Lately I've been reading The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolf. I began reading it once, when I was a teenager, but I didn't have the vocabulary or the perspective to understand it. The books are set millions of years in the future, when the sun itself is fading as glaciers creep inexorably toward the equator, and the author recklessly overstuffs the narrative with archaic terms, instead of invented ones, to describe things which would be unfamiliar to us. Only slowly do we come to understand the concrete reality behind the archaic terms: "destriers" are genetically engineered riding sabertooths; "voulges" are energy weapons; a hundred long-forgotten professions, from uhlan to heirodule to claviger, make appearances, and their true nature is obscured at first, or forever, by the linguistic veil.
What is more, the author is deeply unreliable. We sometimes find the narrative disjointed, and are forced to deduce what he has left unsaid; or contradictory, and he confesses later that he lied. And most of all, things which the narrator takes for granted may never be explained. When I first read the books, I did not realize, for instance, that his guild's tower is a decommissioned rocket ship, or that the "broad snowy shoulders" of the mountains indicate that the mountains themselves were carved into vast statues millennia in the past.
So the books have many fascinating traits, but the thing I've been thinking about is the idea that civilization is cyclical; not just the rhythms of a civilization, but the concept of civilization. And not just the rise and fall of civilization, but the prevalence and decline of cultural habits, technology, modes of thought. It only takes a cursory look at the rise and fall of Egypt, Greece, Rome, and then the Renaissance, to understand that certain aspects of economic achievement go hand in hand with military and cultural developments. "History does not repeat, but it rhymes."
The Book of the New Sun is set in a world which has rhymed so many times that the rhymes themselves have become the vibrations of a bell, one whose tone has nearly faded away.
In fantasy novels, one recurring theme is the return of magic to a world where it has been long absent. The entire urban-fantasy genre of the 80s and 90s was based on this idea—obviously Shadowrun is a notable example, not least because it embraced the concept with a madcap glee. Unsong takes the concept and applies a single majestic transformative twist: instead of magic, it's the Biblical god and all his angels... and demons. For a long time, an archangel's cabalistic "program" converted the light of God into the laws of science. Now it is breaking down, and prayers work again, with predictable effects for human society. Worth reading just for the Nixon/Hell alliance.
Other works focus on the dying of magic, usually to pave the way for a modern technological world: The Magic Goes Away, by Larry Niven, is one of the most on-the-nose examples, but it is a common ending for a genre which is generally wistful for an idyllic spiritual-but-not-religious past.
My favorite variation on the theme, for sheer cleverness, is Fred Saberhagen's "Empire of the East" series, which tells of a world where magic works because, at the very dawn of nuclear war, a supercomputer rewrote the rules of reality. ICBMs in mid-flight became demons; just as deadly, but something mankind could fight and defeat over the next few millennia.
Consider the contrast here between Unsong and Empire of the East. They're mirror images in that regard, aren't they? In one, a supercomputer switches the universe from science to magic, creating demons. In the other, an archangel switches the universe from magic to science, suppressing demons. (And in both cases, programming is the tool, and the universe is viewed as fundamentally algorithmic; who says not everyone should learn to code?)
And consider the parallel between the fall and rise of civilization, with all its cultural, economic, military, and philosophical trappings, and the fade and return of magic. Are these fundamentally the same story?
So of course I keep thinking about these ideas in the context of Shadowrun. Why does the Shadowrun world have magic? Did it have magic in the distant past, and the magic is returning? Or is some new force coming into play, which takes its shape from the legends buried in the human mind? Are the laws of reality algorithmic and subject to revision, as in Unsong and Empire of the East? If so, why?
I don't know how deep you should expect to get into this kind of question. Shadowrun is a fundamentally unreflective game. Why is there magic? Because it's fucking badass. Why are there elves? Because elves with cyber-arms are radical. Why are there vampires? Because evil vampire CEOs are sinister and cool. Why are there dragons? Because if a dragon ran for president it would be fucking hilarious.
But I just can't turn off my brain—so beware.