![]() ![]() ![]() Earth lies prostrate beneath the lash of the Orbital powers, and Earth’s Balkanized nations have no choice but to let the Orbitals plunder their remaining wealth. Such nuggets are hard to find amid the amplified, rock-'n-roll prose. Hardwired, the acknowledged inspiration for the games Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2077, is now available in a deluxe edition for its thirtieth anniversary, with new content by the author. 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. ![]() Most are science fiction or fantasy -Hardwired, Voice of the Whirlwind, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire to name just a few - a few are historical adventures, and the most recent, The Rift, is a disaster novel in which 'I just basically pound a part of the planet down to bedrock. ![]() In both cases, it is a pose, a baroque nostalgia for Hemingway and film noir it only plays at nihilism, terror and despair. Walter Jon Williams has published twenty novels and short fiction collections. The story, though, is buried under an elaborate techno-punk style of the sort William Gibson popularized in Neuromancer. 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. 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. After his thoughtful, elegant novel Knight Moves, Williams wrenchingly shifts gears for this heavy-metal adventure. ![]()
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