Title: Just because it looks like and sounds like...
Product review: ...cyberpunk doesn't mean it is cyberpunk. Walter John Williams uses all the archetypes of cyberpunk fiction - mind-to-machine interface, powerful corporations with money superceding national sovereignty, criminals as the 'good' guys, cybernetics becoming intimate with the human body, and such - but that doesn't make this a cyberpunk novel. Its like painting stripes on a horse and calling it a zebra.It is a good story, and the characters are compelling, but it is also very clearly written in imitation of a cyberpunk story. Part of this stems from the contrived 'future-tense' narrative style, but that's just the best example of the overall 'contrivedness' of this story. Cyberpunk doesn't have to be about futuristic technology at all (see William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" and Greg Bear's "Petra") so long as it carries the cyberpunk sensibility. "Hardwired" doesn't do that. It imitates a cyberpunk story.
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