Hardwired

Hardwired is like a datablast straight from the cyberpunk id. Guns-and-drugs-and-sex-and-tech-and-power all tangled up and flashing with neon lights.

Cowboy is a panzerboy, the pilot of an armored hovercraft smuggling lifesaving medicine across what used to be the midwest, before the orbital corporations shattered Earth's government in a hostile take-over proceeded by meteor bombardment. Sarah is a bodyguard and assassin, hustling in Tampa to buy herself and her brother two tickets off-world. When a job and a betrayal brings the two of them together, they decide to fight back: for money, for revenge, for respect, for the sheer thrill of armored combat in the glow of the interface.

What transpires is some high-octane action in a neon show more hellscape, as Cowboy and Sarah slash across a damaged world writhing under the exploitation of the orbitals. There's all the cyberpunk tropes you'd expect: Addicts, deviants, megacorps, mercenaries, operators, and that awesome mid-80s computer tech. Hardwired doesn't aspire to high art or grand statements, but it gets what it means to be an outlaw and to fight for what you believe in against something huge and slick and inhuman in all aspects.

This is one of my new favorite books, a cyberpunk essential, and has catapulted Williams way up my 'to read' list. show less

It took me a while to pick this one up. I was slightly put off because of the comparison with Gibson's Neuromancer, book that I love but one that at times is so impenetrable due to lingo and weird psychedelic visuals 9I enjoy sometimes to let myself to the story flow but hey, most of the time I like knowing where I am).

I am glad I picked this one up because in form this book is nothing like Gibson's work and for me that is good thing. If you want me to compare it to some of the other authors in the field I think that Richard K Morgan is the first author that comes to mind. I am sure that Cowboy and Sarah would be quite an Envoy team.

First lets see what this book has in common with Gibsons Neuromancer when we look at two main elements show more that Gibson is known for:
- hardly pronounceable made up words and terms - no
- frantic, almost Jodorowski-like psychedelic scenes that make you scratch your head and force you to re-read chapters to figure out what happened- no

Walter Jon Williams prose is much more clearer and on the spot and because of it it is much more enjoyable to me.

While Gibson's books sometime read like a fast forward movie with occasional glitch so that viewer can figure out what a heck is going on (imagine Unreal tournament match at high speed), Williams paints the picture much clearer, more real. It is still fast action movie but one I can follow and actually see with my inner eye. While with Molly and Henry I only managed to follow the story without figuring out what is that actually drives them, Cowboy and Sarah are much more fleshed out characters, I can follow their flow of thought and their motivations.

Book is straight forward action fest - from the first Cowboy's smuggle run to Sarah and her wet-work, various mercenaries, spies and hit-men to grand finale, all out conflict (air battles are pure joy to read) and something very, very satisfying at the end :) In my opinion book is cross between Neuromancer (when it comes to descriptions of neural interfaces and the "flow" hardwired people activate when things get funny), Tom Clancy's No Remorse, A.J.Quinnell's Tom Creasy (Cowboy is one hell of a merc, when he is on a quest you do not want to be in his way) and Burnell's Rythm Section (Sarah's love-hate feelings towards the Orbitals, making the difficult decisions and always ending as played out party but picking up and pushing on).

Book has it all: corporations, mercs, high-end technology, AI, rich in heaven, poor in dirt. You name it it's there.

Unfortunately as most dystopian books this one was also prophetic in the portrayal of the society, way drugs and industrial corporations (pharmaceuticals especially - I like mention of Pfizer in the book - it seems this industry giant was as controversial in 1980's as it is now - as a matter of fact it seems that entire society in 1980s was more wary of big industry (Big Pharma, Toshiba, Hughes etc) unlike today, unfortunately) control the world below, keep people in fantasy world of freedom while they control all the channels and means of distributing the goods (legal and illegal).

This disconnect between two societies is shown through the manager of one of the Orbitals (corporations) - Roon. I cannot but shiver every time I read parts with this guy in. Reason? I cannot but see parallels between all the elite in our world (of any political persuasion) that feels this need to enlighten the majority of populace (read rest of us) while themselves live in completely other universe from that very populace (remember that Marie Anotionette's famous "Let them eat cake [instead of bread]" - well they all suffer from the same syndrome).

Again while the world in this book is interesting and full of intrigue it is world we must not thrive for, because that world means humanity went upside down completely. Seriously!

Highly recommended book to anyone who wants to read about dystopian future and at the same time read about greater than life characters engaged in lots and lots of action :) show less

I don't know why I never got around to reading this back when I used to see it all the time in the bookstores, even knowing that I was such a cyberpunk fan and the whole field was blowing up left and right. Maybe it was all the hardware and the focus on guns and metal that turned me off. I didn't really care about this kind of "punk" so much as I cared for the "cyber".

Granted, back in those days, I might have picked it up, read the blurb, maybe a few random dozen pages, and concluded that it was too cowboy-ee for me to care and I never would have begun anyway.

But today, I have a slightly more refined sensibility. I still don't care for westerns that much, but at least I've picked up the classics and seen that they were, in fact, good. show more I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood.

So while I'm still not a huge fan of the genre, I can at least appreciate what it does very well, and in some cases, much better than any other type of fiction. The main characters are Cowboy (yeah, that's what he goes by,) and Sarah, and both of them are very well rounded and interesting characters, full of subtle and not so subtle flaws and merits, detailed and fleshy histories, and an eventual love story that is neither gushy, idiotic, or verbose. It was built on quiet respect and blooming friendship. It was almost completely unlike what I was beginning to suspect the novel would wind up being.

Oh no, though, you say, what happened to the cyberpunk aspects? Was there lots of computer-y stuff and explosions?

Why, hell yes, I say! Dogfights in the sky! A battle against the orbitals, lots of scary smuggling runs, but more importantly, a heroic message about getting out from under the short-sighted concerns of the crazy, sick, and bodyless brains in crystal. The worldbuilding is more than solid, filled with past and lost wars, body-sculpting professions, and cocaine-rockets. (This did come out in 1987, after all, and it both shows and shows itself off well.)

Was I expecting it to be a bit of a knock-off of Neuromancer, riding the wave of such a fantastic book? Well, yeah, I guess I was. How did it stand up? Great, if you like more hardware and aerial battles that would make rather more pedestrian space-operas hang their heads in shame. I actually got into the battles, and I've never been one to particularly like military fiction.

I was very impressed not only by the execution of this novel, which never felt much like a knock-off, but because I really got into both the main characters. They weren't flashy or snarky. They weren't bigger than life like Holden in the Expanse or unreliable but still awesome like Kvothe in Name of the Wind.

Cowboy and Sarah felt like real people with real problems in a real world doing their real goddamned best in a really shitty situation.

I honestly liked this book a lot, even if it isn't my normal cup of tea. Why isn't this author sitting on more laurels? show less

Note: I just re-read this, and decided to give it an extra star. It's slick and fast and I still like the characters. Big fun from one of the seminal cyberpunk novels

Though it involves a somewhat dark vision of earth's future, Hardwired is a fun, fast-moving cyberpunk thriller featuring flawed heroes.

Considered one of the novels that jump-started the cyberpunk movement (and released not long after William Gibson's Neuromancer helped cyberpunk achieve mainstream status), Hardwired is a different kind of cyberpunk novel -- one that details the attempts of a few individuals to remain free.

In some instances, it borders on space opera, but Williams' prose is lively and rich, and the book incorporates elements of post apocalypse urban show more cyberpunk alongside military SF and even some western elements.

So much cyberpunk is uniformly depressing (darkness, rain, etc), but Williams manages to evoke the spare, unforgiving landscape of the American Southwest, which ultimately releases the reader from a bout with what I call cyberdepression.

I first read it in the late 80s after hearing it was an homage to Zelazny's Damnation Alley, and I've read this novel several times since (when the covers fell off my original copy I bought another, and bought the ebook as soon as Williams released it).

Filled with deeply flawed heroes, deeply creepy bad guys and a lot of people struggling to be human (and failing) in often inhuman circumstances, Hardwired is pure fun -- a high-powered, high-octane adventure. show less

It took me a while to get into this book but once I got halfway through the book, I was hooked. Unfortunately, there a few unrealistic ideas that prevent me from fully immersing myself into the story. And here's the obligatory spoiler warning, read on at your own risk:

1 - I can't accept that the panzers, a sophisticated form of tank/hovercraft hybrid, are able to cross the USA from coast to coast in what seems to be about 2 days. Having read it while on a road trip, I can't see how these vehicles can go across obstacles such as forests, mountains and buildings at such a fast speed.

2 - On the last page, we learn that Reno overwrites Roon's consciousness. To me it would seem unbearable for the emotionally weakest and vulnerable character show more to take over the consciousness of the most horrible character especially considering that he's a unapologetic pedophile!

3- I don't understand why there's a division between east and west coast. It seems to be just an elaborate way of manipulating supply and demand but simply selling to everyone seems like the easiest solution. I do believe that in the end, this is the final outcome and makes the world a better place.

Other than that, I loved both of the main characters and how their relationship grew through time. The main plot was fairly solid. The body enhancement concepts were interesting. The control of IT was well done considering the age of the book. Mostly because the author thankfully didn't try to either over explain it or try to pass it along as some kind of metaphor.

I liked this book way more than Necromancer because I understood what was going on! It didn't feel like a dark and gritty cyberpunk novel. Somehow, I always imagined beautiful the characters action taking place on nice sunny days. I even had to read the definition of Cyberpunk just to be sure. But it did portray a brutal and dangerous world that I enjoyed learning about.

I'm definitely going to read this one again later on and add its two sequels on my list. A solid recommendation on my part. show less

Skiffy cyberpunk goodness from 1986. One of the earlier works in the genre and it's a good one. How this story has not yet been turned into a movie is puzzling. The characters, narrative, action, and dialogue are all very cinematic. I will definitely be reading the sequel, Voice of the Whirlwind in the near-future.

Not a bad book. In fact, fairly decent -- for its time. The problem is -- and this is NOT the author's fault -- it's basically cyberpunk, and back when this was written, William Gibson was the standard and the genre wasn't glutted like it is now, but unfortunately, if you read it for the first time now, you encounter many now-formulaic and predictable cyberpunk plot devices and descriptions, which again is not the author's fault, as it was fairly original for its time. It's just that I felt like I've been there, done that a hundred times while reading this, and that's my fault, because I've OD'd on cyberpunk and for the most point, am now avoiding the genre since not many novels seem able to break the formula. So, this is probably a show more four star book for its time, but sadly, I'm giving it only three due to the fact that I didn't enjoy it as much as I would have in the 1980s. Again, this shouldn't reflect on the author, who appears to be a decent writer. It's just that it's a tired genre, and this fits into the formula quite well, even as a predecessor. Nonetheless, if you're into cyberpunk, recommended. show less