From time to time I sit down with my gaming buddies, and we both lament and observe how well reading and playing cyberpunk games has prepared us for life in the twenty-first century. I don't think that many people expected real life to track quite so closely with many a cyberpunk world penned by the masters, from William Gibson to Neal Stephenson to Bruce Sterling. Strangely enough, many of the lifestyle strategies depicted in these stories have helped keep our own lives (and those of our families) stable and, for the most part nice to live as human history has …

A couple of weeks ago I spent an evening in a dark, cramped bar full of pirate kitsch with a bunch of people who could have stepped out of the science fiction novel of your choice (yes, even the old-school Shadowrun novels). Collectively, we had more electronic equipment than NASA at the times we were born on our person. None of were particularly aware of life imitating science fiction (or is it science fiction predicting life?) or of the horrors occurring around us at the time. On top of all of that, we all sat around appreciating a belly dancer …