Hardwired

By Walter Jon Williams,

Book cover of Hardwired

Book description

The criminal and resistance undergrounds of a high-tech future earth merge to wage war against the corporate Orbitals who rule the planet from their sterile space platforms

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Why read it?

1 author picked Hardwired as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

For the last book on our list, we look at Hardwired, by Walter John Williams because, in my humble opinion, it marks the completion of cyberpunk’s subgenre formation. 

Published in 1986, Hardwired follows a protagonist named Cowboy as he connects his brain to various machines through a hardwire and fights the evil orbital corporations that own the world.  Awesome. It stands out to me in the history of golden-age cyberpunk novels in that it calls upon elements from previous cyberpunk works more-so than its predecessors, solidifying the subgenre’s obligations. 

To say it another way, Hardwired alludes to earlier cyberpunk works…

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