James Nicoll Reviews

Bob Charette, Paul Hume, and Tom Dowd’s 1989 Shadowrun provided FASA with its entry into the flourishing cyberpunk genre. Shadowrun​’s twist was to add magic to the setting, much to the irritation of the original cadre of cyberpunk authors, who saw the development as puerile. Of course, magic is only part of the traditional box of world-building props tabletop rpgs use. Another is entrenched racial hatred, which Shadowrun provided in spades: just prior to the return of magic, the US had been pursuing a bitter attempt to find a final solution to the Indian Question, which is why once the Native Americans had access to magic, they carved out an ethnostate for themselves.

Curiously, the idea the US might occasionally go batshit crazy towards one visible minority or another doesn’t seem all that outrageous. The bit where the Native Americans turn out to be magical… Oh, well. In this case they were just ahead of the curve but it is another example of the magical Native American in fiction and part of a greater pattern where colonized people are seen as closer to (super) natural forces¹.

What did make my eyebrows go up a bit more was how FASA introduced the traditional fantasy races. One in ten people were suddenly transformed into orks, trolls, elves, dwarves, in a process called ​“goblinization.” They were immediate social outcasts and when the violence ended, society was divided along traditional rpg lines, with each new variety of human distrusting the others.

The speed and degree to which people who had been until recently unremarkable humans sorted themselves into the traditional fantasy ethnic factions seemed unlikely. After all, why would family members turn on each other just because one of them now had tusks? Granted the existence of anti-vaxxers proves there’s a minority of parents who would rather see their kids dead than unusual.

It belatedly occurs to me the authors might have intended some parallel between how normies react to goblinization and how Americans reacted to AIDS, which was definitely not a mass resolve to cue the disease, at least not until it turned out celebrities could get it.

Note that one in ten people goblinize, which is the same fraction tossed around for the percentage of gay and lesbian people in the general population. Maybe the authors were trying to make a point! That point apparently being ​“people are dicks.”

1: Don’t get me started on psychic Celts.