

Shadowrun - it had a tremendous effect on my actual worldview (as did other cyberpunk works). The near-future cyberpunk setting offers plenty of opportunity for satire, being rooted in this world makes some geography and history relatable and mixing it with fantasy elements does not only make it more colorful and varied, but also prevents unrealistic stuff from breaking my immersion, because it does not pretend to be realistic.




Hard to describe. I started to feel the same way about the real world as I did about the world described in the books. Like the high tech, low life concept - just because we have shiny things does not mean we have a good life. And developing a tendency for rather diverse and/or weird friend groups who band together to fight for our place in this world. I mean, the books obviously crank everything up to 11, but the prower structures seem very similar.
I was reading Shadowrun books about evil megacorporations who are mightier than nation states and indigenous liberation movements against them, so I paid a lot of attention to real world politics when I read the news about stuff like NAFTA and the EZLN or the MAI agreement.