The FAQ thread was getting way too sidetracked on this topic, so I decided to try and do something by making this discussion thread. Feel free to discuss the effects William Gibson may or may not have had on Shadowrun and the Cyberpunk genre.

I played Shadowrun before I ever picked up a William Gibson book. But when I did read Neuromancer (or part of it -- I still need to finish it ^^;; ), the parallels were more than uncanny. I think it's obvious that Neuromancer had a huge impact on Shadowrun, if for no other reason than because Neuromancer, while it did not pioneer the Cyberpunk revolution, as I'll call it, did bring it to the front of people's minds and arouse their interest in it. Gibson's works had a large effect on other Cyberpunk works, other Cyberpunk works had a large effect on Shadowrun, therefore Gibson's writings probably did play a role in Shadowrun, if not actively then indeed passively through other books.

That said, I think Gibson is being a huge, virus-infected prick if he thinks that Shadowrun owes him anything. If anything else, at least in my case, he owes Shadowrun for getting another person interested in his works and getting another copy of his book sold. On that note, he owes the Computer Science industry a lot, too. I mean, I first heard of him through my CS buddies (I'm a CS major of course), Shadowrun just piqued my interest enough to pick up his book. He can sit up on his high-horse and bash Shadowrun for the merging of Cyberpunk and High Fantasy, or bitch that he didn't get credit where credit was due, all he damn-well pleases but the point is that nobody owes anybody anything, really.

William Gibson thinks he's to shadowrun, what Tolken is to D&D.

Has he ever said SR owes him anything? It's been a while since I read his statements, but my impression was that he was just disgusted by the idea of SR and wanting to distance himself from it.

I can't totally blame him for that. If you try to describe Shadowrun in five words or less, most easy descriptions will sound pretty stupid.

~J

Well, the quote is ...

I read Neuromancer shortly before getting into SR1 (the short story Johnny Mnemonic was the inspiration for my courier-character, Tangent) & found it refreshing from the stuff I was reading at that time. I read the rest of his books (Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive & Count Zero) & read the Mirrorshades anthology.

I would agree that Gibson, Sterling et al. of the Cyberpunk genre should be acknowledged for their influence & inspiration on the cyberpunk-themed RPG games. Anything more would be rather arrogant. If an author wanted to attach their name to a game (such as George RR Martin & his property, the Hedge Knight), they would do so, bringing in the lawyers to secure their rights. Creating a game from scratch is by no means easy, especially from a copyrighted source (I can point out past RPGs such as FASA's Star Trek & the Conan RPG).

If Gibson wants to distance himself from SR, that's his call.

A bit more detail in this interview quote:

I'm thinking phrases like "extreme revulsion" and "gag me with a spoon", and even "over my dead body" indicate more than mere indifference.

I think it's pretty clear he doesn't actually know what SR is about. Or has never actually read Tolkien. I suppose I'd bet on the former.

Honestly, who cares? Sure, he had a huge influence on cyberpunk (being the creator and all), but creations change. That he doesn't like elves is really immaterial to the hobby or the game.

He's a good writer and I read a great interview that he gave once. Why we have a thread here discussing his feelings on Shadowrun, I have no idea though.

I suspect he's rather unaware of the concerns here. However, if he's ever in the Bristol area, he's quite welcome to play in my game and try it out.

You edited out the munchies reference. Were you afraid that droves of DSers would be knocking on your door on game night?

I quite like the man's writing style, and his ideas.

From what I've read about him by others, and from his non-fiction writings, he seems like a bit of a pompous ass. YMMV

So, I look forward to his next works, and avoid getting to know the man.

(I do recall a dig in his last novel though, IIRC. I hope he doesn't keep that up.)

Clearly, William Gibson influenced the creators of Cyberpunk 2013. It is also clear that Gibson influenced the creators of Shadowrun more than Al Gore did. The term cyberspace appears in the bbb, and the terms internet and information superhighway do not. Could that be because Shadowrun was created after Gibson coined the term cyberspace and before Gore coined the term information superhighway and before he drafted the legislation that opened the internet to the public?

It is also clear that Gibson sees Shadowrun as the bastard child of Cyberpunk 2013 and Dungeons and Dragons, and is repulsed by the concept. The fact that the bastard Shadowrun became more popular than Cyberpunk 2013 is probably what gagged him. The truth is: Shadowrun is to Cyberpunk 2013 like Vanilla Ice is to Issac Hayes (creator of rap). It's enough to gag anyone.

The fact that Street Magic was produced before Unwired probably illustrates the relative importance of DnD and Cyberpunk in the Shadowrun mix - at least in the eyes of the player haters. {Do you like that pun?} I like Shadowrun; I like DnD, too.

How do you spot the DnD lovers in a Shadowrun game? They are the ones that complain about the amount of time spent dealing with the Matrix. Imagine how William Gibson feels about that!

Does it honestly really matter what Gibson thinks?

It's like that adage about assholes and opinions and everyone's possession of one. So a guy that broke ground on cyberpunk doesn't like the game - the fifth world still turns, he's still a good writer, and Shadowrun's still a good game.

*applauds Marmot*

Couldn't agree with you more. And neither can our old pal, Bill Gibson.

Where is that door?

at least SR4's rules for handling multiple hackers make some kind of reasonable sense.

i like SR3's hacking rules because they make hacking challenging. i like SR4's hacking rules because they make hacking much more integral to a successful runner team.

I bought a William Gibson anthology for a very good price.
I could barely stand reading Neuromancer. The second one, I think it was Mona Lisa Overdrive, I abandoned after the first 50 pages or so.

I cannot believe that Gibson is that bad a writer, so I blame the translators. I probably should get an english Version of Neuromancer and try again...

(That reminds me, I still need to get hold of 'Das Boot: The Original Uncut Version', just to see what it sounds like in english)

Well, from those two quotes, maybe Gibson just really, really, really despises elves?

Looking back over Glyph's quote from the interview, I'd just like to point out how that question seems intended to provoke.

He wasn't that close. What he got was popularity and critical acclaim. Cyberpunk had been around for some time previously, and it's arguable (and has, if I read what he's saying properly, been argued to some degree by Swanwick) that Neuromancer marked the beginning of the end of Cyberpunk, that the movement was essentially killed off by the overwhelming success of the novel denying the movement the ability to be, as it were, "fighting the man". Nevertheless, even if we accept that he did kill Cyberpunk, he did it by writing something amazing, and that is credit-worthy.

His pre-Neuromancer works were closer, but I don't think they were all that influential until at least '81.

~J

eh. it's kinda self-fulfilling, i guess--Gibson is the first cyberpunk most people read, so they compare everything else to it. if you go back and read, say, The Shockwave Rider, it just doesn't feel like cyberpunk--because it's not Gibson-y.

IMO cyberpunk is only dead if we want it to be.

i think our culture has moved past the classic cyberpunk future. cyberpunk no longer matches our fears about what the future could bring. so while there's still good, interesting cyberpunk material coming out, it doesn't have the social impact or relevance it once had.

Terr'rists, China, government for the corporations, by the corporations (as opposed to corporate independence from the government), and children being taught to hate God and love Darwin.

No, seriously, there's probably a decent amount of the above elements in there, but I can't claim to be nearly in tune enough with the zeitgeist to be able to say.

~J

While the cyberpunk movement is over, the cyberpunk mindset and style both still exist. A movement is a social change based on many people, however a mindset and style can be embraced by any person in any time. We still have people who embrace and life the free love lifestyle, who embrace Victorian style (although few wear it in public). The term "a renaissance man" still applies.

"A renaissance man" refers to someone who studies an assortment of different subjects and is an expert in several. Of course, you could argue that that person isn't part of the Renaissance style, but I'd argue that many aspects of style have nothing to do with the environment at the time and everything to do with applying the mindset to the current style. A man who is barely literate, scratches himself in public and is regularly caught in the nude can still be called a caveman even though he can operate a computer. A person who embraces classical learning and knowledge across a wide variety of subjects may be considered, literally, a renaissance man, even though he is chronologically displaced. This is also why there are multiple renaissances in history, because it refers to a movement, mindset and style, independent of an artistic method and set of available knowledge.

Similarly, I'd argue that any person who is anti-authoritarian and who is oriented heavily on the rapid pace of technology and especially its negative effects on society, even if that person is under twenty and isn't worried about the Red Threat, as showing cyberpunk style.

To strictly define a style as something that exists within set chronological boundaries is to deny the definition of what makes that style special. Of course, if the style isn't special, that's acceptable. However a classical painting done in 2006 is still classical art (in style), and a cave painting showing broken up, multiple viewpoints of an object and stressing abstract geometric forms is still cubist.

I'm not arguing that a Renaissance man needs to come from the Renaissance or from a new Renaissance, I'm arguing that it's no longer possible for a human to be accomplished to expert in enough fields to qualify as a Renaissance Man. I'd also say that the term doesn't actually carry the cultural implications of the other terms under discussion.

~J

Who defines "enough"? The definition doesn't say all fields of knowledge, just wide field of knowledge (and an expert in several). If you can do four or five widely different jobs professionally, and are well studied in several fields beyond that, I would call that "wide".

And regardless, we may be getting caught up on a single example. You can still embrace that style and life that mindset, which was my original point, regardless of your time frame (granted, it's a lot more unlikely in some time frames than others).