World-building works the same way, but even more powerfully, because when you're building a fictional world, what you pay attention to becomes real. Indeed, the longer you focus on something, the realer it becomes. Go back to one location or subject often enough and you'll discover new textures and nuances and relationships. And in service to this new complexity, a sort of fuzzy penumbra will start to form at the periphery of your attention, things that must be true, in order for all the detail to be possible, but which are not quite real, because you've never turned your attention to them.
In a way, this is kind of the curse of science fiction. It is often about changes in society, or the world as a whole, but the bulk of those changes must exist in the penumbra because narrative, as a form, focuses its attention on specific characters. The starship Enterprise is real, because that's what the show is about, but the utopian society of the broader Federation is vague and in flux, because it's only the background that supports the show's various plots.
The reason I call this a "curse" is because a lot of the time our peephole into a sci-fi setting is centered on characters and situations that are at odds with the world. You've created a utopia, but the only things that are real inside that utopia are the restless adventurers who can't be content with utopia. Or, to bring it closer to our topic of the day - you have the decaying late-stage capitalism of cyberpunk, a world driven by consumerism and conformity and corporate control, but your attention is mainly aimed towards criminals and outsiders, who don't directly experience the bulk of the world's disfunction. I've read how many of these books now and I still don't know what it's like to apply for a job or rent an apartment or go to an emergency room in the Shadowrun universe.
Which speaks to the power of attention. I can infer, from the penumbra, that these things must be pretty bad, but I don't know. This discussion is also, believe it or not, actually, specifically relevant to Target: Wastelands in that this book turns our attention on parts of the Shadowrun world I've never seen before.
But more than just a bunch of new locations, this book turns our attention to a category of places that had hitherto been neglected - the physical terrain of the planet Earth. "Wastelands" is a bit of a perjorative title, but it really just means "places with a low population density," which makes the terrain the star. This is the book you use if you want to tell stories of "Shadowrunners vs nature."
At its worst, it could be a bit "Wilderness Survival Guide," but at its best, it was about people, and the way they adapted to their environment. The challenges here are not purely physical, but are sometimes cultural. You're not just going to the desert or the arctic, but to meed the Bedouins or Inuits. I can't say for sure whether the book did them justice, but it was nice that they were there.
But what I found most interesting about Target: Wastelands was the way it expanded the setting's penumbra. Megacorps have WMDs. Warfare is a professional sport. Space is a lot more active than I'd have previously assumed, though I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with an off-world population that is canonically just large enough to support a single mafioso (actually, it's unclear how many other people work with Lee Calder to "[run] a good share of vice at Apollo and Icarus," but whoever he's working with is probably not officially in the Mafia), but it helps flesh out a tech level that's been tantalizingly vauge thus far in the series.
What's becoming clear is that there is a tier of technological power that is beyond the mercenary equipment shown thus far. People live in space. There are space prositutes (who have to be discreet, due to the small size of the communities, but nonetheless are able to carve out a living). Megacorporations can build underwater cities. Shiawase Atomics controls multiple fusion reactors. There is some serious edge of the singularity shit going on. Or, at least, I have to assume there must be, in order for this book to make much sense.
And I really wish I could turn my attention that way, focus on what the system looks like to the winners, not just the outcasts. What are these corpos scheming for?
Obviously, it was never a realistic possibility in a book that purports to be about "hostile environmnets," but the very fact that the powers that be are making a profit off these places suggests that their reach is a lot longer than I'd previously assumed.
Ukss Contribution: One of the new pieces of equipment you can buy is chainmail socks to help protect against snakebite. I have to assume that "titanium micromesh" is a more practical than it sounds as a clothing material, but I like how weird and specific a precaution it is.
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