After his thoughtful, elegant novel Knight Moves, Williams wrenchingly shifts gears for this heavy-metal adventure. It is set with acknowledgement in Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, when corporate Orbitals control what's left of a postwar America, now balkanized and armed to the teeth. Ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, ``hardwired'' via skull sockets directly to his lethal electronic hardware, teams up with Sarah, an equally cyborized gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals. The story, though, is buried under an elaborate techno-punk style of the sort William Gibson popularized in Neuromancer. In both cases, it is a pose, a baroque nostalgia for Hemingway and film noir; it only plays at nihilism, terror and despair. The best effect is Williams's future version of a brain-scrambled vet: a dead buddy of Cowboy's whose scattered bits and pieces of computer memory now constitute a ragged semblance of a man. Such nuggets are hard to find amid the amplified, rock-'n-roll prose. (June 16)
Walter Jon Williams’ sci-fi novels defy simple categorization; you never quite know what you’re going to get from one of his books, but it’s probably going to knock your socks off. He’s written cyberpunk (Hardwired), mannerpunk (The Crown Jewels), arcanepunk (Metropolitan), space opera (Implied Spaces), cyberpunk space opera (Angel Station), techno-thrillers (This Is Not a Game)…we […]