Welcome to the world of 2050
Well this is the first of the Shadowrun novels, and not surprisingly, the first one that I will review. There were a few of them written, and I did read some of them, however, as I have said previously, in these later stages of my life the role-playing game spinoffs novels have ceased to impress me, and the Shadowrun books are no exception. They tend to be poorly written and rushed and their only real purpose is not only to continue to make money from successful product, but to also give some atmosphere to the role playing world in which the novel is set. The major catch with that is that a lot of GMs may like the world, but will change aspects to suit their own style, which means that when one reads the novel, the aspects that that particular GM dislikes and cause it to be a little jarring at times.
I will not go into details of these particular novels, but will rather explore aspects of the Shadowrun world as I visit each of the novels that I have read. For this one I will give an overview of the roleplaying world. Shadowrun is set on Earth beginning in the year 2050 (aligning with 1990, the year that the system was first released - Shadowrun is always 60 years ahead of the year in which a supplement is published). This world is a vastly different place to the world that we known, and a simple definition would be 'Cyberpunk meets Dungeons and Dragons'. The world is a world of the dark future (see Blade Runner, or Neuromancer for an idea of what the world of the Dark Future would look like, though there are a lot of other books and films that could do the same job) where governments have become impotent and the corporations have risen to positions of great power.
Much has changed since our world though, and there is a reasonable time line outlining the events that brought about these changes. The most important change is that magic has re-entered the world, and along with magicians we also have magical beasts, diseases, and new races into which a minority of humans have metamorphed (or goblinised as Shadowrun calls it). Discrimination has moved away from skin colour to simply looking different, and it turns out that orks and trolls, the more uglier of the goblinoids, tend to find themselves at the bottom of the social pile. Along with all of this, dragons have also made another appearance (as the title of the book suggests), which is not surprising because one cannot have a science-fantasy would without dragons.
The idea of the game is that magic is not a new thing, but rather a reawakened reality. For some reason magic left the world centuries ago (most likely because all of the practitioners were killed off) and the magical forces went into remission (and creatures such as dragons went into hibernation). However, in the early 21st Century the Native Americans rose up against their oppression, and in a desperate battle, one Native American released a reign of destruction on the American forces. This pretty much turned the tables and the United States was forced to break up, and much of the West was handed back to the Indians, while the east was split into UCAS (the United Canadian and American States) and the CAS (the Confederated American States).
Most of the action is set in Seattle (I wondered why it was not set in Los Angeles, but I guess the developers may have been more familiar with Seattle), which is an independent city state (governed by the UCAS) that is surrounded by Native American Nations. I suspect that they develop Seattle this way as a means to create a frontier city, sort of like the Wild West meets Cyberpunk.
One of the things that I did not like about this book is that the Shadowrunning team that the protagonist encounters turns out to be the team that was used in the rule books as an example of how to create various types of characters. This I found to be very corny - it just did not sit all that well with me. To an extent it made it appear that they were trying to push the marketing aspect of the game a bit too much.
