I originally posted this over on the Collective Cyberpunk Community a few years ago. It was written by myself. You can find the article on NeonDystopia with some images from the movie Escape from New York here:
https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-books-fiction/you-flew-the-gullfire-over-leningrad/"You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad..."
Observations about a recurring motif in Cyberpunk media
Hello fellow Hackers, Punks, and My Little Pony fans,
I'd like to share my thoughts on this line of dialogue, delivered by Police Commissioner Bob Hauk in 1981's
Escape from New York. It is just a blink-and-you'll-miss-it line and the event is not given any more exposition or explaination. However, for William Gibson, this particular line was to have a profound impact.
"I was intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake 'You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad, didn't you?' It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best SF where a casual reference can imply a lot." - William Gibson
But first, let's stay in the dystopian future of
Escape. The novelization of the movie describes how Snake lost his eye in World War III's Battle of Leningrad, and while I haven't read the novel, I speculate that Snake was a member of some Black Ops outfit whose mission it was to fly over Leningrad to bomb an installation or maybe drop paratroops. The "Gullfire" was probably either a stealth plane or a glider, which would help to explain why Snake was chosen for the
Escape mission; Since he would be a crack glider pilot, he could take the glider to the top of the World Trade Center, not an easy task as evidenced by the fact that in the movie, he just barely manages to land the vehicle.
Either way, Gibson finished writing
Neuromancer a few years later and what do we find in this "Cyberpunk Bible"? The character of Armitage alias Colonel Willis Corto, the former member of a Special Forces team who were to fly ultralight aircraft deep into Russian territory during World War III to disable important enemy computer systems. However, they were shot down but a surviving Cort managed to escape over the heavily fortified Finnish border, which could imply a mission theatre far in the northwestern part of Russia, next to Finland, and the general region where Leningrad (St. Petersburg) is located.
Sound familiar? Wait, there's more...
In 1989's Pen & Paper roleplaying game
Shadowrun, the timeline that leads to the game universe's future 2053 includes a decade-long conflict in middle and eastern Europe called the "Euro-Wars", involving most nations of that region including Russia, Germany and Poland. The conflict was ended rather apruptly when one night Swedish airspace monitors picked up what they believed were British "Nightwraith" bombers flying across the conflict zone and successfully destroying vital command centers of the warring factions, while at the same time unknown assassins killed key generals from both sides, forcing the belligerents to sign an armistice.
I found no sources that directly state if these occurences in literature were directly influenced by the Gulfire line from
Escape, but I would think that it's not a coincidence, especially since it's all in the Cyberpunk subgenre (if you want to call Shadowrun Cyberpunk, that is!).
Anyone else got something like that, where story elements, plots, or just throwaway lines like the one discussed here, had obvious influences on later works?
One more that comes to mind are the Tychon Colony Massdrivers from
Cyberpunk's backstory, which the Eurospace agency installed in space to enforce their will on earth by letting asteroids fall on or near U.S. cities (Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C. in this case). This concept was found earlier in Walter Jon Williams' 1986s
Hardwired, where the earth's wealthy elites live in luxurious space stations that can drop rocks onto the planet's surface without any viable defence possible. Of course, Williams was one of the playtesters of the original
Cyberpunk RPG and R. Talsorian Games also later published a sourcebook for
Cyberpunk detailing the world of
Hardwired.
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