http://nemobay.kaffeklubben.org/">Nemobay

I’m looking forward to Posthuman Studios’ upcoming role playing game Eclipse Phase, a science fiction game with lots of transhuman and cyberpunk elements.

Eclipse Phase’s universe is a conglomerate of sci-fi memes such as transhumanism, singularity, AI, virus, post-apocalyptism and domestic 3D nano printing. While this could be somewhat confusing, I guess it would be possible for a game master to downplay some of the aspects. My experiences are that the more tech you supply your players with and the more these players know the possibilities of it, the harder it gets to challenge them.

The setting is somewhat like this: (Trans)humanity has been plagued by international conflicts and cyberwars. A group of military AI’s known as the TITANS have reached sentience and started to enhance their own intelligence and turned against humanity, thus turning the conflicts into “man versus machine”. This wiped out most of humanity and turned the Earth into a “toxic and strange hellhole”.

Just as quickly as they came, the TITANS disappeared, taking millions of uploaded minds with them, leaving behind a network of wormhole gateways. Known as Pandora Gates, these poorly-understood devices allow instantaneous teleportation to distant star systems—often one-way and/or fatal. Though only a handful of Pandora Gates are known to exist—each highly contested—the foolish, brave, curious, and desperate are already risking certain death to enter and explore what lies beyond.

The transhuman world resembles a three-circled Dante’s Inferno: the center is the suppressive police state where high technology is banned, the periphery consists of societies structured after all the different ideas imagination can conjure up and the fringe is lawlessness and chaos.

To top it all off, a mutating bio-, info- and nano-virus, known as the Exsurgent virus, runs rampantly through humanity, turning its victims into unspeakable reality-altering monsters(!)
The system, as far as I can see, is a basic d100 percentile one, my favorite since its simple and therefore helps keep the players’ minds in the game.

Even though the game eventually will get published as an actual physical book, it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, meaning you can share and remix (expand, develop etc.) the game as long as you: give attribution, don’t use it commercially and share it under the same license.

Now, as said previously, even though I’m looking forward to the publication of Eclipse Phase, I can’t really wrap my head around all the different trajectories explained on the web-page. It’s like they’ve just looked at the contemporary futuristic jabber and thrown it all into the mix; I’m worried that might be too much to get a coherent universe. If I were to create a campaign in Eclipse Phase, I’d probably shave some of the elements off. Then again, all the above information is very concisely written and maybe the source book will help illuminate how this all is supposed to make sense on a deeper level.

But the people at Posthuman Studios deserve respect for this project. I will give the game a fair chance once it’s published.

No Comments | In: Cyberpunk, science fiction | tags: Cyberpunk, postapocalyptic, science fiction. | #

Over at Ficly.com they’re hosting a cyberpunk short story competition, deadline is August 23rd 2009.

Console cowboys. Holograms. Street samurai. Armored battlesuits. All-powerful corporate conglomerates. High-tech drugs. Flesh shops. Jacking into cyberspace to escape the frail confines of ‘the meat.’

The deal at Ficly is that submitted fiction must be limited to 1024 characters, which is the equivalent of 7.3 maxed out tweets. I was unable to find any sufficient term for fiction of that span, but the people of Ficly have dubbed them “Ficlets”.

*struggling to get mind out of gutter*

As to what the elements of a cyberpunk story are, I could go on for Megabytes. But the competition guidelines (somewhat implicitly) state that “the old cyberpunk motto of ‘high tech and low life,’” should suffice.

So wipe off your greasy hands and put away the snacks, because now is the time to write.

2 Comments | In: Cyberpunk | tags: competition, Cyberpunk, short story, writing. | #

First off, I have to warn you that the following will spoil.

Maya is a 12 minute short movie directed by Ben Zasadzki(Twitter). It’s about a girl who’s the test subject of three scientists of dubious character.

The opening scene shows a sneaky girl running around in an industrial environment at night. She’s wearing goggles and carries a gun, all wired together by a system of tubes. She’s an assassin of sorts.

The bulk of the movie portrays a series of neural experiments which ultimately send Maya on a quest to wake up for real.

Cyberpunk Review writes:

“While the philosophical use of VR is nothing new, this piece does make the best of its ten minutes of low-budget cyberpunk.”

I could not agree more with Cyberpunk Review. This movie is the helluvalot more ambitious than most short movies I’ve seen. Normally when people make genre movies, they seem afraid of ridicule and therefore turn to humor and sarcasm for protection against the snickering hordes. This is not the case with Maya. Way to go.

Via Cyberpunk Review.

3 Comments | In: Cyberpunk | tags: Cyberpunk, short movie. | #

Just realized I had this old bookmark waiting for me to come around. We’ll I did, because seeing it, I remembered that it’d looked neat.

The comic takes place in New York City a good hundred years from now. Manhattan has been hit by a tsunami, the consequences; riots, rampant crime and trafficking from the surrounding area, a martial law has been declared and a giant wall erected to normalize Manhattan once again.

This is a society in which hash is legal, in fact you can’t buy a pack without it containing a bit of hash (for your pleasure, of course). Anything open source is illegal, especially open source drugs such as “M6″ (which is actually licensed under GPL).

The language is tough but poetic and there’s a realistic feel to it, I can’t help feeling.

“It made their fashion mods look like cheap costumes. You had to be hard-core to let them open up your skull and stick the gear into your brain.”

The graphic side of the comic is monochrome but of course spiced up with vivid colors where appropriate.

There are six issues up and even though I’ve only read the first one, I definitely look forward to reading the next five. You can read them online either on your computer or your PSP.

Because the series is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, you can also download the files in zip’s if you’d like.

With all this and more, it most definitely is one of those precious pearls one too rarely finds on the Internet.

2 Comments | In: Comics, Cyberpunk, science fiction | tags: Comics, Cyberpunk, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi. | #

“This is the American Dream: All the work - without the workers.”

Sleep Dealer is what I’d call a Cyberpunk-movie. It is Alex Rivera’s first feature film, before that he directed the documentary La sexta sección♣. I would first like to briefly state what my definition of cyberpunk contains and then I’ll explain why I think Sleep Dealer is the first cyberpunk movie for years (if my memory serves me correct).

Personally, My definition of cyberpunk is divided into two; the cyber-part and the punk-part.

Cyber-tech

It takes place in the near future, technology invades the body or there may be a ‘Cyberspace‘.Technology is used to make humans better (mentally or physically). Technology may either weaken or strengthen individual autonomy.

Punk-attitude

Focuses on socially marginalized characters♥ (e.g because of poverty, drughabits or maybe even intentionally). Sympathy with the urban underground. There’s a street attitude in cyberpunk that connects with the bleakness of the genre.

Sleep Dealer as Cyberpunk

Sleep Dealer takes place in near future Mexico. The United States have closed their borders and immigration to America is virtually impossible.

Memo has traveled to Tijuana to work at a kind of plant. Memo has to work in Tijuana, but the work he does takes place in USA because he’s hooked up virtually to a robot somewhere in USA. Memo works in construction. Luz is a journalist selling her experiences via cybernetics and Rudy flies a drone fighter.

The plot thus far does not only revolve around body-invasive technology in what could easily be the near future. Technology also makes it easier for humans to do things with their bodies, but there is an issue of autonomy; Luz: “Sometimes you control the machine and sometimes the machine controls you”. Additionally, the movie’s protagonist, Memo, is marginalized in relation to the world economy, he is almost a slave. While doing his work in Mexico, it is actually benefiting USA, a place where he can never go. Having only seen the trailer, I might be wrong, but it does show clips of Memo running through slum and being at some kind of club; maybe even the urban underground angel angle is there too.

This being said, it does not really matter whether the formal parts of the cyberpunk genre core have been fulfilled; a movie does not have to be prototype cyberpunk to be a good movie.

Thinking about the last cyberpunk movies I’ve seen, I can’t remember any from the last six or seven years (this being a long time, I’ve probably overlooked something). Many cyberpunk stories become to clean when they’re made into movies and then it’s simply not punk anymore; it’s just mainstream establishment scifi.

Why do I bother? - Because the strength of cyberpunk is its social critique. And even though a lot of scifi movies have been critical towards political and economic tendencies, the far future of the space opera is to far away for anyone to really take it seriously. It seems too far fetched to think that we’ll ever colonize space or even have a moon base, we’re to busy screwing each other over on this rock to even contemplate what we might accomplish if the hatches were buried. Anyway, who says that human consciousness can even contain that far future? Cyberpunk seems to propose that we’ve reached information overflow, our memory has become roasted.

♥ That is; in relation to society as a whole, these people are as far as can be from the ones in power; most often CEO’s of great corporations.

♣ According to IMDB, but I also read on io9 that he directed the spoof documentary Why Cybraceros? So I may be wrong saying that Sleep Dealer is his first feature film as well.

3 Comments | In: Cyberpunk | tags: Alex Rivera, Cyberpunk, Punk, sci-fi, science fiction, scifi, sleep dealer. | #