[books] Walter Jon Williams, Hardwired (1986)

The downside of reading a lot of cyberpunk is that everything gets compared to William Gibson, at least for me, and that's going to be tough on a lot of writers. Inviting that comparison is only going to make things worse. In the early going, Hardwired looked like it was going to be a poor man's Neuromancer. There was the tough street girl who has been surgically altered to become a killing machine, and there was Cowboy, the premier delta pilot and panzerboy, who's interface-based flying seemed remarkably similar, at least in principle and in effect, to punching into the matrix. Williams also throws around a few too many terms for the different "castes" in his future. I didn't figure out that "dirtboys" and "dirtgirls" seemed to mean anyone who was earthbound until right up at the end.

Anyway, back to the story. Cowboy, who has this really irritating habit of imagining steel guitar in his head when he gets motivated, smuggles goods across the US in his panzer, which is a cross between a hovercraft and a tank, I think. He used to be able to fly across Missouri, but apparently they got good at shooting planes down, so he must resort to this primitive means of transportation to fuel the black market. This market is necessitated by the restructuring of the United States after the takeover by the Orbitals, these big sky-based cities that took over the world (I don't remember if they were alien, or the product of big German corporations) by dropping big rocks on major cities. Cowboy is starting to wonder about who he is really working for, if the black market is just another front for Orbital dominance. Meanwhile, Sarah, the Molly wannabe, becomes a target after doing a job for one of these Orbitals. As they are both mercenaries of sorts, Sarah and Cowboy meet on a job, and their mutual problems with the Orbitals find them both on the run from the same people. This leads to an eventual plot to overthrow the people who are after them both, Tempel Pharmaceuticals, with the help of Tempel's ousted chairman, who is a bit kooky, but necessary for the plan.

The more I read of this book, the more I got into it. The characters are a bit weak, and a bit predictable, but the pace of the plot makes up for it. Cowboy is a little bit problematic, as he is too much of the rebel hero stereotype. Sarah is better, once you stop picturing her with mirrored sunglasses and switchblade fingernails. She has actual motivation and inner conflict, mostly due to the misfortunes happened upon her brother, which doesn't seem to be the case with Cowboy. Some of the battle scenes, particularly from Cowboy's interfaced perspective, are excellent. All in all, this wasn't a bad book, but it suffers from its similarities to better work.