least two books of short stories by Sterling. don't recall the titles.

Maybe I should read more before I go resurrecting this thread 6 months down the road.

Hey emo, What have you read from Sterling and Gibson so far?

I've only read Gibson and Stephenson, and I've got a hardback copy of Greg Bears' Blood Music sitting next to me.

For Sterling, I've read Zeitgeist, Mozart in Mirrorshades, and Maneki Neko.

For Stephenson, I've read Spew and Snow Crash.

Snow Crash just rocked. I read a great deal of The Diamond Age but lost the copy I was reading.

I've read just about everything Gibson's written, save Idoru and one other book, iirc.

Neuromancer is quintessential. I would definitely recommend Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive and All Tomorrows' Parties.

I've read the entire sprawl trilogy. And tell me what you think of Spew; I think it r0xx0rz.

There's another author who's worth a read... Steve Aylett.

The cyberpunk/Shadowrun-y ones that i've seen so far are:

The Crime Studio
Bigot Hall
Slaughtermatic
The Inflatable Volunteer
Toxicology
Atom
Shamanspace

He's very surreal, and some of his humour is very british too. It took two reads of Slaughtermatic to get the whole plot, it jumped around like a cat thrown onto a BBQ!

"Shamanspace?" Now THAT sounds SR.

Globalhead is a collection of Sterling stories. Well worth the read.

The point of order in Shadowrun is clearly Gibson. The main problem is that technology expands the choices of what humans are able to use and get, while people don't realize the potential of it or use it for the same old garbage.

Let's stick with Neuromancer in the fact that only Wintermute is interested in the fact there's another planet with technology out there. Case doesn't care, he only likes the net. Molly on the other hand is still a prostitute in a time when the technology could have by all rights eliminated all need for anyone to work for a living.

The two characters don't even sustain their connection.

I thought Molly kept on being a razorgirl...

Her life sucks throughout, really. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, even after she makes it, she says that her job as an "independent businesswoman" is to invest in other independents. Kumiko observes that most of her jobs are completely meaningless and bureaucratic.

yeah. it's a trademark of Gibson-style cyberpunk that moving up in the world is a process by which you discover new and different ways your life can suck. the general level of suck is basically constant and inescapable.

True, part of the major problem I had conveying to my players isn't that "Society is not going to keep you down necessarily" but also the request "Your characters are also screwed up on some level." This I think is more Gibson rather than just the world is horrible.

Molly's problem is she's a killer at heart and can't really escape that anymore.

Case's problems could fill a textbook.

A perfect example of what I think people might also get is Bruce Wayne as a Shadowrunner. Even if your characters hit EVERYTHING, there's no way Bruce is ever going to be happy.

yeah, that can work--give the character a goal that is basically unachievable, and have them work towards it over their entire career.

I just finished our first game tonight and it actually reflected a Gibsonian view.

The players were sent by their employers to protect a shooter of a Warrior's style Gang Lord (okay, the entire adventure was the Warriors). The shooter had been promised he could retire in a palatial settlement and was willing to kill, sell himself, or anything to get that "dream" for what amounted to a glorified rent controlled apartment.

The end had it revealed that the people who promised it had no authority there whatsoever.

i like the Sterling-style wonkassedness. i think Sterling does a better job with future shock than Gibson, and it seems to me that most of the SR world is in a permanent state of future shock. the rate at which technology outpaces humans' ability to understand it is an important aspect of cyberpunk, i think--it makes for a dystopia that is more depressing because you don't understand it. best example i can think of is a line in Heavy Weather that went something like "the life's work of tens of thousands of clever, talented people had disappeared into a box that you bought at a flea market and will throw away when it stops working."

hmm, makes me think of cellphones today...

Or, you know, computers.

And it's not like you can ever blame it all on one person, either. Even in the corp world, there are plenty of examples of good people. It's just that, as the same exec in Mona Lisa Overdrive says, corporations and society as a whole function independently of the people inside them.