Hardwired - Hardcover

Williams,Walter Jon

3.91

5,104 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0356148726 ISBN 13: 9780356148724

Publisher: Macdonald, 1987

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"Hardwired is a tough, sleek juggernaut of a story, punctuated by strobe light movements, coursing to the wail of jets and the twang of steel guitars-glittering, nasty and noble- and told in a style perfectly suiting its contents. It has all my favourite things- blood, love, fire, hate and a high ideal or two. I wish I'd written this one." Roger Zelazny Corporate Orbital blocs tyrannize a balkanized Earth of flooded wastes and vast slums filled with zonedancers, panzerjocks, dirtgirls, buttonhead and nihilist cults, where city lotteries give prizes for guessing each night's murdered dead. Yet the worst excesses of the plastic-bodied, implanted, overdosed meat hustlers can't match the evil outside the i gravity well. The blocs control contraband and commerce; they spread recombinant plagues just to market the cures. But now the criminal underworld and guerrilla underground have merged: there is a single chance to shift the balance of power, foment a corporate crisis, and hit the Orbitals with a short, nasty war. A war fought by commandos as lethal as their killing machines- because they are themselves becoming machines, hardwired. Cowboy: the ex-jet fighter pilot; a smuggler with metal eyes and infrared vision, who dreams of Old West glory while riding the shattered highways, his brain circuitry hardwired to his 300 mph armoured aircar. A new Ukrainian president and Russians bent on making the world a living hell.

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About the Author:

Walter Jon Williams has been nominated for every major science fiction award, including Hugo and Nebula award nominations for his novel City on Fire. His books include The Sundering, The Praxis, Destiny's Way, and The Rift. He lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife.

From Publishers Weekly:

After his thoughtful, elegant novel Knight Moves, Williams wrenchingly shifts gears for this heavy-metal adventure. It is set with acknowledgement in Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, when corporate Orbitals control what's left of a postwar America, now balkanized and armed to the teeth. Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals. The story, though, is buried under an elaborate techno-punk style of the sort William Gibson popularized in Neuromancer. In both cases, it is a pose, a baroque nostalgia for Hemingway and film noir; it only plays at nihilism, terror and despair. The best effect is Williams's future version of a brain-scrambled vet: a dead buddy of Cowboy's whose scattered bits and pieces of computer memory now constitute a ragged semblance of a man. Such nuggets are hard to find amid the amplified, rock-'n-roll prose.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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