1988 game accurately predicts America in 2020

[Clusterfrack]

That's a lot of diversity.

Forkin A. There’s a lot to catch up on on this thread, but I hope that picture is a good way to sum it up because I’m not reading all the posts.

Here’s my personal perspective. I don’t care about diversity very much. I also don’t like bullies, thugs, or judgmental douchenozzles.
So: I don’t care who/what you are, but don’t be a dick to people or try to make me do things your way.

[TDA]

You're looking at it the wrong way: Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy is merely the 80's projected into the future, similarly his "bridge" trilogy is the 90's projected into the future.


I can see that I am among my people here, having wasted a bunch of my youth in RPG's, including Shadowrun and the aforementioned Cyberpunk 2020 (which I don't remember ever mentioning "woke" culture).

Gibson himself has said a number of times that his science fiction stories are "about" the periods in which they were written. Pithy Gibson Quote:

"I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible."

Paraphrasing S.M. Stirling to bring it all back home, the point of the setting (of a book, or Cyberpunk 2020) is to set the stage on which some major swash can be buckled. Different stories need different backgrounds, and an RPG about combat between lots of balkanized factions is going to need lots of balkanization, fighting, and factions.

I'm totally willing to entertain discussion of retrocausation and unintentionally precognitive works of fiction, as I've already revealed myself to be the kind of person who remembers when that was the kind of thing the internet was for but 1) Cyberpunk 2020 is probably not an example, and 2) it may not amuse the mods.