>Thing is, there's definitely a market out there for people who want
>the cyberpunk aesthetic, but don't particularly care for the
>now-outdated version of the future it represents.

I expect there is, or the publishers of the current edition wouldn't be doing it. I'm just not a fan.

>It's worth noting that you personally, if I recall correctly, decided
>to write Iron Age from a standpoint of "what would a cyberpunk
>Japan in the 2030s look like extrapolating from the tech base as I
>know it in the aughts" rather than rigorously restricting yourself to
>extrapolating from what the original writers of BGC knew in the
>80s/early 90s.

I suppose so, though that was not (as the "update" of the Shadowrun backstory obviously is) a deliberate and conscious design choice so much as a side effect of the process. As against cross-pollinating it with the later edition of itself and various bits of the Marvel Comics universe, that particular detail seemed somewhat less than entirely important.

>I was always prepared to write that off as some sort of inherent
>danger in the direct neural interfaces they can't design around and
>merely live with because the things are so useful.

Well... that's fine, I suppose, in a fictional world where electrical engineering never developed as a profession and people still think electricity is a magical fluid that affects that luminiferous æther in various unintuitive ways. Which, given that Shadowrun is set in the Sixth World, I suppose it could be over there. That doesn't excuse Cyberpunk 2020, though. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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