Don’t Create the Torment Nexus

Hardwired (Hardwired, volume 1)

By Walter Jon Williams

29 Apr, 2025

**The Realized World**

28 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 29 Apr, 2025

**The Realized World**

28 comments

1986’s Hardwired is the first volume in Walter Jon Williams’ Hardwired cyberpunk series. To my surprise, the title is not camel-capped.

Having decisively won the Rock War, the Orbitals provided the defeated Earth with a bold New World Order. Key axiom: that the Orbitals should extract as much short-term wealth from Earth as possible.

This state of affairs provided Cowboy and Sarah with very different careers, careers fated to intersect.

The state governments in the balkanized remnants of the United States¹ saw the profit potential of tariffing goods traversing their territory. This in turn created an opportunity for bold entrepreneurs like Cowboy, shuttling goods across state lines without the bother of paying those onerous tariffs.

Sarah is a gun for hire, performing useful errands that sometimes require violence. Before she was a gun for hire, Sarah was a prostitute. This combination of skills earns her a job offer from the mysterious Cunningham: seduce and murder an orbital courier, before stealing the package the courier was delivering.

Having accomplished her task successfully, Sarah’s reward is a shaped charge through her dwelling wall. Sarah is largely unscathed, but her drug-addicted brother Daud is badly injured. Daud will require extensive, expensive reconstruction. Difficult to arrange when there’s a contract on Sarah’s head.

Cowboy meanwhile has suffered his own betrayal. Cowboy’s path crosses Sarah’s. Not only do they have betrayal in common, but the same corporation is persecuting Cowboy and Sarah: Temple Pharmaceuticals. Temple’s resources are vast. Cowboy and Sarah’s resources are miniscule. Therefore, the only logical course of action is for the pair to take down Temple Pharmaceuticals.

~oOo~

Credit to Alex Blechman’s viral tweet for the review title.

As the introduction explains, this novel was inspired (in part) by Dutch butter-smugglers², whose efforts to avoid import duties involved souped-up, armoured cars. I believe that WJW’s version of cyberpunk was an independent development, another example of authors converging on similar visions for possible futures.

So, not my favourite WJW. While the ending is a bit abrupt, that’s not my issue. As you will see, there is a lot to… well, like isn’t the correct word. This is not a future that one likes. Appreciate would be better. It’s just that I was never much of a cyberpunk fan, so this is a case of the wrong reviewer for the book in hand.

A detail I’d completely forgotten: very early in the novel, Cowboy reminisces about how Texans wrecked New Mexico by illicitly diverting water in pursuit of short-term profit, then draws a direct comparison with the Orbitals, who are:

just another kind of Texan — someone who wants to rape away the things that keep you alive, replacing nothing, leaving only desert.

That may not be the most negative view of Texas I’ve read, but it is definitely a contender.

I’ve used the cover of the first edition of Hardwired that I own, my nearly pristine Tor mass-market paperback. I do own later editions, including the 30^th Anniversary edition.

As the author points out in the foreword to this later edition:

The things the reader was supposed to find shocking, back when I wrote the book in 1983/84, are now so commonplace as to be part of the background hum. Unending multiplatform assaults encouraging people to heedless consumerism? Check. Drugs widely advertised, including TV? Check. Governments in thrall to multinational corporations? Check. Balkanization of the former Soviet bloc? Check. Worldwide climate change? Check. Rising ocean levels? Check. Widening gap between rich and poor? Check. Entire populations slavishly devoted to celebrity and fashion? Check. Vast unregulated manipulation of securities market by unscrupulous insiders? Check. State-controlled military being replaced by mercenary forces? Check. Pharmaceutical companies making vast fortunes off human misery? Check.

And as I write this in 2020, I find another element of the book has worked its way into the present. Unstoppable pandemic? Check.

There is one element in the book that did not manifest in real life. The orbital industries everyone expected back in 1986 are nowhere in sight. As well, the technology in this novel is surprisingly reliable. Apparently planned obsolescence is not a thing. To balance that, tariffs have made a surprise appearance, in book and in real life, so at least there’s that.

Plus, something WJW got bang on is that the techbros who have commandeered the top of the social pyramid in Hardwired possess infinite appetite married to a complete lack of vision. Having conquered the Solar System, they could reshape it however they like… but that would require more self-knowledge than the oligarchs can muster.

One of the reasons I landed on a WJW review project is because he has over on his blog documented many aspects of his career. Readers interested in how the sausage is made should check out this entry and this entry. As well, the 30^th anniversary edition has an informative introduction.

Hardwired is WJW’s best-selling novel³. Luckily for you, because that means Hardwired is still in print.

Hardwired is available here (Smashwords), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), and here (Kobo).

The tabletop roleplaying supplement is available here (DriveThru). Should I review it?

I did not find Hardwired at Bookshop UK, or Chapters-Indigo and while I did find an entry for the dead-tree novel at Words Worth Books, it was for the Nightshade edition. As that edition does not appear on Nightshade’s site, I am pretty sure it is out of print.

1: USA delenda, along with most other nations. Canada is never mentioned by name (ebooks make that easy to check) so it’s possible they didn’t bother dropping rocks on us… but that’s not the way I would bet.

2: There was at one time a thriving margarine-smuggling industry in North America, smuggling US margarine into Canada. That’s kind of odd. I think it was because US margarine looked more like butter than Canadian margarine did. Or maybe the US’ comprehensive lack of effective food regulations meant US margarine was cheaper. Still, even cheap margarine is still, ugh, margarine, down there with “frozen edible oil products.”

3: Something that did not fit into the main body of the review: this is the WJW work that led to a lawsuit when Wired Magazine (founded 1993) decided the Hardwired novel (published 1986) was infringing on their IP.

Comments

Jeff V

According to the blurb on Barnes and Noble, Hardwired was actually the inspiration for Cyberpunk. I'd always assumed it was inspired by William Gibson.

Charlie StrossJeff V

Hardwired was circulating but unsold for years before Gibson wrote Neuromancer … but in the event Neuromancer came out first, so everyone who doesn't understand how publishing works dismissed Hardwired as a cheap knock-off.

(Much the same goes for K. W. Jete's Doctor Adder, which was … well, I'm going to have to re-read it some day when I have too much will to live: I recall it as being not so much cyberpunk noir as Vantablack™.

Rupert BoleynCharlie Stross

I read Hardwired some time before I read Neuromancer (I assume I crossed paths with the former in the local library first), and I thought that the latter felt like a pale imitation of the former. Yes, I was aware that Neuromancer was published first. It still felt inferior at the time. I'm not sure why, but Gibson's novels never really grab me.

Rose EmbolismJeff V

That would probably explain the increased amount of sexist fanservice in Cyberpunk 2020, compared to Neuromancer.

Robert CarnegieJeff V

I wonder if "Metropolis" or "The Machine Stops" should be considered?

Jon HRobert Carnegie

Metropolis seems more like "Electromechanicalpunk"

Wiredog

I remember the cover. Never read the book though. I pretty much bounced off of cyberpunk and it's spinoff, steampunk.

Carl Fink

Congratulations on your homeland not electing a Trump-like beast. And in fact, his home riding expelling him from the Parliament.

Royce Day

I own a copy of the Hardwired RPG supplement for Cyberpunk, and I can assure you that it's disappointing. A few pages of world info (insufficient to describe it as "worldbuilding ") that adds nothing to the setting, and IIRC it lacks game stats for panzer or delta, or even profiles of Sarah and Cowboy. Most of it is inexplicably devoted to a detailed new h-t-h system for Cyberpunk, presumably in case PC's want a weasel like Sarah's

Rose EmbolismRoyce Day

I remember being somewhat baffled, then annoyed by the adventure, where the Referee is told the players MUST get this character safely to the place he appears in the novel. Or else. And I was "Well if he has to appear in the novel, then don't set up the scenario so he can die "

Mark Pontin

I will offer a contrarian take. I liked cyberpunk generally, since it meant the likes of Gibson and Sterling and a movement forward from the deeply stupid, brain-dead SF that had arisen circa 1977-78 with the commercial success of STAR WARS, DUNE, and the 400-500 page lumps of extruded verbiage which then-dinosaurs like Heinlein and Asimov -- never had much respect for the former; much respect for the latter though he wasn't much of an artist, but he shouldn't ever have sullied his name with the likes of THE ROBOTS OF DAWN -- had been inflicting on the world under the rubric of SF.

Cyberpunk felt like this might actually be the way the Future would be. Indeed, as Williams's checklist from the 30th edition in 2020, which you quote, attests to, we are arguably living in a cyberpunk future, for better and worse. Cyberpunk also offered a continuation of the concerns of the SF books I'd liked circa 1976-77, such as Budrys's MICHAELMAS and Brunner's SHOCKWAVE RIDER, before SF became unreadable. I certainly found it unreadable for a half-dozen years, anyway.

So in that context, the early 1980s felt like a renaissance -- really! -- with a great number of really good writers also entering the field alongside Gibson and Sterling, and taking on board the same ideas and some of the cyberpunk attitude. Like Pat Cadigan or Walter Jon Williams.

However, I don't recall this as Williams's best novel from that period.

James NicollMark Pontin

I think readers will be astonished when I reveal my second favourite early Williams.

Travis ButlerMark Pontin

A contrarian take, indeed!

How gratifying for cyberpunk to save us from the brick-stops of The Pride of Chanur, Startide Rising, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dreamsnake, even The Fountains of Paradise and Ender's Game!

Which is to say, yes, you did have Asimov and Heinlein writing big overstuffed revisits to their past glories like Foundation's Edge and Cat Who Walked Through Walls - but you also had both great shorter works like Chanur, and long dense but very very good books like Startide Rising. And even Clarke turned out an entertaining revisit to the past with 2010.

Tarring the post-Star Wars SF field with the likes of Friday is just as unfair as calling cyberpunk a dystopian swamp of vague cliches and mirror shades.

Sophie Jane

Rather unfairly, I think of this as the book that ruined cyberpunk. In the sense that Sterling and Gibson were both writing interestingly about the blurring of the natural and artificial, technology as environment, and so on, and then Hardwired came along with a new spin on a bunch of standard adventure-story tropes and gave everyone an easy model to follow

Mark PontinSophie Jane

You make a good point, Sophie. This was the book that made cyberpunk® a commodifiable, defined product. That cover, particular, is an atrocity, but the Tor guy (or gal) who commissioned was a marketing genius, or near enough.

PhilRMSophie Jane

I think that is rather unfair and also I kind of have to agree with you, although I really liked this novel, despite its flaws. My response to cyberpunk was pretty much precisely Mark Pontin's as he described above.

Steve Taylor

I am in awe of the awfulness of that cover!

For me Williams is Aristoi and Metropolitan and I’ve never got around to his earlier stuff. I sorta should, but cyberpunk doesn’t call very loudly.

James NicollSteve Taylor

The thing about WJW, especially early WJW, is that no two successive books were alike. So, if you didn't care for this, you might like Knight Moves.

Steve TaylorJames Nicoll

I’ve been reading his blog a bit and got that impression.

Michael McCarthySteve Taylor

Have you read City on Fire? This and the Rothfuss books are the greatest unfinished series in SF.

Paul ConnellyMichael McCarthy

I am pretty sure (as much as the current state of my memory allows) that he said on his blog a couple of years ago that he had started working on a third book in the series. Whether he continued with that is an open question. Metropolitan and City on Fire are very, very good, and there were lots of story possibilities to explore if he wanted to write another volume.

Paul ConnellyPaul Connelly

Searching WJW's blog, I find that two years ago he said the third book, Heaven in Flames, was almost finished. No news since then.

James NicollMichael McCarthy

I have!

Jon HSteve Taylor

Dolph Lundgren was robbed of a screen adaptation lead role that was rightly his.

PhilRM

I have a copy of that same Tor paperback edition, also in nearly pristine condition.

Paul Connelly

The cover looks like a good fit for your Big Hair Big Guns category, James.

Ashley

Myself and Susan both recently re-read this book. We have the British 1987 hardcover, though IIRC I first read this in Pb, and then got the hardcover. It stands up to my criteria of what makes a good book by being eminently re-readable. Up there with ShockWave Rider as one of my favourite cyberpunk books.

Cdr.Bowman

"Texans wrecked New Mexico by illicitly diverting water in pursuit of short-term profit."

How did that work, in the story?

Because, um ... Texas is downstream (largely to the southeast) of New Mexico, east of the Continental Divide, and west of the Continental Divide, the rivers don't flow to the southeast.