Book Report: Hardwired
This review contains spoilers for a 40-year-old book.
Hardwired is a pulpy 1986 Cyberpunk novel written by Walter Jon Williams. It follows Cowboy, an ex-pilot turned smuggler, and Sarah, a cyborg assassin.
In the Hardwired universe, the Orbital Corporations have asserted control over much of the Earth leaving Cowboy and the other "Panzerboys" smuggling black market goods across the fragmented remains of the United States. Meanwhile, Sarah is employed to assassinate an Orbital exec. Obviously everything goes really well for both characters and circumstances throw them together as Orbital megacorporations vie for dominance using the "mudboys" and "dirtgirls" as pawns.
Initially I struggled with the book's tendency to just throw terminology out there and let you figure it out (as a lot of 80s sci-fi/fantasy tends to do) but by the halfway mark I was locked in and wanted to find out how these tiny fish were going to fight back against these behemoth corporations.
Reading the novel in 2025, a lot of the speculative 80s technology is super quaint. The mental image of Cowboy, an augmented pilot who literally plugs the control surfaces into his brain, going to a payphone to make a cross country call (and the concept of a cross country call in and of itself, really!) However, it's interesting to see how far back certain tropes come from such as a character who gets trapped in the "matrix" so to speak.
On the whole, Walter Jon Williams' writing is super tight and I think the book's a lot of fun, you should check it out!