So what is your defense on cities suddenly becoming coast cities with ports and other similiar happenings?
Don't have one. Don't need one. I didn't write that; the author of that piece can defend himself if he so chooses. I'd name names, but I don't know who wrote that chunk, so I'm gonna stay mute on specifics for the time being.
That said, it was bad research, from the looks of things, and should have been caught, but I wasn't there so I don't know what went down. If I ever write anything down in Central or South America, I'll have to deal with it, but until then, it's not actually an issue with me.
Does Dirk have a cyberarm or doesn't he?
Another one of those where I personally don't care one way or another. If I should ever do anything regarding Mr. Montgomery in future (a vanishingly remote possibility, by the way), I'll read everything he appears in and start asking a lot of people a lot of questions, and settle the issue then.
I'm not responsible for the research, good or bad, of any other writers; I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the game world anymore, as it's way too big and I have an outside life, and even if I did, their research is their problem. If I have the opportunity to proof something, I'll point out factual errors as I catch them, but the initial research is the author's responsibility.
Just because it's a book (especially a novel), doesn't mean it's not something to fudge around or figure out a better explanation.
Never said the books were sacred, or in many cases particularly well-written. I happen to think that a vast majority of game-related tie-in novels are utter crap, and those for
Shadowrun are no exception. The writing on some of them is excruciatingly bad, and some of the events in them need some major massaging, at the very least, to make them make sense.
That doesn't change for an instant the fact that, in the baseline
Shadowrun universe, those events in fact happened. Warts, Mary Sues, wretched prose, and all. Do we need to fudge around things? Oh, hell yeah. There's a ridiculous amount of stuff I fudged over when I updated Martin de Vries, for instance, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Do some things need a better explanation? Again, yep. And I never said otherwise.
Again, if the whole ED/Horrors thing hadn't been mostly/apparently/somewhat dropped/toned down for SR4, I might care that previous novels had certain events occur regarding immortal elves and dragons. As it is, I can acknowledge Dunk is dead, deal with the fallout from that, and ignore the specific circumstances that tied two different product lines together.
Toned down? Yeah, for a variety of reasons, most of them bad design decisions on the part of some people who shall remain nameless (this being a personal opinion, not a statement of absolute fact; just wanna make sure that's out there).
But they were never severed, and there was never a carved-in-stone guarantee that they wouldn't be revisited. In fact, given the nature of the SR world/universe, not revisiting them would be...well, difficult. (That's not what I wanted to say, but I was asked privately to tone down some of my terminology and I'll respect that.)
And since it's long been established game-world canon, even if you want to ignore it, it doesn't mean for so much as a heartbeat that it didn't happen. Again, you don't like it, fine, but don't stick your head in the sand and insist that I have to join you.
I'm not attacking authors here, but regarding them and editors as infallible is as asinine as it gets.
Now you're making things up and saying I said them. I never said that we were infallible; I never even implied it. Hell, I can point to a number of failures I've committed in recent history, just in the stuff I've written and proofed.
What I did say, and what you're choosing not to deal with, is that while some of the novels suck, they're still canon parts of the game world and have to be dealt with. You choose to deal with them by shouting "La la la la la" a great deal, from what I'm seeing. I choose to deal with them by choosing my battles and not dealing with the stuff that irritates me, which I suppose is about the same thing.
The difference appears to be that you just decide they didn't happen. I don't have the option of doing that, doing what I'm doing. I have to deal with the game world as it is, not how I wish it was.