Book Review: Hardwired

Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams

This book is beach-reading cyberpunk. The orbital corporations control the world, and a panzerboy and a street assassin are the only ones who can...yada yada. You know how it goes.
I'm almost done with the book, and I've liked it. The characters are solid, the story is fun, and Williams takes you through each page in a high-action, run and gun style. I will say it's nothing revolutionary, and the one weakness I've noticed is the dialogue, which turns into standard action movie writing, for better or worse. Despite this, Williams manages the emotional tensions (which run high) very well, and creates some killer characters out of it.
The one thing I've noticed is that the slang seems to have been borrowed for CP 2020. Panzerboy, screamsheet, the body lotto, even calling the speedware Sandevistan (though the spellings are slightly different). It seems that Hardwired inspired the type of mood that Pondsmith wanted to create with Cyberpunk, and as a result, borrows from it. The game does well here, because the hard-edged, weapon heavy world Williams creates is exactly what you'd want Night City to be on a night when the body count is high and the PCs have full clips. If you like high-action, high-violence games, and even if you don't, Hardwired is a great example of how Cyberpunk writing can turn into action scenes and a great high-stakes game session.