It's a term that I've been seeing cropping up here and there increasingly. And I think it does a decent job of describing where I think SR has gone.

You can poke around
http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcyberpunk
If you'd like

Basically the differences are.

* Postcyberpunk tends to deal with characters who are more involved with society. <Cyberpunk chars tended to stand out with their pink mohawks and whatnot and often be downright anti social. PCP chars blend in.>

* Protagonists of postcyberpunk are more often young urban professionals with more social status. <The old school punks lived out of coffin motels or in crappy apartments. How many of our runners are living it up?>

* In cyberpunk, the alienating effect of new technology is emphasised, whereas in postcyberpunk, "technology is society". <I don't even try explaining the idea of technoshock to the younger set anymore>

* Includes a sense of humor, as opposed to the frequently hardboiled nature of cyberpunk.


Thoughts?

Pretty spot on, even though I like to play Shadowrun cyberpunk from time to time, complete with rockerboys (my last character is one) and pink mohawks.

You missed an important bit with your first point:

Cyberpunk was essentially about survival in the face of hopelessness. Post-cyberpunk is about making things even a wee bit better through the distribution of knowledge to the masses. In cyberpunk, only the elite and underground few have computers and are at war with one another. In post-cyberpunk, everyone has access to information. In cyberpunk, information technology is treated like a form of magic. In post-cyberpunk, information technology is part of the everyday landscape.

That wiki article gives a good example of post-cyberpunk: Ghost in the Shell. Though dystopian, the boot heel that crushes the masses is ignorance, fear and greedy politics rather than a faceless corporation / the cops / the government.

Cyberpunk was about the fears that grew out of the 70s and 80s.

Thirty years later, we have new fears. Cyberpunk had to evolve, and post-Cyberpunk is what we have. I mean, it used to be whacked out to think about a corporate suit walking down the street apparently talking out loud to nobody, because he was in fact talking into his internal headphone. Today people routinely talk out loud to apparently nobody because they're talking into diminutive Bluetooth earpieces.

Shadowrun, as a published game, would be a failure if it clung to cyberpunk. People wouldn't see the point of it (save for us hardcore nuts). I think Shadowrun does well in keeping with the postCyberpunk curb, even leading it IMO.

Although the setting has mostly gone postcyberpunk to keep up with the zeitgeist of the SF Cyberpunk evolution, the core ideas remain largely cyberpunk. Our characters aren't trying to change the world, but just get by from run to run, and maybe, when they hit that "filled cup of wealth" phase, retire and remain untraceable. Unless of course you are running a campaign to spread the wealth of injustices to an ignorant population, we are still more or less playing a cyberpunk game in a postcyberpunk realm.

Good example of Post-Cyberpunk is the Graphic Novel series "Transmetropolitan".

Check it out, lots of good things to steal from it as well.

My group is doing a Post-Cyberpunk thing in a Cyberpunk Universe right now. They're still in a decaying, dreary enviroment, but it's being encroached upon by the "Shiny Happy People" that broadcast SINs and are slaves with their digital chains weightless against them.

And they're doing an altruistic thing ($Diety chips are actually a Winternight-Remnants plot! I'll let you guys guess what it is.).

Sure, they're only doing it because of the money, but they're also doing it for the right reasons...

"A Paris Hilton Clone just ambushed us with a TABLE!"

Just because it bears mentioning. You can get issue number 1 of Transmet for free at
http://www.dccomics.com/graphic_novels/?gn=1719

As you know, the first try is always free...

sadly one try is all that is needed to get you hooked

Volumes One through Six of Transmet are good. Felt like, with the second half, Warren Ellis' experiment in "decompression" in comics story telling (lengthening scenes to last several pages a la manga) was a bit of a rip-off. 2020 Visions by Jamie Delano did it better but it's out of print.

I consider myself to be one of the "younger crowd" being born in '83 and never really having experienced many of the fears that influenced the genre of cyberpunk.
My problem is, I never really "got" cyberpunk. mostly because it's most defining trait to me is the latent technophobia. It always struck me as highly reactionary. And well, nowadays many of the major cyberpunk works could be relabeled steampunk because of their visions of "future" computer technology having been paced by actual development to the point where it strikes me as outright ridiculous.
I reread the Sprawl-trilogy some time ago and it felt similar to Jules Verne (only that I wouldn't compare Gibson and Verne on the artistic level).
Visions of what might be but has been long outdated by time.

I think Shadowrun has adapted so well to post-cyberpunk because it really only had a toe or two in the cyberpunk pool to begin with. You'll always have the purists who think the setting should either be a group of stone-cold professional criminals, or an assortment of losers who rail against the system but are powerless in the end.

Shadowrun does have a thin veneer of grit, realism, and professionalism, but it actually is more about a romanticized, action-movie version of semi-good-guy criminals fighting 'the man" than it is about cyberpunk. And that's good, because honestly, I have a hard time taking the goofy metaplot seriously.

Shadowrun has thrived where other cyberpunk games have failed because it is more than mere cyberpunk. In the sense of asking how the world would adjust to the sudden appearance of things previously considered myths and legends, Shadowrun predated Laurel K. Hamilton and those who came after her. The transhumanist theme is running strong, and Magic only provides one more avenue for it to take. I honestly prefer a vision of a dark, uncertain but not uniformly bleak future to the defeatist cynicism of cyberpunk games (the books are less so - cyberpunk novels often are about the protagonists changing the world for the better).

Actually I agree with Glyph. I got into SR in 2nd edition. And one thing I liked about it over CP2020 is that Shadowrun "made sense". In CP2020 the corps were stupid oppresive, they'd do ridiculous stuff with no regard for the bottom line.

A lot of CP2020 doesn't fit together. SR basically fit together from the start. The world, crazy as it was, made sense.


And really it's only a small fraction of SR games at any point that did pink mohawk style.

I'm sorry, but you lost me when you said that the Sixth World "made sense", I'm sorry, but half-horror or not, there is no fragging way that the Great Ghost Dance redrew the map.

Sure, the metaplot is goofy, and I admitted as much, but I do think Shadowrun tacks to the right side of the line between making a dark, dangerous future, and making a distopia that is hopeless beyond logic or reason. History is full of empires falling, corrupt institutions being overthrown, and ordinary people making an extraordinary difference.

Sometimes Shadowrun can veer a bit too close to cyberpunk, with power players and organizations that are railroading plot devices rather than realistic antagonists. But at least Shadowrun has things like Mothers of Metahumans.

History is also full of oppressed masses who are either unwilling or unable to achieve freedom, and revolts against corrupt institutions only resulting in the new Masters being just as bad or worse than the old Masters.

Personally I like the Universal Brotherhood far more than Mothers of Metahumans.

Funny - to me the world of CP2020 has always made more sense: no millions of Native Americans appearing over night, no tiny countries with bubble economies jumping out of the box...
Politically and economically CP2020 had the more coherent world, IMHO. Then again, SR is definitely the more fun game.

My point was the Shadowrun has both of them. I don't mind the dark stuff, and I don't mind a dystopian feel to the game. I don't like it when it's nothing but doom and gloom. PC's should have to face cruel odds, unpalatable choices, and situations where there is no easy resolution. But they should still be able to win the occasional victory, or make a difference somewhere.

Cyberpunk already had suspension of disbelief in the form of believing in the future you ride virtual sharks on the internet to hack things. Or that "wire reflexes" will in any way work in 50 years.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. In CP2020, I forget if it was an adventure module or something, some old artwork has been discovered and the big bad corporation wants to destroy it. You know, because it's art. And so your punk wants to go save it.

In SR a corp would be interested in grabbing any ancient artwork to sell it (or maybe it'd be magical, something like that).

Stuff like that.


SR just throws magic into the mix.

But within that context it rolls with it. Great Dragon awakening into a new world? Do an interview, figure out to ask about the distribution rights, do a cable show. Get rich, build a fortune, run for President. That sort of stuff was a breath of fresh air after time with the cancer causing game where we'd delt with dragons supposedly just as old and smart who just sat on gold (and since the GM was running them no smarter tactically than a person, dumber even as a PC would have at least set up traps and stuff).

heh, while diamond age may be a good book, the writing is as dry as tinder more often then not...

as for cyberpunk vs postcyberpunk, i think the opening of the slashdot text, with its warning about label-mongering, says it best...

i keep wanting to ask some reviewer or similar if they have some kind of checklist for putting a work of art into one box vs another, or if they just make stuff up as they go along.

Where-as I find the idea of NAN, the Tirs, a Dragon actually winning a national election, Free SINs for all after Crash 2.0, Technos going from hated "X-Men" to fairly accepted in the span of a year, ect, FAR more silly than the idea that some corp middleman would want to use company resources to destroy some artwork that offended him.

while shadowrun has very obvious roots in cyberpunk, to me the major theme of the game, and perhaps one of the less-discussed in a purely philosophical-thematic sense, has always been transhumanism. many of the complaints i've heard from lots and lots and lots of CP-fans about shadowrun is that it's "CP with tolkien," i.e. they focus too much on the fantasy origins of the "other half" of the shadowrun world, while ignoring its basis as a leap forward in genetics and a new type of human who is in some sort of developmental symbiosis with the ever-changing nature of the world.

SR is cool (and perhaps somewhat unique) because of the way it combines many different aspects of transhumanist thought - spontaneous environmental evolution (i.e. The Awakening), cybernetic augmentation, the growing importance of computers and information as a new paradigm for human societies (the techno-literati hacker class, basically), and then SR4's expounding of these concepts, especially with the blurring of the awakening/information age (technomancers) and the introduction of gene- and nano-tech in Augmentation.

while the giant mishmash of themes may at times make Shadowrun seem like an unwieldy universe, it does leave SR open for a "slipstream" fiction style of storytelling, moreso than traditional fantasy or traditional cyberpunk narratives.

israel?

heh, thank the players for that (iirc, there was mail in vote cards at the back of a book around the time)

heh, may not the be smartest, but it was the fastest solution for getting back to something close to status quo...

media blitz by a megacorp and a AI?

hell, check present day usa election. even in nations where one cant vote, the coverage is somewhat heavy imo...

i say potato, you say potato

I say "taters."

Israel didn't pop up near as fast as the Tir and with as little outside help. Had the Tir developed more slowly and 'naturally' I'd have liked it a lot better, especially if it had begun it's life hostile to the NAN and getting heavy support from the USA/UCAS during formation.

Besides, Israel is still here via blood, sweat and tears. Tir is still there...umm...because all the non-elves decided to just leave...or something?

Who said the elves left the Tir? It's just the Immortal Elf Princes who are gone. Supposedly. For whatever reason that has yet to be disclosed.

Pointing to the real-life rise of nations only works when your setting strives to be 100% realistic or a historical-based fiction. I don't find the powerful and rapid rise of groups who said, "Give us our lands back or we'll blow up your European asses with magic" to be all that unbelievable within the context of the story. Nor the idea that a mystical-mythical beast would win the Presidency, considering that all other candidates from the past to the setting's present seemed like a bunch of schmucks to the populace by comparison. Nor the rapid dispersal of wireless technology. Or the technomancer panics which died down when the A.I.s appeared who were then marketed by the megacorps as being friendly.

If this argument doesn't sway, think about how little life changed during the Agricultural Revolution. But once the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age hit, society spiraled into rapid-fire changes every few decades, years or months.

Society rarely coasts for long, it only accelerates.

... because they picked Oregon. Who would want it else ? T'was their second choice after Rhode Island though

At the time only they had magic on that level. I mean they were causing effects with devestation on the order of magnetude of nuclear weaponry. Spirits materializing inside of tanks. I can see the UCAS having to give up land.

It would be an interesting plot if a new war broke out in the future now that everybody has magic to some degree.

Not to mention that they couldn't even use nukes as a weapon against magic because apparently they've all suddenly stopped working or go off but at a much weaker yield.

On par with nuclear weapons? Even IF I bought that you are still talking about a tiny minority of Mages amongst a tiny minority of Indians and one half-horror against the American military, sorry I still find the NAN far more silly than a corper using company resources to destroy some art that offended him.


I think the fact that the Tirs are nothing like Israel has already been pointed out.

The fact that someone at FASA (Or was it Fanpro at the time? I can never remember.) had the stupid idea of letting a reader survey decide the president of the UCAS just before having him off himself in order to save the universe doesn't make it any less silly.

As for the free SINs, since when did the powers that be care about the status quo for people without cred?

Uh-huh, Dunkie 2.0 was able to make people totally forget that one of it's siblings was threatening to use Big A's bioweapons to destroy major cities, nevermind the fact that a few short months beforehand people were actively hunting Technos to the point that Deckers with implanted 'links were getting caught in the crossfire.

I don't mind the formation of the NAN. I could almost see it happening if these events occured as described, especially with the fear of such powerful magic. But what I have trouble with is how the UCAS never bothered to even try to reclaim their land once the threat of magic was greatly lessened (namely by having their own cadres of magicians). The other part that totally ruins the plausibility of it is that similar events took place nearly the world rounds, and all in a very short amount of time. And just... ugh.

There's a lot of other ways it could have gone down that would have been more plausible, more believable, and more interesting. Just wish they would have done any number of them than the rather transparent "we just liked the idea of Amerind Shaman returning with magic." Which is pretty much the only solid explanation for what we got. Which is fine in and of itself. But damn.

The didn't know anything about that. For all they knew some guy in a shack somewhere was causing everything.

As for nukes they could have used them, but on what? I don't believe they knew where the great ghost dance was or that there even was such a thing going on. So they wouldn't have had a great target.


Nukes aren't a very good battlefield weapon without good targets. By that I mean they'll wipe out a city. But blowing ten kilometer holes in the forest when you don't have a target just wrecks your country.

Of course now the NAN nations have their own cities they wouldn't like to lose, and if they tried another ghost dance scounting elementals would probably find it and a warded surprise could be sent by the UCAS.

warded tactical nukes.. I like the sound of that

Who said anything about using nukes on North American soil? All I said was I don't buy the argument that The Great Ghost Dance was on par with nuclear weapons.

In my game, the SAIM threatened triggering an eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera like they did for smaller volcanoes. If not on par, that would be at least a bogey. Of course, at the time Shadowrun timeline was written, few people knew about the Caldera.

Back to the topic instead of Metaplot bashing...

There is one major element that those articles are forgetting about when discussing Postcyberpunk...
When comparing Cyberpunk to Postcyberpunk, one has to look at the influences that come from society and how they influence the works created. Cyberpunk was about the fear of rampant technology as people have described, but also and more importantly tied to the social revolutions of the 70's and early 80's. The punk revolution from which cyberpunk draws its name was birthed of hundreds of thousands rebelling against the machine and living with a nihilistic, "screw you!" attitude. Too bad, this cultural revolution was not a revolution at all, and just a counterculture that was more than dead by the mid 80s.

Authors can't write books that will be well received by audiences if they can't relate to the characters. When Gibson wrote his sprawl trilogy, he was appealing to the spirit of the times and the culture and they were well received. Had he tried that only 5 years later than he had, people probably would have had a largely different opinion. With the death of the punk revolution (or at least with the commercial packaging and branding of the punk revival movement that killed any and all similarity it had to the original movement), people became docile and super commercial wage slave happy fat 80s new wave gunk. If one writes a story about life on the edge to a consumer who can't comprehend this lifestyle that was popular only a few years ago, their book loses an audience because the readers can't relate to the characters. It's too gritty and dark for the readers' tastes.

That's why we have postcyberpunk now. The characters are normal or at least hold close to middle class positions in society. They fight against injustice much like the ideal we would like to live by as a crusader of good. There isn't a "screw you" life on the edge mentality like in the original cyberpunk works and the characters aren't usually committing crimes for profit or survival. It's not a theme that's written into our society.

While in original cyberpunk there was a theme of alienation and lack of humanity from technology, in postcyberpunk, we have themes of the next step in human evolution do the evolution of man into the digital realm. Again, a reflection of the times as at the turn of the 70's into the 80's, we had rampant changes in technology (the CD and digital audio/video was birthed of this time frame) and it scared the masses. Look at today's society where most of us welcome the next major leap forward. With initial leap inot the information age and our exponential increase in technology over the last 15 years, we are more prepared for anything the world will throw at us. And if we don't, the corporations will market it at us so we that we will love it. In fact, we'll love it so much that we'll immerse ourselves in media 24/7 to completely numb ourselves to the point we won't know how much the corporate man is robbing us blind...

Like I've mentioned in another thread, the reason I find postcyberpunk so drab and lame compared to the original cyberpunk is that we have no counterculture in our society that is fighting for a cause similar to the original punk movement did. I really feel the entire cyberpunk (including post) genre is dying a horrible death and won't be revitalized until we have a counterculture that is as abrasive and vocal as the punk revolution was to drive new literature about life on the edge and sticking it to plastic commercial society.

Nukes can't accurately and selectively cause five mountain tops to explode into active volcanoes simultaneously along with interfering with the operations of specific military targets. Which the Great Ghost Dance did. It's never been stated if any other group on the planet has had the ability to create that much of a mana uprising in one go. And after 2008 or so projectile atomic weaponry became unreliable for "some unexplained reason, of which there are a million and one theories" (BBB). The UCAS theoretically could have had military mage brigades put together once everything assorted with the Awakening was sorted out but by that time there were some Great Dragons squatting on American soil who probably wouldn't have appreciated us petty humans messing with their new status quo.

The New Revolution attempted (and failed) in 2064 to reunite the original US of A (Threats 2, BBB).

In these days and age, any form of counterculture get bought out, covered, packaged and sold long before doing any harm. Consumerism (which more adequately refers our society than "capitalism") is very efficient at suppressing such threat. The same probably goes for any kind of revolution. Subversive elements at the sources of new countercultures should remain, so to speak, "moving target", moving on to their next thing as soon, if not before, what they created reach the mainstream.

There are countercultures in society. They operate quietly from within The Machine rather than spitting in faces and screaming about bringing down the rich. The original punk movement took the largely ineffectual 60s and early 70s vocal protest attitude and injected it with methamphetamine. However, most people can only tolerate being bellowed at for so long before they start to either become desensitized or so weary of the medium that the message becomes lost. Plastic commercial society can only be brought down by using its own weapons and tactics against it. Check out Douglass Rushkoff's Ecstasy Club or Grant Morrison's The Invisibles for excellent fictional examples. To paraphrase King Mob: "We want to make the entire world a party, one that even The Enemy would want to join."

Exactly, all the Great Ghost Dance managed was to cause several existing volcanos (Along the West Coast if I remember correctly.) to erupt and spawned some freaky storms aimed at military supply lines. An impressive display of force but not enough to redraw map lines when it was the only advantage the Indians had. Remember that according to canon before the "war" started the Indians were subjected to death camps so an already tiny minority group should have gotten even smaller.

Um. You know of Hells Kitchen right? That's the part of the map they redrew. An it isn't like nukes take out a whole state or force a map redraw. I single nuke wont even take out a large town entirely. For example if a modern H-bomb hit downtown Seattle the surounding areas would still be mostly functional. It'd take about

Once again, so what? I AGREE that nukes aren't really all that impressive by themselves, which is one of the reasons that The Great Ghost Dance is not the "I Win" button that the devs turned it into.

Nukes is what the starwars program was designed to take out, before that they had all those other crazy ideas like mutually garanteed destruction.. The state know nukes.. they have tons and tons of them lying around, and they know what to do if someone arm one.. now a bunch of ruggish indians simultanously makes 4 volcanoes erupt and bring down their F-16 with freaking storms.. who know that else they got up their sleeve? I dont think the founding of NAN was as much a demonstration of force but rather an reaction in fear of the unknown, the real life inspiration of the ghost dance provoced so much fear from the neighbouring "Civilized men" that it went down in history as the massacre of wounded knee

Sure, but in order for that to fly you have to assume that the Indians had access to cloning tanks, otherwise you might as well assume that Al'Quada could also bring the American government to its knees with a handful of planted nukes and the fear that they "might" have more.

The bottom line remains that the Indians simply did not have the numbers behind them in order to pull off what they did.

As of the 1990 census, there were 1,937,391 registered Native American Indians in the United States. I'd assume it's over 2 million now. I don't have the Canada numbers in front of me. And those are just the ones that considered themselves members of specific tribes. Assuming that half of those AmerInds are of fighting age, that's still a significant number of people who could seriously fuck your shit up.

Plus, y'know, major magical mojo which is an I WIN button no matter how you play it.

Now reduce this by 25% for VITAS and we get 1.5 million spread out over a vast area with little in the way of mil-tech and not much in the way of support.


Durh... It's maGiKK, it maykes everythaNg OK. It wIns the fitz and foods the pepls and mayks it possible 4 <2 mil to accupy the big-aSS'd arEA. MaGiKK 4 win!!

Please, it's stupid plot convenience. If the whole of the NAN would have been the Dakota states, it might have been a bit more plausible.

I don't have my copy in front of me but I believe that Shadows of North America stated that one of the great ironies of the US and Canadian Re-Education camps was that because the Indians were isolated from the major population centers they were spared VITAS. The Amerinds took the lands that were seceded to them by the Treaty of Denver but those lands aren't inhabited solely by Indians.

And you need supply lines, air support and other conventional military techniques when you can blow up mountains with a magical ritual... why? You'll forgive me if I have a hard time swallowing that one of the fundamental setting points of the Shadowrun universe is a "convenience."

After all, everyone knows that huge poorly run prison camps with a high death rate are have always been exceptionally sanitary and managed by experts with degrees in Public Health. ...

Supply lines being the big one, and communications being the second because you're trying to coordinate an effort of - as you say - 2,000,000 people. They need to feed and coordinate their efforts - there's no GGD astral BBS set up to coordinate all this shit.

I could line you up for a barium swallow study if you'd like and we can just what your problem is, but my guess is it's linked to fanboy blindness. However, if you want a great example condensed setting-point crap, look no further than the entire timeline of events in the CFS.

while it's only very minorly mentioned, the whole idea of squatter "tribes" in the barrens banding together for survival, the Plastic Jungles, etc, stuff like that, are all concepts which are very much alive and well today. there is a very large population of street people, travellers, and communal societies that operates similarly and which are a very real part of the current counterculture (bleeding edge, chummer!). we aren't as well known, and we're often overlooked because of the less visible aspect of our "countering" of the contemporary culture, but there are many people who feel that the only effective protest against the current system is to abandon it. if the US economy goes to heck in a handbasket (not to bring current events into it or anything), people who have been living outside the mainstream of society as a form of protest against it may very well become more visible and prominent.

(i'm a member of an anarchosyndicalist community that attracts a lot of street people, train riders, rainbow family members, and others of that sort, for what it's worth)