Companero

Another year, another Sterling short story collection! 

At my current rate, I'll be done with this project in 2040!

A Good Old Fashioned Future by Bruce Sterling

A really prescient short story collection, covering the risk culture of silicon valley, the general collapse in institutions, tech empowered ethnic genocide... (and a lot of hipsterism).

This is Sterling at his most "I AM THE SURVEYOR OF ALL GLOBAL ART AND CULTURE AND I WILL TRY TO CRAM IT ALL IN TO ONE THING"-est. There are some great Leggy Starlitz stories, and a lot of stories about asocial, asexual US-Southern nerds being confused by polysexual hipsters (I might be exaggerating that). There's a great story called Big Jelly which basically summed up the entire business model and ethos of early 21st century Big Tech two decades before it happened.

It's all in good fun.

and then...

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

HOLY SHIT

I'd heard the name of this book being spoken of in legend, although I had no idea what it was about. I didn't know that Michael Moorcock and William Gibson had both called it the best science fiction novel ever, either.

TSMD is a book written in 1957 about a man pursuing a maniacal grudge against a spaceship that abandoned him to die in space. He wages this in company of a motley crew of specialists, going to war with corporations and security spooks, and utilising cybernetic speedware. It has essentially every cyberpunk genre trope except the internet. Instead, like most proto-cyberpunk books, it has psionics instead fulfilling the same plot and setting functions. 

This book is so absurdly full of ideas and incidents. Every concept and character is HUGE. It covers more ground in a chapter than the average novelist manages in an entire book. At times, it has some of the best prose I've ever read. 

This book is to Cyberpunk what Iggy and the Stooges were to punk. I'm very glad I read it.

PROGRESS

While I've certainly miscounted somewhere, I think I've read 69 books on the list.

However, if you chart progress down the list, I've only managed 8

Here we are. We reached the year we spent all that time talking about.

I know I don't post here as much as I used to, but the friends I've made here have stayed with me through the last decade and I expect will help me make sense of the next. I'm eternally grateful.

Welcome to 2020! Remember to check your bags on arrival!

While I haven't been a regular poster in years, I did fly half way around the world last month to visit a friend I met here.

Whatever the outcome of the above decision i'm eternally grateful to this place, which has probably been the most personally significant online space I've been a participant in.

Thank you!

STERLING JAM

GLOBALHEAD by Bruce Sterling.

I own almost every important cyberpunk short story collection and have read half the stories in each of them. When I say I've just finished Globalhead, I mean "I just picked my way through the book trying to work out which stories I didn't read in 2007 and then read those ones."

Globalhead is a collection of stories written by Sterling at the end of the 1980s, when he was in peak I AM THE ON THE PULSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGICAL CONDITION hubris mode. Most of the stories are set in the present they were written in or a very near future redefined by one or two new technologies, and feature criminals and burn-outs.

There are basically three major inspirational modes

- The Iran-Iraq War

- The decay of the Cold War superpowers

- Being a burnt-out hippy

plus those old Sterling obsessions, "weird ghosts telling people how they're going to die" and "foreigners looking at America, and being confused and horrified." A couple of these stories feel like sledge-hammer subtle in-jokes.

When I was a teenager, I thought that ultra-near future fiction about cultural contact and change was the best thing cyberpunk did, and wrote some bad Sterling imitation-fic .

I have different views now, but I still think some of these stories are among the best Sterling every wrote. Hollywood Kremlin in particular, about a fixer with a cruel streak navigating the fall of the Soviet Bloc, would be on any Best-Of-Cyberpunk list I ever write.

ZEITGEIST by Bruce Sterling

Because Hollywood Kremlin is one of two Leggy Starlitz stories in Globalhead, this feels like a good time to talk about Zeitgeist, a full-length novel about the same character. I read this novel years and years ago, and its still one of my absolute favourites.

Leggy Starlitz is a cynical fixer with a talent for finding the weirdest criminal circuits going and an unexpected

I spent most of today covertly reading a novel about an AI made of wasps, instead of doing any real work.

Catching up with novels from the reading list...

SLANT by Greg Bear

The sequel to Queen of Angels. Also a sprawling political novel with non-descript characters and Big Ideas about The Future, although the ideas in / are less original than those in the original. It takes a really, really long time to get going.

That said, the latter half of the book is tense and interesting. The antagonists become far more interesting when put under pressure.

It's also a nice entry in the Greg Bear mini-genre: "rich people get fucked by the design flaws in their corporate designed transhuman upgrades."

FOOLS by Pat Cadigan

The sequel to Mindplayers. One of those Pat Cadigan novels in which its unclear who the characters are, what their motivations are, or what the stakes are - but it's alright because the characters don't know either, and you figure it out faster than they do, allowing yourself to feel smart .

This is a really funny book, which makes up for the constant vertigo. I read it in two sittings.

DR ADDER by KW Jeter

This book came with an introduction from PK Dick complaining that it took a decade to get the novel published, thereby missing the window for it to achieve it's radical, shocking potential. The original draft predates cyberpunk and definitely seems intended to shock people.

Instead, having missed the window, it just reads as a Baby Boomer yelling at the TV. A generic cyberpunk urban wilderness full of TV gangs and mutilated prostitutes serves as a battle for the same old "televangelist vs macho rocker hero" cyberpunk I've read elsewhere. Compared to Cadigan and Carter and Greg Bear there's nothing here.

Not shocking, just edgy.

CRYSTAL EXPRESS by Bruce Sterling

Excellent early short story collection, except that i'd already read half of it - several of the stories are in Schismatrix, and Green Days in Brunei is single cyberpunk short story anthology ever. Most of the stories - half of which are fantasy stories with historical settings - concern societies in technological transition.

Sterling loves his prophets of technology. In one story, an 18th century scientist is berated by the spirits of the medieval era as he ushers in the Enlightenment, and in another the wealthy denizens of a wealthy medieval west African city dismiss a prophet of doom as light entertainment. Quite a few of the stories here feel like fables or morality plays.

BONE DANCE by Emma Bull

An interesting genre bending novel set in a post-apocalyptic America putting itself back together after an assault by the Psychic "Horsemen," where high tech exists but the electricity to turn it on is frequently unavailable.

It's a good Fixer novel - full of deals and hustling and a million different characters, all washed over with some 1990s Goth/New Age-y-ness that I found irritating in the actual 1990s but am a little nostalgic for now. There are tarot cards and vodou priests everywhere, and I can practically smell the joss sticks.

Emma Bull went onto be one of the main progenitors of the Urban Fantasy genre, and you can see that here.

All that time we were talking about Polish cyberpunk, and Mike never mentioned the band Siekiera.

How could we ever do Cyberpunk Poland justice without this on in the background? It sounds like the soundtrack to Jean Reno being chased down a subway tunnel by a robot subway train while piloting a flying car!

I've missed these!

Berlin's sewer system was built for a much larger city expecting to get even larger and so is notoriously full of big empty spaces (and apparently in summer so little passes through it compared to what it was built for that large parts of it stand stagnant and stink out regions of the city...).

It's basically Neuromancer: the movie - a burn-out hires a group of misfits who use a consensual hallucination to steal from a dysfunctional family in a world of faceless megacorporations...

Dreamhacking is definitely something to add to a CP game

SATURDAY NIGHT SCREAMSHEET RETURNS, ON A WEDNESDAY.

Featuring heavy metal dance-offs! A D20 neo-nazi generator you didn't think you needed and probably still don't!

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2017...-3.html

*blink*

JANUARY WAS THE LAST TIME I UPDATED THIS? WHAT?

I suppose I got lost in a haze of short story collections. I tend to read them one story at a time, then go onto a different collection, soooo

Anyway,

THE FORTUNATE FALL by Raphael Carter

One of the books I was most looking forward to reading as part of this project.

I'd never actually heard of this book before seeing it referenced in obscure game bibliographies. It certainly isn't a part of the recognised "canon." But people who have heard of it tend to rave about it - this great undiscovered novel, the flash in the pan that should have presaged a new heroic career, etc. And it is a very good book, about fascism and trauma and sexuality and love and agency and violation and a million other things.

Decades before the novel is set, American fascists overran most of the world and implemented a horrific regime of concentration camps and cybernetic experimentation. Faced with this, a group of hackers unleashed a truly horrifying weapon to bring down their regime - genuinely one of the most apocalyptic ideas I've seen in science fiction. Decades after, with society picking itself up after that conflagration, a wired reporter goes searching for data about the original genocide, convinced that the new government is perpetuating a cover-up.

For some reason it just didn't click with me. I don't know what why, because every individual aspect of it was great. Something about the prose, maybe, although I can't define what. A coldness, perhaps? That hasn't stopped me before - I fucking love Bruce Sterling

Maybe this isn't the right year, or even the right decade, for me to be reading a novel about internet enabled fascism. The best definition of science fiction I've ever read is "SF is the genre with the most literal attitude to metaphor" and this book delves into some deep fears of mine regarding the way a person's search history bears their soul to faceless observers (i'm a huge introvert, which makes me a kind of a kind of mafioso of the heart - don't tell nuthin' to nobody!).

Maybe that's why I couldn't properly enjoy it.

Use some version of D&D 5e's 3 strikes and out death save when they go out of action. I think if you did that you wouldn't find it much more lethal than 1st level 5e D&D, actually (which is to say I've killed more characters in that style of play than I did in CP2020, but...).

You might also want to cut Stun/Shock out entirely, or nerf it somehow. If you do that, you might find that CP2020 is less lethal than low level D&D (CP2020 characters can take a few 9mm rounds!). Or reduce REF penalties for damage.

Also, it's gutterpunk. Milspec and full auto weapons don't have to be easy to come by, at least not before the team understands the stakes.

Honestly, in terms of damage, the main difference between 1st level 5e and CP2020 is that 5e D&D characters stand back up much faster if (when!) they go down. Maybe if you introduce some kind of tech that lets that happen - even something a little unrealistic like a stimulant (did you ever play any Far Cry games, where the dude is constantly sticking adrenaline into himself?), I think things will be much less overtly lethal.

I'm not saying have it like my last D&D game where 5 characters went down 11 times in one combat, but...

And it's always good practice with a new system to run an easy combat encounter in the first 15 minutes just so everyone can get a handle on the rules. One or two pistol hits won't obliterate the party but will teach them some tricks.

-------------------------

All that said, Malek77 ran long campaigns in which everyone had lots of milspec guns and everyone used full auto all the time and characters survived, just because he handed out lots of body armour and things like that. CP2020's high lethality reputation is partly because of GMs (like teenage me!) not accepting that that stuff is in the game for a reason, rule of cool be damned

Merchanter's Luck is one of my favourite novels ever. It's so taut and claustrophobic and gothic. It's absolutely the best Deep Space inspiration. I brought Malek77 a copy when I was in Sydney.

I find Cherryh's work rides a line for me. She loves to put her characters into physically and socially claustrophobic situations. Depending on the exact level of that, I either find her novels wonderful or almost unread-ably horrible. Not because they're bad - the opposite, in fact - but just because it's tapping into a personal nightmare. I think I read Heavy Time in 20 page bursts over several years, because I didn't have the emotional fortitude to do it faster!

I've got Rimrunners and at least two others on the pile, but i'm not in a mental state to attempt them yet .

I've now managed to miss posting things in my pile for three weekends in a row. I've also developed a pathological aversion to the sound of fire alarms, which isn't a coincidence.

It might have inspired this over-the-top Collateral Damage table, for when PCs miss.

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2017...t-not-miss.html

I have to admit, I don't really get the stitcher rounds, rules wise

(as cool as they are - did you ever play early 40k, with the "Harlequins Kiss?" - a somehow less cool and definitely less plausible version of the same thing...)

I'm definitely always in favour of weird-but-plausible sci-fi guns tho!

Binh Xuyen reference FTW. They really were the most cyberpunk organisation ever to exist, and in the 1950s as well

Also, Dominic Teeth

That all sounds great, and doesn't step on anything I have planned

(Also, I looked at a map of Florida to remind myself where Key Largo is, and discovered that Fort Lauderdale is SOUTH of Palm Beach, so I've already wrecked my plan.

Suggestions that I went through the Kasha post and changed every reference to Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach are FAKE NEWS)

I'm going to have to save this, 'cos it's something I've had problems with in the past (I tend to just shoot at players until they decide to intervene in the plot and in the game).

You know, I was putting aside the idea of a "spy" book because it was too close to Darkness Visible, but there's a whole new layer of possibility implicit in this post. I have to think some more...

I'd love a guest post on mine, just to keep the weekly thing going if nothing else

If you're interested, of course:

- Freaky rules:

(Yes, I know the cat mission violates most of these)

I'm not planning to make any of these rules actually explicit in the series, it's just there to keep consistency.

1: it isn't set in existing continuity. No references to CP2020 branded gear, corporations, etc.

(that part isn't so freaky).

2: the assumed campaign model for all these screamsheets is "sexy losers wandering the Earth." Like in Cowboy Bebop or especially Samurai Champloo - a group of 'runners travelling around, taking on odd jobs from fixers and fences they discover, meeting weird people and moving onto the next place. Not high tech cops, not super-soldiers, not gangers confined to one place...

Like, I want all of these adventures to be easily slotted into a game about cyber-murder-hobos

3: All local. The stakes shouldn't be world changing, or even country-changing. As soon as I work out a plot that brings edgerunners into a clash between competing gumbo chefs, I'm going to write it. The first one I wrote is about an organised dance-off competition, and I've got one about hi-jacking postal drones. Even stuff about corporate violence should really be about fighting between local branch offices.

Now the freaky bit:

4: You might have noticed that both adventures took place in Florida. It's 'cos the wandering sexy losers are going to start in Port St Lucie and travel down the coast - Fort Lauderdale now and maybe for the next couple, then Palm Beach and Miami and Key West and the Everglades, up the coast to Tampa and onto the Gulf Coast and Texas. Basically, every post is going to be set on that route, in the geographical order of travel. Like, they've already gone past Port St Lucie so no more adventures there.

The South Florida setting is really intentionally lightly sketched. Basically - Miami has been badly hit by storms and floods but still has the big corporate centre hanging on, and half the houses that got abandoned by people running from the storms are being used by FEMA to house "ecogees" from a drought in Texas and the South West. That's pretty much it. I don't want to make assumptions about tech, beyond a "it isn't grey goo nanotech yet."

There are some recurring organisations

- the Okie Cartel (from the first adventure) who are a bunch of Good Ole Boys who run the black markets in the ecogee camps

- Nolasco Security; a front company for an anti-Castro militia turned mafia called the Nuevo Ejército Nacional that has the paycop contract in northern Miami

- Yeongdeok Group, a Chaebol corporation that stands in for Petrochem/Saeder Krupp/BP etc. I'm always going to use the Korean word Chaebol instead of Zaibatsu to represent the assumed "gigantic Asian mega-corporations that rule the world" that every CP world needs, if only to lend a little setting colour.

- a vigilante militia called the Rough Riders, composed of elderly cyborgs drawn from Florida's retirement communities.

The mayor of Miami is called David Romero and will generally be referred to as a corrupt bastard who rules through co-option and increasingly frayed alliances with other corrupt bastards. The people of Miami really hate the Texan ecogees. That's pretty much the setting. I don't really want to talk about stuff outside of Florida much at all, except to assume that it's balkanised all to hell and corporations hire 'runners as a matter of course.

/Freaky rules...

Apologies for the info-dump, but i'm hoping to talk a few people into this and wanted to have it all in one place

I should talk you into doing some guest posts for the series. I have a couple of weird requirements to keep it all consistent, but nothing too strenuous

A few times

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2017...gal-rights.html

SATURDAY NIGHT SCREAMSHEET 2, featuring lawyers, cats, and bastards. Also more bastards.

Any ideas you might infer about my opinions regarding toxoplasmosis ridden murder-aristocrats cats are obviously groundless and false.

SATURDAY NIGHT SCREAMSHEET:

http://vircadesproject.blogspot.co.uk/2017...lots-child.html

I love the Screamsheet format soooo much, I wrote a dozen of them.

If anyone would like to guest a screamsheet in the coming weeks, I'd love to set it up. I've got a few requirements to keep everything consistent, but nothing that can't easily be hashed out (the big one is a Florida setting...).

That's beautiful.

The fact that there are still more to be found both amazes me and gives me hope I might be able to earn money to live when my job gets automated five years from now

Greg Bear's Queen of Angels - BIG novel about BIG ideas. One of the most obviously ambitious books I've ever read - clearly Bear trying to push all the boundaries, both in terms of speculation and literary style. It isn't entirely successful, but I always prefer something a little "pretentious" that fails to be what it wants to be than something completely mediocre. Also, several of the elements I felt were distracting and unnecessary early on in the book paid off by the end, sooo

I'd place Queen of Angels in the same category as 1984, Fahrenheit 459, Brave New World, etc. A dissident character is even called "Emmanuel Goldsmith." There's definitely an element of "if [social trend x] carries on, this terrible world might ensue."

That said, it is more subtle than some of those other novels and ends up being pretty nuanced by the end. And the politics aren't a simple extrapolation of modern divisions but based on some fundamental ideas that transcend them. I came away from this book feeling like my mind and understanding of the universe had been expanded in some important fashion. Any novel that achieves that has to be called a grand success, pretension be damned

On a side note, this is the first book I've read that really feels like it could describe a 5th Wave society in the game GURPS Transhuman Space.

I finally read Bruce Bethke's Cyberpunk, noted for being the first use of the term, although I don't think it can really be called the start of the literary movement. It's available online here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/cpunk.htm

(I understand it was later made into a novel and posted free online - I haven't gotten around to that)

So - yeah. It's short, nothing to set the world alight in terms of prose, and basically completely predictable. It abandons a potentially interesting hook about the relationship between the protagonist and a fellow alienated hacker dude in favour of a very obvious plot. It could have used another 20 pages.

I suspect it would have had more of an impact when it was written - "holy fuck! kids might be able to use the internet to fuck shit up!" - whereas now, we know kids can use the internet to fuck shit up, and a short description of kids using the internet to fuck shit up needs something else to be interesting.

Still. You can read it in 20 minutes. Worth it for the history alone.