Transhuman Space (2002) is an elaborate science fiction setting for GURPS. It presents a near future of technological marvels — there are many, many sourcebooks for it, but this is the core book. It’s…interesting.

Early on, it purports itself to be the optimistic look to the future, portraying human civilization as it teeters on the edge of the technological singularity. Perhaps its just because I am writing this in 2022, but what the authors call optimistic feels rather naive to me. In the world of the game, disease has been cured, the ozone layer repaired, the nukes disarmed. There are rough patches, sure — their pandemic happens in 2015, for instance — while many of our current day political alliances have been rearranged thanks to war and economics. That stuff…feels less than plausible. And, honestly, seems undercut by the art direction, which mostly portrays a galaxy that looks dark and unpleasant. The cover in particular, perhaps because of the color palette, strongly evokes the first Dead Space game for me, and that videogame series isn’t know for being chipper.
The space stuff fares better, with a solar system getting steadily and believably colonized in the wake of new technologies, like fusion power and nanotech. The business of space travel and living in space is rooted in pretty hard science — in this way it reminds me a bit of The Expanse.
It is hard to judge Transhuman Space because its constituent parts seem so…arranged in opposition with themselves. It seems to really want to be a hard science fiction setting, but lacks the grounding that would come from the extrapolation of the socio-political reality of the 21st century. Things weren’t great in 2002, remember, and now, a fifth of the way through the century, they haven’t really improved. If the timeline of the past is so skewed, it makes it hard to take the world built on that timeline as seriously as the authors do. Maybe the supplemental material brings it home — we’ll see eventually, I have a big pile of these books to look through yet.






