I sometimes feel like there is a strange consensus now a days that pulp just doesn’t sell. When I was a kid in the 90’s, bookstores had reams of cheap serialized fiction that feels to me now like a descendant of those cheap pulpy novels of the 1950’s that are starting to disappear. Whole damn bookcases where filled just with the Dragonlance series. One of it’s sci-fi equivalents was Shadowrun.
Shadowrun as a universe is not something I relish. It is large, complicated, and one has to start with the Mayan calendar, wherein the year 2012 ushered in a new age where magic and magical creatures return to the world as we know it. If you saw that awful netflix movie called ‘Bright’, it is a lot like that, but it isn’t awful, and it stems from a 1980’s aesthetic that assumes that The Ramones and The Clash would one day become more significant than the Beatles, and we would all one day have a facial piercings as a norm. The Shadowrun world is a weird one, because while on the one hand you have to imagine Elves, Orcs and Goblins, the occasional minotaur, walking around in a world that looks like Blade Runner, and at the same time have to imagine that the same Orcs and Goblins are picketing outside of the Coca-Cola factory where they work because they aren’t being allowed to unionize. Also, they are every now and again jacking into The Matrix, just not one with Keanu Reeves in it.
It’s a complex world. And people love it.
I didn’t research this too strongly, but I think this is the first of the published Shadowrun novels. It certainly feels that way. It gives you, a bit too frequently perhaps, tidbits about the greater lore of the world. But it does that with literally every aspect of the world as it appears in the RPG.
I cannot help put parallel this a bit to some of the Warhammer novels I have read. They too are strongly set in world created for a game, but I feel like the guys in charge of Warhammer novels took a lot of steps to not do what made this book feel like a cluttered slog. They recognized that their universe is too rich for one narrative, and so they tend to streamline their narrative to focus on just some of the factions of their universe. It features one or two different fighting forces, and thus readers new to the universe won’t find themselves too confused.
I think this novel mentions every little bit of Shadowrun lore. And it was a bit much. It might actually be a good place to start for someone wanting to get into the lore of this.
Failures in Polymathy 