|
Nigel Findley was the author of a number of Shadowrun books. He wrote the novels 2XS (1991), Shadowplay (1993), Lone Wolf (1994), and House of the Sun (1995). He also wrote a dozen sourcebooks: Paranormal Animals of North America (1990), The Universal Brotherhood (1990), Native American Nations 1 (1991), Native American Nations 2 (1991), Neo-Anarchist's Guide to Real Life (1992), One Stage Before (1992), Tir Tairngire (1993), Corporate Shadowfiles (1993), Lone Star (1994), Paradise Lost (1994), Double Exposure (1994), and Aztlan (1995). Nigel passed away in 1995.
The Cutters are profiled in the Underworld Sourcebook, p.103; and New Seattle, p.107. The Cutters are a first-tier gang, roughly equal to the Ancients in size and influence at the beginning of this novel.
As in previous books, Nigel displays an intimate familiarity with the Seattle area.
Rick Larson appears a few times in the Lone Star sourcebook (Nigel Findley, 1994), under the street name Wolf. Larson/Wolf is fond of Soviet vocabulary -- he makes regular use of the Russian words priyatel (friend, buddy) and bolshoi (big, huge). Larson also makes a cameo appearance in the novel, House of the Sun (Nigel Findley, 1995).
Argent's opinions appear frequently in shadowrun sourcebooks, particularly those written by Nigel Findley. He is also a minor character in 2XS and Shadowplay, and the main character of Run Hard, Die Fast (Mel Odom, 1999).
p.9: The Cutters originated as a Los Angeles street gang in the 1970s.
p.27: "For a moment Blake reminds me of sims I've seen of lions in the wild,before they all died out." Wild lions are extinct, apparently. Or at least, Larson believes they are.
p.30: first mention of the Eighty Eights, a Chinese triad later described on p.50 of the Mob War campaign book (Steve Kenson, 1997). The Eighty Eights are affiliated with the Tigers street gang (described on p.50 of Mob War and p.103 of New Seattle; first appeared on p.250 of Into the Shadows -- It's all done with mirrors). The Tigers are the third largest gang in Seattle after the Ancients and the Cutters, which undoubtedly contributes to the Cutters' rivalry with the Eighty Eights.
p.31: Real coffee -- not soykaf -- runs about fifteen nuyen a cup in downtown Seattle. Natural foods (as opposed to soy-based, vat-grown, or synthetic) are hideously expensive in the Shadowrun era.
p.31: Unsubtle plug for America Online. "I spend at least some time every day logging onto UCAS Online, this big public bulletin board service on the Matrix. ... UOL has a drekload of chill features, but the big selling point's the massive message base. Lots of slags from all over the continent -- even some from Europe sometimes -- log on to connect with special interest groups or real-time online free-for-alls about anything and everything." Sound familiar?
UCAS Online (UOL) is a major Matrix Service Provider (MSP) according to Target: Matrix, p.14
p.41: One of the most obnoxious trog-rock bands is Darwin's Bastards. Among their hits are Scrag 'em All, Bloody Day Coming, and a cover of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. The band is mentioned on page 17 of Shadowbeat (Paul Hume, 1992).
p.59: "She's tall -- probably more than two meters in bare feet -- about as tall as me." That would make them around 6'7" tall. Larson's a big guy. Other than this single observation, though, Nigel never remarks on his protagonist's unusual size. Makes me wonder whether he got the math right.
p.85: Findley describes an anachronistic author named Nicholas Finnigan. Nicholas Finnigan = Nigel Findley? Is he casting himself as a minor character in his own book?
p.101: "I key in 114 for directory assistance, then when the synthesized voice starts yammering, I enter the 'special function' code known to all Lone Star employees (and to most of Seattle's shadow community as well). With 'special functions' engaged, the directory search engine looks through more useful files than just the standard name-LTG-address drek 114 usually gives you."
p.108, 124: Cat Ashburton's search routines assemble a list of Tir corps with licensed security forces in Seattle but no official commercial presence -- Crystalite Environmental Research Corporation, Griffin Technologies Incorporated, Telestrian Industries Corporation, Margaux Enterprises, and Starbright Advanced Synergetics. TIC is described in the Tir Tairngire sourcebook (p.78), the others are not.
p.112: "Sometimes I think I'd have been better off born in the Dark Ages, like back in 1994 or some drek." This book was published in 1994. Funny.
p.117: Extended description of Tarislar.
p.118: a little Sperethial vocabulary: celénit, "unevolved monkey-man". A bit different from the glossary on page 67 of the Tir Tairngire sourcebook (Nigel Findley, 1993): "celé n. A non-elf homo sapiens. celénit n. Insulting form of celé."
p.130: Finnigan describes Shadowland to Larson. "Shadowland is a BBS, with no fixed geographical location. The server hubs and nodes that make up the network 'float', like illegal crap games. Rarely are they in the same place for more than a week at a time. So, too, the access lines -- the LTG numbers and communication protocols -- are highly variable." Interesting to note that Larson, an experienced professional undercover agent for Lone Star, has never heard of it. Apparently, its existence is not widely known outside the hard-core shadow community. Not in 2054, at least.
p.131: Larson has a fairly critical opinion of Shadowrunners: "Too many people -- especially in Seattle, I've found -- seem to put shadowrunners up on some kind of pedestal, viewing them as fragging 'heroes of the underdog' or some such drek. ... Me, I think they're scum -- mercenary street drek, no more heroic than the guttermeat informers and stoolies and rats I spent too much time dealing with in Milwaukee. They'd sell out their mothers for a few nuyen, and the only reason they wouldn't do the same for their fathers is that they generally don't know who their fathers are." He reiterates this opinion a few times prior to his meeting with Argent, who shatters his preconceptions.
p.152: "To a cop's mind all people can be lumped into three simple categories: cops, civilians, and scumbags. ... the 'civilian' classification tends to drift a bit. When a cadet first leaves the Academy, all fired up and eager, naive and green, he might tend to rate civilians as right up there, almost as admirable and worthy of attention as cops. That doesn't last long, though, and soon civilians drop way down the scale to rest only a few notches above scumbags."
p.171: Argent says, "James Telestrian was a 'spike baby,' born before the Awakening. Rare, but it happens. James is fifty-five, born in 1999, according to Peg's research. Makes him probably the oldest elf in the world." Not quite. Does raise the question of whether James Telestrian is a genuine spike baby or an Immortal. I tend to think spike baby, personally, if for no other reason than I'd like to see the number of Immortal Elves in the world kept under an even dozen.
p.172: The corporate maneuvering between Lynne and Timothy Telestrian is mentioned on page 78 of the Tir Tairngire sourcebook.
p.179: "I scan the bands for some music hot enough to blow the cobwebs out of my brains. Classic Mercurial, maybe, or the latest by Marli Bremerton and the Shadows." References to the published adventures Mercurial (Paul Hume, 1989) and One Stage Before (Nigel Findley, 1992), respectively.
p.179: And now the News:
"Among the NAN states, Salish-Sidhe and Tsimshian are still slagging each other off in council meetings, and threatening war over some new resource-allocation scheme. Pueblo doesn't like Ute now, while Sioux -- the old enemy -- seems to be the flavor of the week. In Europe, the Serbs and the Croats are at it again, and everybody still hates the Israelis. Three universities are holding celebrations of the one-hundredth anniversary of some slag named Tolkien publishing the first book in some trilogy or other, and an Atlanta Neo-Anarchist group wants to declare a 'Day of Shame' about the activities of someone called McCarthy, also from a fragging century ago. (Get with the present, will you?) The biz news boils down to the megacorps still giving it to the consumer up the hoop."
p.189: Doc Dicer knew Argent before he had his arms replaced.
p.212: Fewer than 5% of the employees of Telestrian Industries Corporation are human.
p.214-220: Larson and Argent discuss Lone Star's Military Liaison division. Their observations are summarized on pages 24-25 of the Lone Star sourcebook as "runners' comments" by Argent and Wolf.
p.217: "A standard UCAS light infantry squad is ten rifleman and a sergeant -- eleven guns, and one of them a mage. ... Assault rifles all around, probably with all the toys including grenade launchers. Depending on the mission, maybe one or two are packing assault cannons, and there's always one slag humping along a heavy machine gun or maybe a fragging minigun if they're feeling really militant." A platoon is "four squads, with a combat mage for astral support."
p.221: Argent summarizes the intertribal squabbles in the Tsimshian nation, detailed in Native American Nations, Vol. 2 (Nigel Findley, 1991), and the subject of that sourcebook's adventure scenario, Eye of the Eagle.
p.224: The grand prize for least-accurate interior illustration goes to this one. Raven's aircraft is described as a McDonnell-Douglas Merlin V/STOL tilt-wing turboprop, where one pictured looks like an effing passenger plane. NVC launches a single Ares Type Four self-guided missile at them, which loses its radar lock and augers into the ground, not the two rockets shown passing the jumbo jet in the picture. Feh. Sloppy artists bug me. Did Joel Biske even read the book, or was he just asked to draw a picture of missiles missing a plane?
p.255: Argent says, "I can trust my chummers. Like Peg, and Jean, and Sly, and Dirk ... And there are the ones I used to trust before I lost them -- Hawk, and Toshi, and Agarwal. Not many, Wolf, but some. Shadowrunners don't have many friends, that's true. But we cling to the ones we've got." Peg and Jean appear in this book. Dirk Montgomery, Hawk, and Toshi worked with Argent in 2XS. Sharon Louise Young (Sly) and Agarwal appeared in Shadowplay.
p.260: The strike force uses mortar-launched combination chaff/smoke shells. The smoke is composed of "living microscopic blue-green algae cells in a water suspension. The cloud of dispersing water droplets makes it fragging difficult to see clearly, and the fact that there are living organisms in those droplets extends the effect to magical sight too."
p.279: This is the scene nominally depicted in the cover picture by Romas Kukalis. Except that Larson is wearing combat armor, and the Samuvani-Criscraft Otter is only disabled, not blown in half and hurled twenty meters into the air. I'm not even gonna talk about the Watersport. I've got no objection to artistic license, but it can be carried too far. Sigh.
Aftermath: The biological warfare agent decimates the Cutters in Seattle. Though they remain a first-tier gang abroad, they are all but extinct in Seattle for years. Even in 2058, four years later, they are still 75% under their previous strength. It's core leadership survives, however, including Blake, Springblossom, and Vladimir (according to the gang profile in the Underworld Sourcebook).
|
