| Print List Price: | $13.49 |
| Kindle Price: | $4.99 Save $8.50 (63%) |
| Sold by: | Amazon.com Services LLC |
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the author
OK
Hardwired: 30th Anniversary Edition Kindle Edition
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.
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. Below the zone of Orbital control, buttonheads, panzerjocks, dirtgirls, and hustlers scramble for their ticket out of the gravity well.
But now, if the criminal underworld and the guerrilla underground can join forces, there is a chance to shift the balance of power— in a war fought on the ground by hardwired commandos, in the air by high-flying deltajocks, and by genius hackers in the neural interface.
As Roger Zelazny said, "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 content. It has all of my favorite things— blood, love, fire, hate and a high ideal or two. I wish I’d written this one.”
The Thirtieth Anniversary Edition of this cyberpunk classic includes essays by the author devoted to the origin of the novel, the unexpected source of the term “panzerboy,” and an amused guide through some of the oddities of the first German edition.
“Williams' use of language is as explosive and as techno-tinged as the world he describes. Reading the book is like taking a jet ride across a futuristic America, with acceleration forcing you back in your seat all the way.”
Rockland Courier-Gazette
“Cowboy is no Rambo; he is a thoughtful, intelligent hero. He and Sarah are two of the many good things about HARDWIRED. Another is the world they inhabit--- an incredibly detailed future of personality transfers, bizarre drugs, cybernetic implants, and complex political and economic power maneuvers . . . It is one of the best SF novels I have read in years; I heartily recommend it.”
Fantasy Review
“The story moves with the speed of a hovercraft, the climax has all the action and excitement of Star Wars and the ending has a delightful twist.”
Providence Sunday Journal
“Hardwired is his best book to date...as the parallel plotlines of a hotshot contraband flyer and a sleek bodyguard/assassin develop and gradually intersect, the book takes on a life of its own.”
Locus
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateSeptember 19, 2011
- File size2477 KB
- Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Revolution, and Evolution
Kindle Edition$9.99$9.99
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
''Williams' use of language is as explosive and as techno tinged as the world he describes. Reading the book is like taking a jet ride across a futuristic America, with acceleration forcing you back in your seat all the way.'' --Tom Von Malder, writer and arts critic
''Heavy-metal adventure.'' --Publishers Weekly
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.
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than three thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014 and was named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices in 2012.
Emily Janice Card (a.k.a. Emily Rankin) is an actor, writer, and singer from North Carolina, now residing in Los Angeles. In addition to being a narrator, she has directed numerous audiobooks, including the 2007 Audie(R) and Earphones Award winner Hubris, Legacy of Ashes by Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, and Them by Nathan McCall.
Product details
- ASIN : B005O5VR3U
- Publisher : Walter Jon Williams (September 19, 2011)
- Publication date : September 19, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 2477 KB
- Simultaneous device usage : Unlimited
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 274 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #159,718 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #394 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #618 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #2,091 in Science Fiction Adventure
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Contrary to most Science Fiction writing, cyberpunk tried to show and explicate its fictional world through the eyes of comparatively low-ranking people on the margins of their society, perhaps thrown into a situation where their actions are important to it (although not necessarily) but virtually always with the characters' mental environment shaped by, and immersed in, the larger social and physical/technical environment, and with their actions constrained by outsider and lowly status. This was a gesture towards realism, as most all people are greatly constrained by their circumstances and are much more caught up in the present than are typical characters in Science Fiction. The limited power and vantage points available to cyberpunk characters are complemented by the characteristic cyberpunk immersion into the techno-cultural environment of the story. Just as most people have more contact with DVDs, bottled water, and PCs than with nuclear reactors, so cyberpunk immerses the reader in the common environment present in the story.
By contrast, Hardwired, while utilizing the iconic technologies, imperfect world, corporate domination, assassins and smugglers of cyberpunk, is a far more traditional Science Fiction story in that the characters are that extra (unrealistically) bit mobile, are rather more powerful and connected to the center of events than is typical, and are concerned with the core issues of their world, rather than with a tiny fraction of it. In this way, Hardwired is not quite cyberpunk, and the criticism that this is "not real cyberpunk" is understandable. In a similar vein, the language, while comparatively poetic in true cyberpunk fashion, fails to completely immerse, indeed flood the reader with the world of the story (as opposed to the events of the story).
All this being said however, Hardwired is not only an entertaining and adventurous story, and a relatively "hard" one (as in "hard", meaning scientifically viable science fiction), but it also very usefully explores the stereotypical themes and characters of cyberpunk. The smugglers and assassins that populate the genre are less two dimensional, and the reader will get a much stronger feel for what such a profession or what corporate domination might MEAN. An additional bit of cyberpunk credit is due in that cyberpunk is very much about the intersection of culture and technology, and Williams has a keen sense of how future technology and trends might interact with world, particularly US culture. For these reasons, while this book differs from most cyberpunk (hence my description, "left handed cyberpunk"), I think that it is indispensable to understanding it, and this book should be considered a crucial part of the cyberpunk canon.
For those readers not interested in canonical status in their reading, I would again highlight that this is a great adventure story, and well written, with interesting characters. So long as you are not put off by a dark and gritty environment, this book has high entertainment value.
Cut to a completely different cyber-babe in a different part of the country. Her name is Sarah and her hobbies are scowling, ass-kicking, and french-kissing people to death. She can kill people in ways that are actually more gory to read about than to see on film.
One thing leads to another and Mad Max II and Cyber-Babe end up alone, on the run, wanted by the law, and with no other sex partners available for hundreds of miles. Nothing good can last forever, though. Mad Max II goes back to his high lonesome prairie with the steel guitar jukebox and Cyber-Babe goes back to Vice City.
Next there is some character development. And by "character development" I mean that we learn that Mad Max II doesn't drive a tank because he WANTS to. He's just waiting for his matte-black alcohol-fueled epoxide-composite fighter jet to get out of the shop.
Fortunately, the people trying to kill Mad Max II and Cyber-Babe haven't given up yet, and they have death planes, too. So everything steps up a notch, and another notch, until it's time for Luke vs the Death Star. And you know who's going to win that one, but so what, it's still what you want to see.
Except. THIS time. Right after Luke (I mean Cowboy) shoots down the Death Star (I mean the Tempel Shuttle), Darth Vadar gives him the finger and EIGHT MORE DEATH STARS come around the corner.
Bad-ass vehicles. Killer cyber-babe. Mercenary armies with names like "Flash Force" and "Gold Coast Maximum Law". Computer-fu. Tongue-fu. Religious cults. Human-computer personality transfer (beta, with bugs). Space exploration gone wrong. A whole lot of missiles. Sponsored by ModernBody. Check it out.



























