Nach Jahren des Wartens und der Ankündigungen ist die neue deutsche Cyberpunk-Ausgabe vom Verlag Games-In nun beim Drucker und wird demnächstigstens erscheinen!
Link zur Cyberpunk-Seite
Category: book
William Gibsons take on giving a city description shames my GM skills
.
Here in my Akasaka hotel, I can’t sleep. I get dressed and walk to Roppongi, through a not-unpleasantly humid night in the shadows of an exhaust-stained multilevel expressway that feels like the oldest thing in town. Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer – equally sheer, skintight, and microshort – and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami.
William Gibson is god. The bits of text are from a piece he wrote for Wired, the cyberpunk geek monthly.
Craphound von Cory Doctorow übersetzt
“Craphound”, eine Geschichte von Cory Doctorow (den man u.a. als Autor von boing-boing kennt) steht unter einer cc-Lizenz. Das erlaubt es z.B. auch, die Geschichte ohne rechtliche Probleme zu übersetzen. Christian Spließ hat das gemacht, jetzt steht die Geschichte auf deutsch zur Verfügung. Danke!!! Auch die Übersetzung steht unter der cc-Lizenz. Bedeutet also, dass man die Geschichte auch umarbeiten darf, etwa ihr ein anderes Ende geben – wenn man mag. Großartig!!! Ich zitiere aus dem Anfang der Geschichte, um euch den Mund wässrig zu machen:
Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.
Die ganze Geschichte gibt es auf deutsch hier, auf englisch dort.
Free Cyberpunk Novel Online
Rudy 
Rucker decided to publish his new novel online, for free. He even uses the CC-Licence! This summary is taken from his own site:
Postsingular and its sequels represent Rucker’s return to the cyperpunk style of his classic Ware tetralogy. But this is 21st Century cyberpunk; Rucker calls it psipunk.
Postsingular takes on the question of what will happen after the Singularity-nanotechnology takes on the power of magic?
A mad scientist decides it might be a good idea to create a giant virtual reality simulation that is running a copy of Earth and of most of the people in it. Fine, but in order to create this simulation, the mad scientist plans to grind our planet into a zillion supercomputing nanomachines called nants.
Ultrageek Ond Lutter and his autistic son Chu find a way to block the nants-but then Ond can’t resist infesting Earth with a congenial breed of quantum-computing nanomachines called orphids.
The orphids coat the planet, one or two per square millimeter, and now everyone is on-line all the time, and everything is visible in the orphidnet. Artificial life forms emerge in the orphidnet, these are helpful agents called beezies, and they pyramid together into a superhuman planetary mind called the Big Pig. People can mentally access the Big Pig and feel like geniuses-with the catch that when they come down they can’t really remember what they saw. Those addicted to this new kind of high are called pigheads.
The lovers Jayjay and Thuy begin as pigheads, but Thuy manages to kick the habit to work on a vast orphidnet-based narrative called a metanovel. Jayjay continues his sessions with the Big Pig in hopes of learning more about science-and this puts a damper on their love affair. But the mad scientist is still machinating to bring back the nants and destroy Earth, and Thuy and Jayjay reunite to save the world.
It helps that Jayjay has figured out how to do teleportation via the orphidnet. And that Thuy has made friends with a giant, ethereal man from a parallel world called the Hibrane. Jayjay helps Thuy teleport to the Hibrane for help. The Hibraners do have a fix for Earth’s problems, but it’s going to be a bigger change than anyone ever imagined. Earth is on the verge of a postdigital age, more postsingular than anyone ever imagined.
Nature will come alive.
(Via Boing-Boing)
People who say I'm dystopian are middle class pussies!
Says William Gibson in this Interview
On the seamless net being woven
“There’s some enormous number, millions and millions, of Iranians who are about to get their first cell phones. The infrastructure has been built. That’s an interesting side of Iran we don’t hear so much about. And you know, they’re not just getting cell phones, they’re getting Internet. What is that going to do to that country? The government is not going to be able to control what those people are watching. I just find that amazing, really.
“We’ve grown up thinking: ‘Over here is the Internet, over there is cellular telephony, and here are iPods.’ It’s not going to be like that. That stuff is all just one cloud of stuff and it works together and you can’t just get a little piece of it. The kids being born today will grow up finding the quaintest thing about the past was that people had these different devices that had discrete functions.”
(Source: This Interview)
Fantasy Literatur
Ich soll mir A Game of Thrones. (Song of Ice and Fire) von George R. R. Martin bestellen, meinte Ivan. Ist es gut?
I Just Finished Reading "Spook Country"
It was hard to stop reading to eat, drink and sleep. The book is just wonderful. I won’t spoil it for you, if you haven’t read it yet.
Check out this video in which Mr. Gibson himselfs tells us how he feels about his book.
[youtube 3pO_hY1JIeY]
You can buy the book on Amazon-Germany and support my blog here.
MAAS-NEOTEK GUIDES
MAAS-NEOTEK GUIDES
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UNITS
In “Mona Lisa Overdrive”, William Gibson’s second novel, Kumiko has a AI travel guide that simply rocks. Here are rules to create one for your cyberpunk 2020 game. But beware – it doesn’t really fit the average tech level of the cyberpunk 2020 universe.
Author: Syberman
Taken from Datafortress 2020.
“The ghost awoke to Kumiko’s touch as they began their descent into Heathrow. The fifty-first generation of Maas-Neotek biochips conjured up an indistinct figure on the seat beside her, a boy out of some faded hunting print, legs crossed casually in tan breeches and riding boots. ‘Hullo,’ the ghost said.”
[ Mona Lisa Overdrive ]
GUIDE: BACKGROUND
The origins of the first artificial intelligence guide is unclear, the event was never recorded in the history books. In an unknown lab, in an unknown country, the first biosoft was developed, a device capable of storing hundreds of memory units. The technology was in its embryonic stage when the designer Janice Grubb first became interested in its applications. Since the creation of the I.G Algorithm in 2014 she had become increasingly worried about cyberspace and transcendental sentience. If her theories were correct she had not only created life, but trapped that same life in the endless bounds of cyberspace. The biosoft technology was the answer to her conundrum, how to free, that which could not be freed. It’s unclear how her Internet paymasters reacted to her idea’s on the future of cyberspace, what is clear, is that Grubb allowed herself to be extracted to the Maas Corporation. Continue reading “MAAS-NEOTEK GUIDES”
Mafia Hintergrundwissen
Wer sich mit der organisierten Kriminalität befasst (s. dazu auch das Mafia Job Starter Kit), dem sei folgendes Buch ans Herz gelegt.
Roberto Saviano: “Gomorrha. Reise in das Reich der Camorra”, Carl Hanser Verlag, München. 21,50 € (Bei Amazon bestellen).
Der Autor muss seit Erscheinen unter Polizeischutz leben. Es soll SEHR realistisch sein. Ich habs eben bestellt – eine Rezi folgt.
Sunday Poem
“My daddy he’s a handsome devil
got a chain ’bout nine miles long
And from every link
A heart does dangle
Of another maid
He’s loved and wronged.”
So, what’s cyberpunk about this poem?