Voice of the Whirlwind

Walter Jon Williams gets spookiness, writing a sci-fi espionage thriller that rivals vintage Le Carre. The protagonist, Stewart, is an old insurance policy, a clone with the 15 year old memories of his original, recently murdered on a space station. Last thing he remembers, he'd finish mercenary training with the Icehawks before a mission to Sheol to recover alien artifacts. After that, well, his original was a busy man with a lot of unfinished business.

A little less stylized than Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind tracks Stewart across the solar system and into a deadly game of corporate politics and biological warfare against the alien Powers, an advanced race that holds the key to massive wealth, and possibly an escape from the brutal show more cycle of corporate Darwin Days and ideological entropy. It's also not as compelling, but one chapter alternating Stewart making a drug connection in LA with an account of the war on Sheol, is as fine a writing as anything in scifi. show less

This was truly a great read.

First thing first - I do not know why is this called Hardwired #2 because I could not see any connection points. Could be that I am missing something ..... in any case that's my 2 cents on this.

Back to the story. Main protagonist is Steward, data broker and gang banger in his youth and later member of elite mercenary outfit Icehawks sent to fight against other corporations on mysterious planet of Sheol. Well, to be more precise protagonist is clone of Steward (so called Beta) with the 15 year-gap since original Steward (aka Alpha) did not update his memories in the meantime. What Beta knows is that Alpha was killed on one of the colonies, and that his private life is in shambles.

Beta Steward, after series of show more incidents and deadly accidents involving him and people around him, soon decides he needs to look into conditions under which his Alpha died. And to achieve this goal he needs to become a storm - whirlwind in the title.

I wont go into any more details because book needs to be read, and I truly do not want to spoil anything for anyone. Its a truly great story.

Authors style is wonderful, way world is portrayed is pure joy. You can feel the people walking around, hear the noise. One of the recently read books that had same quality was Neon Leviathan by T.R. Napper (highly recommended if you did not read it already). There are no heavy details on technology or society, but through mentions and descriptions of the [brave new future] world we see how corporations now rule everything, how national states collapsed and how cybernetic enhancements and genetic manipulation started to dominate everything. In this way Richard K Morgan's style seems to echo this author's cyberpunk style. And I like this a lot.
I also liked the elements of story related to indoctrination of mercenary troops by corpos (use of quasi religion with elements of Zen), very similar to the way Dune universe troops get indoctrinated (I guess proven methods are there to remain eh :)). Also ideological rules from various corporations - what can be seen, read and consumed - might have seemed out of this world few years ago but now .... not so much.

Everything that makes a good action story is here: hero trying to bring his past to the light, advanced technology, space flights, commandos, secret services and spies, assassins, wars on distant worlds ..... you name it it is in there. Story flows very naturally and keeps you interested 'til the very end.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone looking for cyberpunk action/spy story. show less

Voice of the Whirlwind is set a century after Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired. In the gap, the orbital policorps have fought a war over the right to plunder alien ruins. A new group of aliens, the Powers, have stepped in to end it, staking out their areas of influence and making those star systems no-fly zones. Steward Etienne, a hero for one of the losing policorps, is murdered, and his clone, Steward Beta, is revived with memories that are fifteen years out of date.

He has to retrieve his lost history and solve his own murder.
It is a cyberpunk world dominated by Gibsonesque media. In one program, a free-fall kabuki actor appears in a drama set in “a genetically modified posthuman society” threatened by “the return of violent show more human primitives from a forgotten space colony, a comedy of manners laced with acid and appalling violence.”

The story also has a post-Vietnam feel. In a 2011 interview with Lightspeed, Williams says, “With Steward I wanted to ring some changes on the idea of the combat veteran who returns home to find that he has changed too much to appreciate his homecoming.” Fifteen years of amnesia in a post-human world will sure do that. show less

The third instalment in the Hardwired Series.

A super good story and certainly no complaints on that aspect of the book, but the telling of it leaves a bit to be desired.   As in Hardwired, we are told a tale without any explanation as to the background, only for that to be revealed later on.

At 6% i found myself suddenly realising what's happening in this vagueness that i'd been reading which left me with no choice but to go back to the very beginning and begin again.   Why Walter can't just tell you what you need to know before you read it instead of sometime afterwards i have no idea. There's a few other places in the book that i was left feeling like i'm going back and forward in time and feeling like i'm not quite sure where i am show more any more.

It is rather annoying because he is certainly a great crafter of story, with great characters and world building, but then goes and lets it all down by writing things out of sequence and all over the place.

But, it is worth putting up with this downside to enjoy a really good story.

And this officially ends the trilogy, although i believe that Aristoi is kind of set in the same universe with a fair few references to Nero, one of our favourite characters from Solip:System: so i may just have to dive into that in the not too distant future. show less

The setup is thought-provoking: is your clone a person distinct from yourself, even though he has all your recorded memories? Is he responsible for your actions as well as his own? How can your clone have free will given that will and consciousness are all technically in memory anyway? Well, I guess they're new memories. How much genetic shift arises going from clone to clone, and how?

How can anybody have the bravery to write futuristic fiction? Look at this author: for a 1987 book he fixed on genetic engineering and faster-than-light travel, but had no clue that there would be wireless communications or hand-helds! Intentional mutants with 4 or 6 legs still have to run to a phone booth to make a call! I wouldn't have the nerve for show more guesses so public.

The writing, by which I mean the sound of the narrator's prose, is terse and intense. It's exactly the way a man is when he's concentrating on some job he wants to do. So Williams got that right.

I liked all the Zen stuff. It's apt for a clone who wakes up with nothing and has to build up from there, which is what this highly memorable and sympathetic hero does. show less

Sci-fi of the sort that would make a good action movie...
When Etienne Steward signed up to go fight a war on Sheol, he took the
precaution of buying insurance... In the case of his death, a clone
would be created, complete with the most recent backup of his
memories. Now, Steward Beta has been activated - but for some reason,
the most recent backup was 15 years old. Steward realizes that he no
longer really knows who his Alpha was - he's suddenly divorced; he
even had a second wife (who also divorced him) whom he has no memory
of even meeting. He has no idea what happened to him as part of the
mercenary group Coherent Light, who he was fighting for. But it's
common knowledge that the war was a disaster, ending in a massacre.
But it's not at all show more certain that the original Steward was a war
casualty. As a matter of fact, it's beginning to look more like he was
murdered.
Suddenly, an old friend, Griffith, shows up, offering an opportunity
that could help Steward find out what happened... but without the
knowledge of what his Alpha was tangled up in, he may be in over his
head.
Plenty of action and mystery are balanced by a focus on ethical concerns. show less

Your basic space opera cyberpunk tale.