Neurohard was a worldbuilding project of Shirow's intended for others to use to create stories, games, or whatever else they could think up. I don't think this has ever been published as a collection, and unfortunately Shirow lost most of the original work for this in the 1995(96?) Kobe earthquake. To the best of my knowledge, he has not gotten back to the project since that time, and is leaving it as a shelved project until some time frees up for him, right alongside Appleseed 5 and Dominion:Conflict 2(aka a long time from now). As I recall, the original plan was for Neurohard to run somewhere around 80 pages, but what with the earthquake and all, only 50 or so pages saw print, along with a few covers and closing panels.
Now I know there's a pretty good writeup about Neurohard over at the Hyperpages, but this writeup's gonna be all me, based almost entirely on looking through my scans, along with a few references from other sources (like the Hyperpages) when my memory kicks in about them. ... Okay, I can't write any sort of plot summary with this, without heavily leaning on the Hyperpages info... So I guess I'll fall back on what I know about the project already, show some scans, and make a few observations... First off, some of the basics.
As stated above, this was a world-building project by Shirow, which, while being a story of its own, was intended more for other authors to use as a setting for their own stories. Set on the Planet of the Bees, the focus of the story seems to be about a group of explorers (be they military, mercenary, or otherwise) that come to investigate the planet. Of course, given the nature of the project, Shirow has filled most of the pages with piles of descriptions and diagrams of the technologies and lifeforms involved, like the horeshow-shaped transporter in the scans below.
Being a Shirow work, there's plenty of his odd character designs, spending nearly equal amounts of time looking normal and switching over to a deformed view. Landmates also show up, as one might expect from a Shirow sci-fi project, though there seems to be only one design present here. Aside from that, there's really not a whole lot for me to get into, lots of strange aliens, hive-like structures, and bees that look more like wasps than bees to me. So umm... enjoy these scans, and hope that Shirow gets a chance to get back to this.
