Cyberpunk Appendix N Part 2: Spooks!

"The Intersection of Paranoia and Technology"

(This series is all about cyberpunk literature and how it can inspire games. The last post covered Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy and 1950s noir. This one is all about espionage!)

The difference between a cyberpunk novel and a technothriller is the social dimension - the awareness of how technology filters down to the streets and is re purposed and reinvented by the society that uses it.

Or to put it another way, imagine the story after Dale Brown's superbombers have landed, been stripped for spare parts, their ECM systems reused in videogame software, the copper wiring ripped out and used to string illegal power connections between slum houses in the bomb craters...

Many - most, even - of the most famous cyberpunk stories are essentially espionage thrillers where the state-funded Bonds and Ryans have been retired or replaced by freelancers. Inspired both by the wave of corporate espionage stories in the 1970s and noir archetypes, these characters possess a very similar skill set to earlier spy characters, but drop the patriotism and jingoism in favour of punk cynicism (in the earlier stories) or a damaged idealism.  

William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy starts with a literary game: Pattern Recognition. A character with a name pronounced "Case" pursues Marly's subplot from Count Zero using a version of Colin Laney's nodal sense seen in All Tomorrow's Parties.  The major elements of 1980s science fiction fit seamlessly into a present day narrative. Gibson wasn't the first cyberpunk writer to write an almost doctrinaire genre story outside the science fiction genre, just the most prominent. 

Pattern Recognition also introduced the coolhunter into common parlance, and was one of the first books to really deal with viral marketing. The coolhunter relates to the modern pop culture landscape like an adventurer in a dungeon. One day I would love to run a game around the concept, although i'm not sure how it would work in practice. Certainly the GM shouldn't be the arbiter of "cool!"

Spook Country follows a group of spies and journalists through a dangerous search for a maguffin of deep political significance. The characters in Spook Country are older and wiser than Neuromancer, or else more conditioned. The centrepiece of the novel is an intricately described collision between underground factions, where rival ideologies express their differences through tradecraft. I've always been attracted to fanatical or highly trained characters, and Tito's group of interstitial "illegal facilitators" provides wonderful inspiration.