The Original Panzerboys

Back when I first read Cyberpunk 2020's Hardwired sourcebook my attention caught on one of the few paragraphs actually devoted to Panzerboys, the hi-tech hover-tank jockey smugglers who dominate Walter Jon William's original novel of the same name. Cowboy and his ilk might have been weirdly absent from the CP2020 book devoted to his own world, but his influence can be felt across cyberpunk RPG settings - what are the odds that Shadowrun's Native American Nations were conceived to give Hardwired-aping T-Bird smugglers suitable borders to scream across?

Anyway. In the book, Walter Jon Williams claims

"The new smugglers are called "panzerboys", after 20th century butter smugglers who ran armored cars across the Dutch-Belgian border in the face of Belgian tariffs on Dutch dairy products. (I'm not making this up, you know.)"

I'm sure you aren't, science-fiction-writer-posing-with-fake-cyberhands-on-back-of-an-RPG-sourcebook!

For years I failed to find any corroborating evidence for this claim, because my google-fu is weak and I don't speak Dutch. However, this has now changed:

THANK YOU, December 16th 1962 edition of the Chicago Sunday Tribune! 

According to the August 24th 1966 edition of the Tuscaloosa News, these bullet proof panzer wagons simply hurtled through border posts at high speed, dropping caltrops to hinder pursuit vehicles. 

I couldn't find any pictures of Dutch butter smuggling panzers. However, I could find pictures of contemporary German border smugglers operating near Aachen, mere miles aways... below the jump:

Cyberpunk Appendix N Part 5: Hardwired!

Another season, another instalment of the Cyberpunk Appendix N, all about cyberpunk, post cyberpunk and sorta-maybe-inspiring-perhaps-maybe? cyberpunk. Once again, the subject of this column isn't what I claimed it would be at the end of the last Appendix N post. I've decided just to give up on making plans for this series. 

The last Appendix N post covered the magical realist tendency in the genre. Today we return to hard, burnished chrome.

This post is about two novels that concern pilots and their futuristic machines. If you're a fan of Shadowrun's rigger class, you want to know all about Hardwired. If your rigger came into eight million nuyen and used it to buy bleeding-edge drones, making you and the rest of the team utterly obsolete, Yukikaze might reflect your mood. Either way, this post is going to be all about jet turbines and heat seeking missiles.

"But he's called himself a citizen of the free and immaculate sky too long to accept the notion that his world of air has bars on it."

When people talk about the Cyberpunk genre - the 1980s literary movement, that lasted roughly a decade from Neuromancer through to Snow Crash - they tend to discuss a canon of classic novels. Neuromancer, Pat Cadigan's Synners, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Walter Jon Williams' Hardwired (and Rudy Rucker's Software and John Shirley's unjustly forgotten Eclipse and George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, before I get angry emails...).

Hardwired even got a classic (some people would argue the best) Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook, written by the same author. It's a great gaming resource. It put me off reading the novel for years.

The sourcebook made Hardwired seem generic. It had a lead character called "Cowboy" who teams up with a cyber'd up female assassin. The cover made them look like extras in Cherry 2000. In my head I built up Hardwired to be the ur-source of every generic B-movie and bad cyber-hacker-samurai novel to crowd the second hand bookshop shelves where I spend too much of my time. 

The sourcebook had all sorts of neat stuff in it. New "realistic" firearms and armour rules. New "realistic" hacking rules. Some interesting adventures. And maybe a page about Panzerboy smuggling, the subject matter that makes Hardwired into something really special.