Shadowrun - Technobabel

Stephen Keneson

Netrunning or decking seems to be a pretty central theme throughout the Shadowrun series; it is also fairly central in one form or another through many of the “cyberpunk” type novels I have read.

Basically it is a more advanced version of the Internet as it is now, sometimes it is called the matrix, William Gibson was fond of using this term, and it may be where the idea was originally lifted from. Instead of sitting at a computer, people plug themselves in through special hardware of some form or another and experience (hallucinate?) it as a sort of digital landscape.

In this story our main character has developed the skills to use the net directly without needing a “deck”, this is very significant since basically everybody needs this piece of hardware in order to decode the information from the pure data stream, by plugging in direct he has much more freedom and can do basically anything.

Unfortunately when this skill was obtained (through his initiation into the tribe with this ability) he lost his entire memory and has no idea who he is. The start of the novel sees him waking up inside a body bag with no memory.

As the novel progresses he starts to re-discover him self and regain some memory, what he discovers is that his journey to his current state began with one of the major corporations trying to gain the upper hand with the special skills he managed to develop.

Apart from the personal journey story thread that runs through the novel, there is also sub plots involving the corporations and a special sitting of the corporate court on Zurich orbital, a space station that is the home of the corporate court.

To learn how the corporate law side of things works in itself is great in regards to world building, making this one of the must have Shadowrun novels in ones collection.