Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook (1989) marked a change in direction for 2300AD. The space part had failed to capture the imaginations of players, so GDW retreated to Earth in hope of capturing some of the gritty cyberpunk-style science fiction that was ascendant at the time. That might sound like a cash grab, but this world was always designed along the same lines of William Gibson’s Sprawl, as laid out in Neuromancer.

I like this sourcebook. It paints a convincing picture of an Earth that has become a kind of backwater in the wake of interstellar colonization. It doesn’t really get down to street level, with a lot of space devoted to the big picture of the governments of Earth, but you can picture the streets pretty easily. The art helps, too — that Janet Aulisio cover is fan-fucking-tastic, one of my favorite bits of RPG cyberpunk. It looks like it could be just round the corner from Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time cover art. Tim Bradstreet is one of the interior artists, too. He’s past his journeyman phase, but isn’t quite the gritty, urban Bradstreet we’re used to. But that guy is in there, you can see it. It’s neat.

There’s the expected accompaniment of cybernetics — smart guns you can link to your brain, finger knives right off of Molly Millions. There is a stunningly brief treatment of cyberspace, the net, hacking and such. The explicitly cyberpunk stuff doesn’t come off, honestly. It feels too self-conscious, not natural, sort of like it was a rush job to capitalize on the sub-genre’s sudden surge of popularity in hopes of saving the line rather than being a labor of love.