Erik's Reviews > Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams

So Covid led me to an interesting epiphany, what I call the Scalar Edge (or others call the ‘Tyranny of Scales problem’) because I like fancy-sounding names: That there exists a fundamental conflict between the macroscopic ‘freedom’ and microscopic ‘freedom’ within a given system. Which… read the intro to my Leviathan Falls review.

Well, after recently reading a cyberpunk pairing - the rather lackluster Shockwave Rider and this much more excellent fare - I had a related epiphany, which is that the Scalar Edge lies at the heart of cyberpunk. Some form of authority - governmental or, more usually, corporate - seeks to maximize the macroscopic ‘freedom’ of society by repressing the microscopic ‘freedom’ of the individual. To the corpo-suits, this is progress and a requisite for achieving maximal economic and technological progress and control. The cyberpunk, then, is a libertarian hero who wishes the opposite.

Viewed thusly, Hardwired is a prototypical cyberpunk novel. In space around the Earth exist the Orbitals, powerful corporations who have beaten Earth and its denizens into the dust. Those on the surface, the poor bastards, the dregs of humanity are ever looking upward and seeking to join the Orbitals in their space heaven.

Hardwired follows two protagonists: Cowboy, a smuggler who once used jets (‘deltas’) to smuggle goods across a fractured States of America and now uses high-speed tanks (‘panzers’) to do the same. Which he does by directly interfacing (‘facing’) with the vehicle’s control and sensor systems using cybernetic implants. His sections reminded me heavily of the anime film Redline (which if you’ve never seen, you really should because it is gloriously absurd). Cowboy is pretty cool…

…but it’s the other protagonist Sarah - who has a cybernetic snake-weapon coiled down her throat - that I would consider the true cyberpunk hero. Cowboy ain’t a punk. He’s too wealthy and too buoyant for that. Sarah, though… she has clawed her way out of the gutter and carries that reality as a badge of both pride and shame in her every thought and every gesture. In fact, that’s the major conflict between Sarah and Cowboy, in that Sarah is a realist and Cowboy is an idealist. This book’s journey is really that of Sarah, who, by the end, has learned to look to the sky not with bitter envy but with something akin to… let’s not say hope, for I am uncertain that such a word exists in the cyberpunk lexicon but rather… an ambition to vengeance. By book’s end, she understands that though the greed and corruption of mankind can never truly be overthrown, it can on occasion be curtailed - and the opportunity to do such is enough to consider one’s life well-lived.