I think it's the only way to: A. Have the novels; B. Avoid the insanity of such works as, say, Black Madonna *shudder* or similar.

Oh Gods, Black Madonna. I bought this in O'Hare, on my way back to Europe, in 1996. I didn't read mroe than some two pages till I dropped it and trather watched the crappy movies airline companies broadcast on transatlantic flights. Wasn't that the one with the Leonardo elf?

DE, how strict are regulations for freelancer submissions? Like, would your submission be cut if you introduced something like magically enhanced optical chips, even if they were a logical combination of alchemy and modern nanochemistry?

You mean like the ones in Imago?

Yes.

Only if you're Lisa Smedman.

Maybe it's just me, but I always just read the novels as entertainment, and it never really bothered me whether or not they complied with the game rules.

Speaking of Black Madonna, has anyone noticed how similiar it was to The DaVinci Code (which in itself is supposed to be a rip off of a book called The DaVinci Legacy)?

So BM and TDC are both rip-offs of The DaVinci Legacy, I guess?

Sounds logical. But rip-off is such a harsh word. Let's say "was influenced by" or "an hommage to"....

Imitation is the highest form of flattery?

Man, when my dad told me that while my brother was mimicing me it just made me angrier...

Eh, the Merovingian conspiracy and related "truths" about the secret origins of Catholicism have been around for centuries. The DaVinci Code just popularized them in the mainstream. Beyond the "Catholicism is fake, it was invented as a front for Earthdawn passion-worship!" tidbit, has everyone forgotten that London was demolished by nuclear attack in Black Madonna? It's easy to miss, since it's mentioned in a single sentence, but if you read why the main characters didn't just go home and just forget the whole Leonardo thing was because London had been nuked while they were away. Odd how that never made it into canon and/or escaped most people's notice.

I think that Dead Air was my favorite example of a book that could be made canon without causing massive and terrifying damage to the game's structure. Nothing much happened, as far as events in Dead Air went, that impacted the game world in a meaningful way. It was a description of the sort of shadowrun activities that are intended to happen in the game-world on a daily basis, things that, while dramatic and epic within the lives of the characters described in the book, make no difference in the actual game world's development. Who cares if a combat biker star went nuts and blew himself up during a game? It's not like he proved a major world religion to be fake through it.

Of the few novels that dealt well with actual world-altering (or potentially world-altering) events, I'd say that my favorite was Burning Bright, in terms of events that actually provably happened. A close tie is House of the Sun, insofar as that if Dirk Montgomery hadn't saved the world in the course of terrible things happening to him at every turn, our characters would all be speaking Horror right now. The Dragonheart Trilogy was mostly okay. Ryan Mercury was and Burnout were over-the-top powerful, but that wasn't bad. If you're a memory-manufactured true drake raised by the most powerful Great Dragon, chances are you're going to be in the top world percentile of badasses. When the book ends with the spirit of Dunkelzahn inhabiting a metaplanar cyberzombie, however, things have gone horribly awry.

And then there was Shadowboxer. Shadowboxer was like a David Lynch film, complete with dwarves (though the guy in Shadowboxer just seemed to speak backwards). What makes David Lynch a demented genius, since he intends for his films to play out in a way that leaves you feeling confused, uncertain, and afraid that Dennis Hopper is hiding under your bed waiting to kill you when you sleep, is that this is intentional. Shadowboxer did not do this intentionally. It was the Manos: Hands of Fate of Shadowrun novels. It's like every couple of pages was taken from a different story, written under the influence of a different mind-altering drug, with editorial work designed to merge them into a hideous non-euclidean whole. It is a pigeon-rat, or perhaps a whale-vulture.

My synopsis of Shadowboxer, based tortured delvings into my memories of the novel:

Cast:
Main Dwarfy Guy
"I'm the main character, also a dwarf! I goblinized into a dwarf! What, that can't happen? Shut up, I'm hiring you all. If you question the plausibility of my origins again, I'll just walk out of here and save all the readers hours of pain and suffering! We can't have that!"

Troll Ganger Guy
"I am a lowly troll ganger, though I have hundreds of thousands of dollars in combat-grade cyberware! I'm going to invite myself along because dwarves can't take care of themselves. They're small. So very small."

Decker Chick
"I'm a decker whose uberdeck and flesh were destroyed in the prologue! A free spirit saved me! I'm like Burnout, but with b00bies! The cyberdeck I'm bringing with me is comparable in power to a calculator, but hire me anyway, lolkthxbye!"

Street Samurai Dude
"I was a badass bodyguard in Japan, but then I was disgraced by the same thing which causes 99% of my profession to die in duty or commit seppuku... those goddamned filthy ninjas. I didn't commit seppuku, though, because I have this super-holster that tosses my gun into my hand at speeds that would shatter my frail hu-man bones! Staring at it in awe and confusion is what keeps me going!"

Cat Shaman Babe
"I'm a cat shaman, and I'm really hot! I'm also betraying the group for Gunderson, because no one can learn of the meaning of the seekrit word! This is revealed and resolved in three paragraphs, at the end!"

Gunderson CEO
"I have a weird condition that is never explained! In the only real appearance I make, I think about how I rely on the stolen and grafted flesh of others to survive! Woo, I'm scaaary! Now, you'll never see me again!"

Plot:
"I'm the dwarf, and I heard about this thing called IronHell, which is a word so seekrit that people die just for knowing that they can, in fact, combine the worlds "iron" and "hell"! A big troll ganger decides to protect me for no explicable reason! I hire a street samurai in a business suit that has an uber-gun that defies physics! This decker's got no real cyberdeck, but I'm going to hire her anyhow, woo hoo! Oh, and a cat shaman, because we need a magician and she's smokin' hot! Oh, noes, corporate security goons are attacking of us! A troll samurai with a daisho! Scary! I are stabbed. I die."

"Ironhell is a secret pirate island base! Even though our employer is dead, pirates are cool, so we will be on a ship for no reason, looking for it! Oh no, pirates in a pirate-submarine attack us! Also, possibly sea monsters! Let's board the pirate ship in the chaos and murder every single member of the crew save for the rigger! Our team needs one, and I'm sure having killed everyone he's ever known or worked with will not make him want to betray us!"

"I are the rigger. What us do? Don't kill me!!!!"

"We have to find... um... we can't remember! Let's just cruise around the ocean floor! Even though her cyberdeck sucks, our decker will plug into an ocean-floor supercomputer! While wearing a diving suit! It are l33t! Oh and there are a thing, on the ocean floor! We go !!"

"Like, OMG, it is a seekrit corporate base that is not Ironhell! Let's go in, for no reason, even though we will surely die! We will fight security guards with supermachine guns, and the cat shaman will attempt to betray us but get shot and we'll never know, and it won't have mattered anyhow! Woo, people get frozen with liquid nitrogen for no reason! We ride bikes up a big twisting ramp from a slum on the lower level to the upper level! We reach the boss and become kings of the secret base! We power up and win the game!"

I always liked Preying for Keeps, and Headhunters as basic, Shadowrun, non-earth shattering books. Good characters, basic SR module type plots. Easy to read.

The end fight between Argent and Ironaxe was almost as disappointing as the last ep of season 1 of "24" when Kiefer just pops Dennis Hopper and his "sons" in the first ten minutes after several hours of buildup.

God, I hate that show for stealing 24 hours of my life.


Oh.....

Now I remember Shadowboxer. That's the one where it begins with a sam--the sole survivor of his team--climbing out of the Atlantic who then provides an internal monologue bitching about how he had to fight off cybersharks and mercs trained by Dunkelzahn on a secret oil platform while he's on his way to meet Ms. Johnson in a warehouse. Ms. J then shoots him after all that trouble, and drives off in her minivan.

The author should be shot for writing that crap.

When it comes to SR novels I have a very cliché opinion: I like the early stuff.
The novels published in the first half of the 90s.
Into the Shadows, 2XS, the Secrets of Power trilogy, etc.. Where the characters were humans (or at least player character-level) instead of over-the-top ultra-rich, ultra-professional, dragon-backed god/superhero-like über-runners. Where tales were told about survival in the streets and classic shadowruns (extraction, breaking-and-entering, corporate espionage) instead of saving the world.
When there were stories instead of meaningless action (as a comparison, the early SR novels could be scripts for good cinema movies while the latter ones are bad direct-to-video b-movies).

Yeah. That's what most of us liked, I think.

Yep, same here. It's likely in the music scene, espcially when it comes to sweden.

I enjoyed Changeling quite a bit. I still think about the character development that went into the Troll main character and how it was basically canon.

No one was wired to the max, and if they were they were a threat to be avoided.

And the Troll was a world class research scientist through years and years of hard work.

My favorite was Burning Bright.

I liked the original 3 books also, but even they had some weird things in there.

2XS was good, also. What was the one with the retired decker and the kid shaman? Shadowplay? I kinda liked that one, except for the fact they were killing each other over something that can easily be done today (tap fiber optic lines). I liked the torture box that the Sioux baddie used on her.

EDIT: Oh, I liked Just Compensation too. A little too large in scope maybe, but handled well. Big events with basically no effect on the status quo.

I didn't like any books with Talon, any with the gimpy elf mage guy, or really, mostly any of the others.

Yeah, please just focus the novels on the lives of shadowrunners. It's an interesting enough topic, the idea of shadowrunning, that it doesn't need to be drowned in extradimensional global conspiracies, godlike heroes, and frequent nipple descriptions.

Books about anti-heroes trying to make small differences in a world that's insane. Which is why Burning Bright was so good, because at its root, that's what the story was.

<bobhead in DSE's direction>

Agreed, so much I can't find words.

Even books like Just Compensation were a bit much.

Forget the big, world-changing plots. That's for sourcebooks.

Shadowrun novels should focus on Shadowruns, period. Nothing that changes the world, just Shadowruns (or Merc campaigns, or the like).

Thank you, God! You do listen occasionally (though You do pick the most capricious times to do so...)!

Burning Bright and House of the Sun handled massive world events in ways that I think were elegant and non-nausea-inducing. In Burning Bright, the insect spirit infestation of Chicago was going to happen anyway. Kyle Teller couldn't manifest some power from beyond sanity and suddenly stop it, all he could do was deal with it happening and survive the events leading up to it and its immediate aftermath. In House of the Sun, the events were stopped at a level that didn't require anything save for a military strike.

If he'd been a few minutes later, maybe Dirk would have been faced with a situation only Superman or Ryan Mercury (same deal down to the cobalt blue armor; though he needed a cape!) could have dealt with, but at the time, with luck and a brief distraction by Harlequin, along with a machine gun and a grenade launcher, he was able to make it so that the system already in place to stop such things could do its job. He barely survived, anyhow, but he didn't tap into any terrifying and unknown power to do so.

He just shot things, blew people up, and had two very lucky moments (falling down the hill in the nick of time to end up out of LOS of a deadly magician, and realizing that the paralytic spell cast on him didn't affect his cyberarm), and threw enough of a monkey-wrench in things that the manaspike-building attempt failed.

Compared to fighting untold armies of the unspeakable in hand to hand, taking on an armed military encampment with only a group of four runners, and other such epic heroism, both books described a much more realistic and identifiable form of heroism, the "right (or horribly wrong) place at the right (or horribly wrong) time" scenario that allows one person to change the sequence of events, or at the very least exert some degree of damage control before and after.

Those are the sort of heroics that I think people are more prone to identifying with and enjoying.

there are lots of books you can do that with. non-SR books. the books for a game line should support and exemplify that game, not drag it off in directions the game wasn't intended to go in.

Don't get me wrong, I can identify when an SR book is splitting from the universe. I can also enjoy the book for its own merits (if it has any).

2 words: 2XS & 2XS.
Best book i've ever read.

Down, JJ. Many people consider 2XS their favorite Shadowrun book. Hell, my favorite is still Worlds Without End, and other people consider it fit only for mulch. We need to respect the opinions of others.

Well, mostly. Some books are just shit. But those two aren't among them.

i liked 2XS. it was well-written, had a non-high number of editorial mistakes, had a plot that made a fair amount of sense, had a likeable main character and PoV, and didn't contain massive canon inconsistencies. it was pulp, sure... but come on, it's a novel from a friggin' roleplaying game.

You guys would really like the three German novels I read so far .... let's hope FanPro gets smart when (IF) the new US novels sell less than obscenely bad, and translate them. They're pretty low level, have neatly developed characters, and are completely devoid of nipple descriptions or random attacks by gun bunny corp hit teams.

Then again, I know three out of what, 30? I could well have been lucky and read the only ones which are worth reading.

Funny coinky dink indeed.

I haven't been around in a along while, so forgive me if this has already been posted:

Born To Run: Shadowrun #1

Cool November!

Well, if it shows up in the Sept. Previews, I'm ordering mine.

Well, if we already know it is 288 pages, then it is probably ready for the printers, if not already in production.

In other news...

If I need the words "a novel" on the front of my novels to tell me that I am, in fact, reading/looking at/about to purchase a novel, then I have lost more brain cells than I care to admit.

Why is "a novel" printed on every fucking novel cover since 1995?

Kage mirrors my own views in this, I feel that if a story is going to be published, it had better mean something.

A parrallel Shadowrun might be interesting in small doses, but the books should be canon.

I don't read German, but it would appear from here that "Born to Run" has already been published in German and is in fact the first of the Shadowrun Duels trilogy (since it mentions Kellan Colt). I would assume by this that the other two Steve Kenson novels are the remaining two books in the trilogy.

I wonder if this means that the other three of the six books are also set in the Duels universe?

Seems to be set in the Duels universe, as far as i know.

The summary of the linked review is: "nice book, but mostly for shadowrun-newbies. And it has a hell of an ugly cover. "

"Born to Run" and the follow up "Giftmischer" (don't know the right translation) are published in german and are based on SR-duels. not my favorites.
An other very good german SR-novel is "Shelley".

Incorrect (partially). My opinion formed by the information given thus far, is complete. Opinions change, though. My opinion about SR4 changes a little every time I hear something new about it -- it won't be anything like "final" until I've seen the product (and likely not even then, it'll take me trying a game or two).

But, you are partially correct, as well. At this time, I'm not really looking forward to it, and I feel that "nice book, but mostly for shadowrun-newbies. And it has a hell of an ugly cover," might be appropriate enough to have been kind of funny. If you disagree, sorry.