Ross. E. Lockhart, over at Night Shade blog, muses on Cthulhupunk, in which a short-lived attempt was seemingly made to fuse SF cyberpunk with Lovecraftian tabletop RPG games in the 1990s.
I can see the many points of connection with Lovecraft’s original fiction: isolated alienated semi-powerless not-really-heroes with a mystery to solve; underground routes in the cultural landscape that lead to forbidden knowledge when hacked; blurring at the boundary of the real/unreal; a ‘reality’ that is outside the code of language; alternate/multiple planes of existence; flying around through weird multi-coloured glowing geometries; a degraded contemporary society stratified by class and race; mind transfer and personality augmentation; unknowable artificial intelligences pulling the strings behind the scenes and projecting their avatars into the real world. Throw in some bio-engineering and gene-splicing ‘gone wrong’ for sea-dwelling humans… could be awesome. Lots of literary potential for crossovers and mash-ups there, I’d say.
Perhaps the failure was more of a market failure on the side of the RPG game marketeers in their rather constricted “durh, Lovcraft iz black magik?” market, than a failure of the imagination on the part of writers? Correct me if I’m wrong (I’ve been away from literary SF for a while) but literary writers have never really had a go at such a melding?
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In the 1990s the gamer population split in two, along with the games industries. Those interested in the games themselves took the obvious path into RPG computer gaming. There they didn’t have to waste time doing math or character development. Time that they spent working, or raising children. Those who played the games to develop characters, or daydream ‘what mythological creature defines me as a person?’, continued to buy mass-produced picture-books, books eagerly provided by the now corporately-run tabletop RPG gaming companies.
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