Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: Quell on <11-29-10/0055:46>
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Hello all,
I'm not sure where to ask this--and it's perhaps a silly question, in general--but I am interested in getting back into Shadowrun, but I heard rumors (perhaps unfounded), that Catalyst games was having financial trouble. Has this been resolved? Really I just ask because I would hate to spend a lot of money on a game that will not be supported in a few months time.
Thanks for your info!
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I'm not big in the rumours department, but the internal problems seem to have been smothened out. They lost some stuff and a lot of people in the process, but they still hold the licence, so Topps seems to think they can pull through.
There were some rumours about SR5, but on that somebody else has to comment.
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There were some difficulties last spring, which unfortunately led to some good people leaving Catalyst, but they also led to many improvements in the back-office operations of Catalyst. We've kept pushing forward all year, and we have plans to move forward for a good long while. Now, I'm not making any guarantees here--nothing in any business is guaranteed. But given that Catalyst management keeps pumping me for long-term plans and supporting me when I develop plans for a release schedule stretching more than a year into the future, I believe the company is not going away in the next few months.
Speaking of plans for the next year, there currently are no plans to release a 5th edition of SR in 2011. Which is good, because I've got plenty of other books to work on.
Jason H.
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Heh. Fifth Edition? What for? SR4 is one of the more modern (in terms both rules, and setting) games on the market.
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I hope they don't go to SR5 too quickly. I would hate to see CGL do what WotC did with D&D (releasing 3e and then 3.5e only a couple of years later). I really think what needs to happen is CGL needs to focus more on marketing of SR and BT to get them back where they use to be in the overall RPG industry. Maybe throw some money at polishing the product, but they shouldn't just give up on SR4 yet, that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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I hope they don't go to SR5 too quickly. I would hate to see CGL do what WotC did with D&D (releasing 3e and then 3.5e only a couple of years later).
Oh, they've already been accused of doing that.
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I hope they don't go to SR5 too quickly. I would hate to see CGL do what WotC did with D&D (releasing 3e and then 3.5e only a couple of years later). I really think what needs to happen is CGL needs to focus more on marketing of SR and BT to get them back where they use to be in the overall RPG industry. Maybe throw some money at polishing the product, but they shouldn't just give up on SR4 yet, that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
As I said, we have no plans to release a fifth edition in 2011. SR4 premiered in 2005, which means it will be at very least 6 years between editions.
Jason H.
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So technically you could go for SR5 in 2012? ;) Just kidding. Looking back on publishes for SR2 and SR3, there's still lots of ground to cover in SR4. And I agree with Kot, SR4 is doing a great job so far!
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Agreed, SR4 is pretty damn cool. And I don't see a need to do updates/etc. since we have the Advanced rules in books like Street Magic and Unwired.
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Well he did say not in 2011 HOWEVER the world will of course be changed on December 22 2011 as such in 2012 to keep the game moveing in the right direction they will need to make Shadowrun 5th Edition.
(for anyone who doesn't get it yet yes i'm jokeing)
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Well... of course they'll need a new edition then. Because then we'll have actual magical and matrix theory to start working out! ;D
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And VITAS, Goblinization, widescale flooding and Awakening of the land. Oh yeah. Fun fun.
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Actually no on the matrix theory that really didn't even strat to crop up untill closer to the first crash and team echo which was what 2029 If my memory serves me right.
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Well... of course they'll need a new edition then. Because then we'll have actual magical and matrix theory to start working out! ;D
We're too busy with the dragon breeding program for that at the moment.
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Well... of course they'll need a new edition then. Because then we'll have actual magical and matrix theory to start working out! ;D
We're too busy with the dragon breeding program for that at the moment.
Well, that certainly explains why Jason's always looking like he's running from a burning building... ;)
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I hope they don't go to SR5 too quickly. I would hate to see CGL do what WotC did with D&D (releasing 3e and then 3.5e only a couple of years later). I really think what needs to happen is CGL needs to focus more on marketing of SR and BT to get them back where they use to be in the overall RPG industry. Maybe throw some money at polishing the product, but they shouldn't just give up on SR4 yet, that would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
As I said, we have no plans to release a fifth edition in 2011. SR4 premiered in 2005, which means it will be at very least 6 years between editions.
Jason H.
Oh good, because after several years of absence, I started getting back into the Shadows last June with the main book, and now just got Arsenal, Street Magic, Runner's Companion, and Runner's Havens a couple weeks ago. I dont know if my wallet and or sanity could handle it!
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Well he did say not in 2011 HOWEVER the world will of course be changed on December 22 2011 as such in 2012 to keep the game moveing in the right direction they will need to make Shadowrun 5th Edition.
(for anyone who doesn't get it yet yes i'm jokeing)
Yeah SR5 will be known as "Oh frak, they were right all along, it is the Awakening!!!"
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See, I'm going to tack those 6 years onto the release date of the SR4A, so I'll be looking for SR5 in 2015. ;)
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SR4A just came out and SR5 would just be anti-climactic and jumping the gun. There should definitely be an event/book for the ending of the Mayan calendar though!! I agree with Fastjack though, the focus should be on marketing what already exists. Focus should be MMORG/RPG...and a movie. I was watching the 6th Harry Potter last night, and I've never been a fan, but still, the magic fights are soooo SR! Especially the whole spirit summoning, the stun-bolts.....all these different aspects which exit in SR. Add to that Deus Ex style cyber gun battles and stealth and I feel you got a whole aesthetic which the public could get their minds around and it would freakin work! Especially if it focuses on the global, non-eurocentric elements which Shadowrun brings to the table. All other Sci-fi is super euro-centric....SR has that going for it that it has always been from day 1 an inherently non-eurocentric world-view.
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I second the Deus-Ex part. That game was Shadowrun-ish more than Cbyerpunk-ish from the first one. And i really liked the way it promoted non-lethal combat methods and revolved around humanity's reactions to high-tech, augumentations, and the consequences of their use. And Invisible War was partially taking place in Seattle, and there was the destruction of Chicago, so...
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I have always been a proponent of making an SR movie. But while a live-action SR movie is possible, I do belive one of the best mediums would be to make not a movie but an animated movie and or series. Heck, make it an anime move, done by a studio like Madhouse, Bones, or Gonzo. Look at Ghost in the Shell: SAC. All it needed was magic and it WOULD be SR.
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That would be cool but I'm just not all that into anime. Anime just doesn't have the gravitas that I would want from an SR movie. Sure i've seen anime's that have made me cry (Grave of the Fireflies....omg just get teary thinking about that movie) but I want the SR movie to be for American audiences and they don't go to the theaters to see Anime. A CGI movie would work, and even if they did a live action movie, to do it well it would have to be practically a CGI movie anyways. I think if they really worked the noir aspect of SR, they would have a great hook. I just hope that it wouldn't turn out too comic-bookish. Something. Something that had subtlety and with an over-arching message....high-concept if you will.
I feel the best message SR has to bring to the table is this: Even in a world steeped in magic and technology where the amount of power an individual being can have is un-imaginable, the exact same power structures (corporations) which keep us down today are just as strong if not stronger and simply adapt to be able to exert their dominance. I mean, corporations have only been around in human history for a few 100 years.....the gist of the movie has to revolve around why are there still corporations in-charge in a world where a single man can summon insanely powerful spirits to do his bidding or where dragons exist. Wouldn't dragons just simply take over the world? Why wouldn't society slide quickly into a more fuedal type system with the most powerful beings at the top? Or is corporate rule just a consumer society's version of feudalism? SR has dragons and free spirits as board-members of many companies...this would have to be explained. An SR movie would be redundant and just a pretty crappy movie if it didn't answer these fundamental questions. Cyberpunk doesn't have to answer these questions because there is no magic in cyberpunk. Shadowrun still would have that dark hopelessness since the corps always come out on top, but it would have more room than cyberpunk for the creative and "magical" side of the human spirit.
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Actually, I think SR is a bit more hopeful than most dystopian cyberpunk stories. The magic and such give a little bit of light in the darkness than you get in most of the "cog in the machine" cyberpunk concepts.
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I agree completely, and I don't feel SR should be really a dystopia....that's so cold-war. Look how badly Terminator 3 did....on top of it being a bad movie....I feel that dystopias don't resonate well now-adays. Take the game "Fallout"...that's a dystopia, but it's a video-game where you're focused on the details of staying alive and it's really about life....one's own personal individual quality of life......traditional dystopia's are more about society and whether or not society will survive and whether or not we can rebuild it. Today we only care about if we can hold on to our own personal humanity and the humanity of the ones who are close to us and essentially try and keep a rose alive in a desert. If society fails, well that's too bad. That's my take....now for the rest of the post which you interrupted Fastjack :) !!
A lot of the SR timeline would resonate in this day and age.....and probably the biggest pill to swallow would be the part about NAN....and being as that's central to the awakening, a lot of thought would have to be put into it and fan boys and girls would have to really be extra-understanding. SR1e came out before casino's were a big thing. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) was signed in 1988 and over the next 10 years really was a game changer in terms of the economic conditions of many reservations. A lot of this economic boom for many reservations however masks a lot of social problems that persist and the obstacles that many native youth face. However, it kind of neutralizes a little bit in people's minds the pressing nature of changing the social order. I feel that the focus of the timeline would have to be a modified version of the Shiawase decision which frighteningly resembles the "Citizen's United" decision and I feel today's society can identify with that.
Today's zeitgeist I feel would be ready to see sci-fi where the U.S. is no longer intact because the fear is very real in people's hearts given the level of divisiveness we have in our national discourse and our economic situation. If it's made clear in the story-telling that corporations hijacked the U.S. and basically make Daniel Howling Coyote's followers and NAN simply people who want their country back, then it would make a lot of sense. Instead of dividing up along racial lines it should be divided along ideological lines and all the "rebels" who are fighting to split from the U.S. have kind of taken native american culture as a banner to unite around. This isn't really that far from cannon anyways, there being "pink tribes" and elven tribes. Besides, this would all be a montage anyways....hopefully narrated by Dunkelzahn himself. The love Dunkelzahn has for his beloved and curious little meta-humans would be apparent.....metahuman's analogous to "hobbits" and Dunkelzahn analogous to "Gandalf". Then after the world is described, we'd zoom into a typical grimey futuristic street scene and our protagonist is introduced. It would be great to make him an ork....a poor, young hacker/ganger....and he gets caught up in some major world-scale events. ....man the possibilities are endless and as long as the writers and directors think outside the box and just worry about telling a damn good story, the rest will just fall into place. Story is going to have to be everything.
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I agree inca. And the main difficulty in a SR movie would be the split from our own timeline. Splitting a timeline is fine for a movie when the split occurs at least 30 years in the future. To properly make a SR movie, you'd have to start it off with a scrawl in the front detailing how, 20 years ago, the world went in a totally different direction and wound up over "here". And there's a reason that alternate history movies aren't very popular with studios--the mass' imagination is fine when you go full on into fantasy/sci-fi, but can't seem to handle minor tweaks in reality.
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I would just gloss over the history for a Shadowrun movie. Include enough in the abstract for new fans to understand that it is the 2070s, and that magic has returned alongside advanced tech an corporations.
Since the history is abstract, new fans can read into it what they want' while rabid fanboys—not me of course :-)—won't be shouting about how the film got it all wrong.
IE say magic returned "over 50 years ago" not "magic returned in 2011". Similarly do not give exact dates for other things that are history, just have dialogue say "decades ago" etc.
I would also generally ignore the pre-crash 2.0 tech, since it would seem anachronistic to those with iPhones. By glossing it over, the new fans can just assume a smooth progression from real 2010s tech to SR 2070s tech while the fans in the know aren't given retcons, just gaps that are in the end inconsequential to a good film story.
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Take the game "Fallout"...that's a dystopia, but it's a video-game where you're focused on the details of staying alive and it's really about life....one's own personal individual quality of life......traditional dystopia's are more about society and whether or not society will survive and whether or not we can rebuild it.
Fallout barely scrapes the neighborhood of Dystopia.
an often futuristic society that has degraded into a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian. Dystopian literature has underlying cautionary tones, warning society that if we continue to live how we do, this will be the consequence. A dystopia, thus, is regarded as a sort of negative utopia and is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government. Dystopias usually feature different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions and constant states of warfare or violence. Dystopias often explore the concept of technology going "too far" and how humans individually and en masse use technology. A dystopian society is also often characterized by mass poverty for most of its inhabitants and a large military-like police force.
Amusingly, Shadowrun is much closer to Dystopian themes than Fallout but didn't make Wikipedia's list.
Classic Dystopian works are 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Harrison Bergeron, and Logan's Run.
More recent ones include Equilibrium, Gattaca, The Island, Minority Report, Serenity, and V for Vendetta.
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Ya, i mean i guess I meant to say that Fallout is on the surface a dystopia, but in reality it isn't. But the common thread among all the works you mentioned is that they focus on the effects of a dark future on a society....and the falling apart of society of the changing of society is what scared people. I feel people now-adays are not so much scared by that because they feel like they're actually living in that future now. So all people really care about now is if little pockets of people can retain their humanity.....even if they have to jettison their cultural or national identity. There's an interesting article in the NYtimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html) about the popularity of Zombie movies....and I don't agree with the author on a lot of it....but I feel one reason people like zombie movies so much now is because of that little pocket of humanity that survives....and it's always a diverse group which really just focuses on maintaining it's humanity above all else. A lot different from a movie like Red Dawn where national identity is what one strives to retain......now it's just about staying "human."
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I think retcon'ing is the only way to go. It will help if people really feel that SR 2070's is really our own world in the future rather than some parallel universe. Ya don't even mention cyber-decks and just assume wireless has always been the way it was. Not much will get lost in retcon'ing everything before the awakening and then tweaking a few cultural anachronisms.....but a lot will be gained by tying the movie to our own present time.
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i kinda agree with Inca in that it would have to be a CGI movie, but i think that if you got the intro just right and had appropriate flashbacks to the happenings in the history, then it would work. Kinda like they do the intro to "Centurion" however i think that they should probably start with an animated series or even (if they could get a decent budget to do it, talk to Sci Fi channel) do a live action/CGI tv series to work up to the movie (like they did with "Serenity"/"Firefly") then it would be a bloody hit.
has to have the right storyline though, something that touches the total of the playable history........EG.....i think i have an idea, give me some time to get it written though
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Might be interesting to see an SR: The Early Years book released at the end of 2012. It might make an interesting setting. Magic is just starting to come back, elves and dwarves are still considered to be suffering from UGE etc. Might make for an interestingly fresh take on the things SR takes for granted.
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Hahaha, just wait, SR5 will be exactly that with a complete "reboot" of the series ;D
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doc, its no fun when you get to live it instead of play it.....ok, maybe it will be fun, oh to hell with it your right its gonna be a blast
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I doubt they'll reboot it like that....I mean then they'd have to do that every couple of years to keep Cannon aligned with RL lol. We're just gonna have to accept that slowly SR and a lot of other sci-fi becomes a parallel universe.
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Star Trek has not actually been set in our future since the fall of the Soviet Union. The trekkies know this and the average fans don't care since it is not usually stressed in the story telling.
As I said above, the same thing is the correct approach for a Shadowrun film. Present a future that could be ours, and gloss over (without retconning) the differences between SR's past and our present. If it is done correctly, the long time fans are happy that their are no blatant contradictions, and the film fans don't even know it was an issue.
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Both Shadowrun's and BattleTech's timelines diverge from our own right after the first games were released. I'd have to track it down later, but I posted that in Shadowrun, Bill Clinton didn't run for nor win the presidency in '92. This is where Shadowrun diverges. I'll have to check my BattleTech sourcebooks, but they diverge earlier, since Gorbachev's successor was assassinated, which lead to the rebirth of the Soviet state.
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In theory, the SR timeline diverges in '88 or '89. Though realistically, it should diverge even earlier than that to set up certain events that happen in the early 90's. If I were forced to write the "history" of Shadowrun, I'd probably have a few subtle differences around 1970 or so, and lead on up through into the '90s with the major ones that start defining the world of Shadowrun.
That said, SR's history has had a few retcons over the years, to incorporate events from the "real world". IIRC, someone slipped a Twin Towers, 9/11 reference into one of the early FanPro books, as an example. It doesn't really invalidate anything, since I don't think the Neo-Anarchists Guide to North America touched on the World Trade Center one way or another, so it doesn't invalidate earlier material... But at the same token, it was also slightly unnecessary, since we could easily explained away the lack of the WTC in Season 3 of Missions and the the Manhattan eBook by saying "The quake detsroyed them". Or they were torn down and rebuilt by Ares. Or whatever.
Personally, I think SHadowrun needs a hard break in '89. I'm not a fan of trying to force real world changes into Shadowrun. It's a different world. Things have progressed a LOT differently due to the Crashes, VITAS, the megacorp structure, the multitude of wars, civil and other wise... One of the things that always makes me want to bang my head against the table is anytime someone busts out "But it happened like X in the real world..." I mean, yes, obviously you want to look at real life as a template, but you don't need to be bound to that, and regardless you have to look at it through the lens of Shadowrun's world.
Smartphopnes, Wireless, miniaturized computers, etc... Sure, they exist today. Why did they take so long to materialize in Shadowrun (other than the real life explanation that they hadn't been invented yet, and the writers back in the 80s and 90's didn't think of it)? Simple... Corporate Greed. When 10 companies control 99% of the worlds economy, there's much less of a need for competition. And without serious competition, you don't have the constant advances you do now. Why make things smaller and more powerful, when you can keep them larger and less powerful, sell them at inflated prices, and your manufacturing costs are almost nothing? THat;s maximizing your profit margin right there.
Plus with things like VITAS and the wars that happened, it's easy to say that certain advances were simply never made. WHat happens when the first guy to engineer the smartphone dies of VITAS, or was killed by rampaging Amerinds, or was locked up in a concentration camp? What happens when Microsoft and Apple lose their entire database to the Crash virus (WHich also conveniently corrupted their entire backup system as well). And when half the programmers and developers who worked on those programs are dead due to various issues, who's going to be rebuilding all of this?
It doesn't all make sense, but it's there... We roll with it. It's a part of the fiction, and it's a part of the groundwork that the world of Shadowrun is built on.
Bull
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I usually shoot for the '92 hard break with the presidential election since most of the history written in older sourcebooks was kept vague until then. (They didn't say Bush Sr. was elected or anything about Desert Storm, but they didn't say anything that denied it either.)
And I agree with the Twin Towers ret-con. It's nice that they took time to acknowledge the tragedy, but it really had no impact on the Shadowrun universe.
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The first hard break that I know of comes in 1986. But really, it's a fictional world. If I wanted Ralph Nader to be President in 1984 there is nothing canon stopping me AFAIK.
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I think the first break comes somewhere in the thousands of years BC. We have pretty good archaeological evidence that there wasn't a pre-Egyptian civilization made of several different sentient humanoid races living underground to hide from great cosmic evils. And I have my doubts that DaVinci had immortal elf friends in the real world. ;D
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The thing I keep telling people, both fans and non-fans alike, is that sometimes to enjoy any fiction that has some basis in the real world is that one has to have a healty dose of what I call "suspension of disbelief". In other words, don't sweat that things are either exactly "real", realistic, or that something may be just plain goofy. Go along with the story and enjoy it for what it is, not what it isn't.
If you want reality, watch so-called "reality" TV. Me, I want to get away from it, that's why I enjoy stuff like this.
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Actually, I think SR is a bit more hopeful than most dystopian cyberpunk stories. The magic and such give a little bit of light in the darkness than you get in most of the "cog in the machine" cyberpunk concepts.
4th edition thats certainly true, but in earlier editions - well, so to say the earlier you go the more cyberpunk and hence the more dystopian Shadowrun was. 4th edition is rather post-cyberpunk, anyway, not the real deal anymore, so to say. And those 4e sourcebooks do have a certain techno-optimistic vibe...
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We're too busy with the dragon breeding program for that at the moment.
I thought that was supposed to be under wraps....
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We're too busy with the dragon breeding program for that at the moment.
I thought that was supposed to be under wraps....
I keep telling you guys... What you do in the privacy of your own homes is none of our business... ANd I don't want to hear about it. :)
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Actually, I think SR is a bit more hopeful than most dystopian cyberpunk stories. The magic and such give a little bit of light in the darkness than you get in most of the "cog in the machine" cyberpunk concepts.
4th edition thats certainly true, but in earlier editions - well, so to say the earlier you go the more cyberpunk and hence the more dystopian Shadowrun was. 4th edition is rather post-cyberpunk, anyway, not the real deal anymore, so to say. And those 4e sourcebooks do have a certain techno-optimistic vibe...
I would beg to differ. The thing about the neo-A's and the tone of cyberpunk and punk itself premised in part on the idea that you could still change the world.
Like punk the neo-anarchists lost. They lost HARD.
The tone of post-cp and arguably SR as it stands is definitely one where you cannot change anything. The corps took over and co-opted even the opposition. You know, like RL. Token gestures and the facade of hope and optimism does not actually make it so. I mean, really, how swell is it to be richer and live longer if your life just now belongs to the corps for longer?
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As for dystopia or something similar not being popular, I'd like to point out that "The Walking Dead" got renewed for another season.
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Right, and what i'm saying is that Zombie movies have replaced dystopias. People used to be scared society will go to shit...now people just accept that society most likely is gonna go to shit, so the next best thing is to salvage your humanity...which is the point of a practically every Zombie movie. People just accept the fact that every few months we'll hear about someone who goes into their workplace and just starts shooting everyone and then themselves......or some terrorists who don't care if they blow themselves up....people here at home and all over the world just mindlessly following religion and just throwing science, music, art and reason right out the window. The current zeitgeist is one in which everybody feels like the world around them is turning into zombies, society is already screwed so the best thing I could do is just try and survive physically and psychologically. Look at the movie 28 days later.....it's all about surviving, but shows a group of humans which have survived physically (i.e. they're not infected) but have died spritually/psychologically. The only thing keeping the group of soldiers from killing themselves is the prospect that some females will be brought. The protagonists only really care about surviving psychologically and keeping the beautiful things that matter in life alive.
The Walking Dead fits right into this. Think about one aspect of Zombie movies which is always present.......the worst thing that could happen to a person is not death....it's getting turned into a Zombie.....the audience always feels a little relieved and sees a little redemption when the characters who just before they're gonna get infected, either kill themselves or get killed.
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The tone of post-cp and arguably SR as it stands is definitely one where you cannot change anything. The corps took over and co-opted even the opposition. You know, like RL. Token gestures and the facade of hope and optimism does not actually make it so. I mean, really, how swell is it to be richer and live longer if your life just now belongs to the corps for longer?
Pretty swell. After all, for what free time is still worth theres quite much to fill it with, too. In purely hedonistic terms, life isn't so bad in 2072. SR4 books sometimes try to pander to dystopia by inserting "true for the rich, but what about the poor?" comments, but even those do not hold fully true - thanks to "technology trickle down" the poor of 2072 (except for the desperate poor) do have it better than the poor of nowadays.
In the days of Neo-A sourcebooks the tone was rougher and the world more openly violent and bad. I mean, that was one of the core tenets of cyberpunk as a literary whole: That technology does not necessarily solve problems, merely shift them. SR4, OTOH, is as said rather technologically optimistic. Which IMO is also more realistic, but makes it less cyberpunk...
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But cyberpunk went belly up, because of both the advances in technology, and the fact that we don't have any cyberarms yet. I still love the genre, but SR is up-to-date with tech at least. And it has Dragons!
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RAWR!!
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. . .the tone was rougher and the world more openly violent and bad. I mean, that was one of the core tenets of cyberpunk as a literary whole: That technology does not necessarily solve problems, merely shift them. SR4, OTOH, is as said rather technologically optimistic. Which IMO is also more realistic, but makes it less cyberpunk...
Sci-fi is never about the future its about the present. Technology did smack us over the head and it turned out the Internet was damn useful. Violent crime is down a lot in the past 20 years (in the US). People have grown up on the cyberpunk ethic of soulless corporations and found out that having air conditioning and an iPod is worth them spending some time doing work for someone else. The Wireless Matrix isn't the only change SR made to keep up with the times.
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Sci-fi is never about the future its about the present.
I never bought that. It's either excuses, or a lame justification to have over-forcefully "meaningful" sci-fi.
However, you're right of course that we live and learn. I always say that about Star Trek, actually, that its pretty much obsolete sci-fi, fitting to the 60s, but not these days anymore (and not for quite some while). It is true that simply nobody could deny the usefulness of much of SR's technology (which after all had been described already in earlier versions, but it seems few thought about what uses it could all have) anymore.
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There are two kinds of s-f. 'Scientific', which is about the future. And the common kind, where tech is just scenery. I was reading a few books of the lately popular 'mil-opera' genre. Most of it is crap.
Now, Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Bułyczow - they wrote 'science fiction', in which these worlds they created seemed real. For example, if you can, read Return from the Stars by S. Lem. It's transhumanism. Written in the bloody 1961. And that's just one of his works. Good thing there's a return-to-the-roots movement surfacing, in which people are at least as important as tech in books. If you take any generic 'mil-opera', there are no society changes. Just planets, or multi-stellar bodies that are 'just like <culture x>'. That's what also Cyberpunk was about - the Man more than machine.
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You're talking about the difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. I prefer hard myself.
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Well, even soft sci-fi can be scientific. And maybe i just lack the terms. Damnit, my english isnt any good sometimes.
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It's fine. It doesn't really matter anyway. They're pretty vaguely defined categories and it can be hard to tell what's what sometimes. And, of course, people's opinion of what is hard sci-fi and what is soft can vary a lot. So in the end, who cares?
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You're talking about the difference between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi. I prefer hard myself.
Its not everything. The problem is that the difference between the two is defined merely based on technologcial realism. But ignoring technology (besides FTL and lasers...) isnt even the biggest fault of most of sci-fi. The biggest fault is ignoring social changes and trends. So much of sci-fi is "Current Decade IN SPAAACE", and thats just annoying - its lazy. Thats why cyberpunk was so original, because it did took social changes into account. As does Shadowrun still, to an amazing degree. Just look on how much society is discussed in Augmentation or especially Wireless, and just how much thought is invested into it.
That is why I said for example Star Trek its obsolete. It never really much talked about technology besides FTL (and Beaming, maybe), or any social changes (vague utopianism, yeah, but only very vague), so its bad on principle, but also every decade it aired in had its own take on it based on how things are (technology and society wise) at that time IRL. And eventually you just cant "update" an universe anymore, you have to look for a replacement model.
And while much mil sci-fi has creative ideas, its rather trapped in this, too. On the whole, its not a very creative subgenre, yet it dominates the American sci-fi market for a decade, or so it seems to me. Meanwhile, its British authors who lead the creative vanguard - Hamilton, Alistair, Stross, McLeod, Morgan, Asher, Banks...
(Im allowed to judge by nations, since I do so from the outside. And Germany didnt have ANY good sci-fi authors since the Weimar Republic, damnit. No, Eschenbach doesnt count, and the Perry Rhodan authors count as big negatives :p )
But my point is those people think about possible political and social changes, about how technology will aspect our life, about technology beyond just FTL and weaponry, and about how they can absolutely upturn our society. Biotechnology alone in the coming decades, if one just thinks about it - but most sci-fi 'verses and franchises just completly ignore it. And that is whats bad. And that is why sci-fi shouldnt be about the present. The present may correct and update sci-fi, but the genre has to be more then just that.
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But my point is those people think about possible political and social changes, about how technology will aspect our life, about technology beyond just FTL and weaponry, and about how they can absolutely upturn our society. Biotechnology alone in the coming decades, if one just thinks about it - but most sci-fi 'verses and franchises just completly ignore it. And that is whats bad. And that is why sci-fi shouldnt be about the present. The present may correct and update sci-fi, but the genre has to be more then just that.
Sci-fi can't not be about the present, at least the way I was using the phrase. No matter how hard a speculative author tries to determine what the future will be like, he is necessarily looking at it through the lens of the present. There are always unintended, unforeseeable consequences to change, whether technological or social. Even books like the Difference Engine, which take place in an alternate past, are reflective of the time they were written.
More importantly, the characters have to be people that the reader is capable of caring about. So their challenges and values have to be something identifiable to the current reader. We don't even notice a lot of these presuppositions because, being in that society, we take for granted the same things as the authors. The fantastic elements of a sci-fi story are still the vehicles for telling a story. That story has to have some meaning, some emotional reosnance to its audience or what's the point?
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Nomad, we had something called 'Sociological S-F' here in Poland (and in other countries of the eastern block). Their sole purpose was social commentary (on socialism, and such), and the authors avoided censorship by putting it into a s-f world. That's what Lem, Zajdel and others did in Poland, and Bułyczow and Strugaccy (fyi - they wrote the story on which Stalker was loosely based) did in Russia. And there were tons of books like that. I've grown up reading them like there's no tomorrow, so probably that's how i ended socially, scientifically and politically aware before i went to high school. And in a country that whores it's reclaimed independece, that's not really a good thing.
P.S. Yeah, i'm a spoiled bookworm geek, and proud of it.
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All art in general is necessarily dealing with the society and culture in which it is embedded. I agree with Nomad, if you think you're reading sci-fi that doesn't deal with the "present" then you're most likely taking a lot of assumptions for granted. That's not to say that we can't enjoy art from a different time period but merely that we see it in a very different way and we focus on different aspects of it, namely the ones which resonate with current themes of the day. The technology, the scenery, the whole world are secondary to the larger story about human nature which is told....this isn't only the way sci-fi works, it's the way all art works. In good art, the medium is secondary to the message being communicated.
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Hear, hear.
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No, Eschenbach doesnt count
And Andreas Eschbach doesn't count because ... ?
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He doesn't know how? ;D
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e7yYBDHOgg
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No, Eschenbach doesnt count
And Andreas Eschbach doesn't count because ... ?
Eschbach, ah, yes, oops. Well, there are certainly worse authors, but I would not call him among truely good sci-fi authors. Thats what I meant.
Sci-fi can't not be about the present, at least the way I was using the phrase. No matter how hard a speculative author tries to determine what the future will be like, he is necessarily looking at it through the lens of the present. There are always unintended, unforeseeable consequences to change, whether technological or social. Even books like the Difference Engine, which take place in an alternate past, are reflective of the time they were written.
More importantly, the characters have to be people that the reader is capable of caring about. So their challenges and values have to be something identifiable to the current reader. We don't even notice a lot of these presuppositions because, being in that society, we take for granted the same things as the authors. The fantastic elements of a sci-fi story are still the vehicles for telling a story. That story has to have some meaning, some emotional reosnance to its audience or what's the point?
You are right in both points, it's just that I feel "sci-fi is truely about the present" is all too often a cheap cop-out. It is certainly true that sci-fi is kind of restricted by the present, since by the very nature of those things we cannot imagine quite all that will happen in the future. However, we should certainly try. There is no shame in having made a wrong prediction in sci-fi as long as thought was invested into it. That I think is what it comes down: Authors have to invest thought about future society, and about future technology besides the usual sci-fi staples. If they turn out to be wrong, hey, its only sci-fi, no big deal. But if they show no social or technological changes at all, then its bad sci-fi.
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I would not call him among truely good sci-fi authors
Have you read The Carpet Makers, Tor Books, 2005, ISBN 0-7653-0593-3 =
If not, do so (now :) I'm waiting until you're finished)
Dum-de-dum
Done?
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I didnt read it because I already found the summary text to be rather cheesy... Is that even truely science fiction at all?
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Problem with reading the summary is that in THIS case, it's a real spoiler. The book starts out as some kind of medieval fantasy, a story aout an old carpetmaker and his family. FRom that, he perspective and dimension of the narration grows more and more, and the final solution comes as a HUGE surprise.
Ah well.
But tell me: Which SF summary does NOT sound cheesy?
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Hrm, I see. Maybe Ill consider it should I encounter it in a book store again.
And:
But tell me: Which SF summary does NOT sound cheesy?
True enough.