Books like Hardwired — picked by fans

I don’t think cyberpunk as we know it would exist without William Gibson’s Neuromancer. If PKD jump-started the genre, then Gibson advanced it in ways previously unimaginable.

I love the tone and texture of this book. Written in a gritty urban style, the mixture of atmosphere and wacky characters vividly paints the concept of high-tech and low-life that underpins the cyberpunk genre. Plus, it has “street samurai”–I mean, let’s go!

City Come A-Walkin’ is it, the beginning, the first true cyberpunk novel. 

As William Gibson famously said in the forward to the 15-year anniversary edition, “John Shirley is cyberpunk’s patient zero.” Debuting in 1980, City follows Stu Cole, a streetwise nightclub owner who angered San Francisco’s political and criminal elite, bringing down the full weight of their power; his only hope, the enigmatic construct known only as, “City.” 

A proto-AI, City was a conglomeration of the computer, surveillance, and data infrastructure that took on a life of its own, becoming sapient and dangerous. To ten-year-old me, it was the coolest book I had ever read (and it didn’t hurt that the school library refused to order it for me) and really put the punk in cyberpunk.

So often overlooked by cyberpunk aficionados, Streetlethal is the first of the Aubrey Knight novels by Steven Barnes.

Published in 1983, Streetlethal is a story of betrayal, corruption, criminal syndicate politics, and the dichotomy between the obscenely wealthy and the outcast poor. The gritty look at power from below—as Aubrey is set up, almost shanked in prison, and then on the run in the city’s literal underworld—is the novel’s major draw, but the most interesting part, looking back, is that both it and City include psychic elements. 

Hard as it is to believe now, in the ‘80s, psychic powers were considered science. Really. Even mainstream TV shows like Magnum PI and Miami Vice regularly employed psychic powers as plot movers. Bizarre, but true.

Software is a zany romp through a 1983 vision of 2020, with sapient AIs living on the moon and maybe invading South Florida. 

Like its author, Software is a rich amalgamation of disparate elements: on the one side, the book is campy fun, while on the other, it’s a legitimate exploration of Artificial Intelligence and identity. Back when I was first getting into cyberpunk, this was another difficult find, despite having won the Philip K. Dick award; I actually didn’t read it until the late ‘90s! 

The author’s life is nearly as interesting as his books, too: his full name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, a descendant of German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel, though he grew up in Louisville, KY, and he would eventually develop his own literary movement, Transrealism.

Both my first book Curveball and my new book touch on how losing access to information can only shrink someone’s ability to live their life effectively which, in an age where most of us have a near-constant Internet connection, can feel unimaginable, and yet, Broad Band proves that is more likely than we think. Evan’s book attempts to reframe the history of computing by recentering the often forgotten women at the center of that story, asking us to reimagine what our digital informational landscape could have looked like if care for everyone in our communities was more central to that story.

The Land by Aleron Kong is the third litRPG on this list, and probably the most famous. Every litRPG uses a few ways to denote progression, but this book has an almost unending series of charts, numbers, rules, and powers for everything. And I do mean everything.

Character growth. Weapon quality. Town building. To career building. Even dungeon building.

Everything progresses. Everything has level-ups. The world is huge, and the events feel extremely epic. This is also the longest series on the list, with books so massive, you could knock a fool out with one.

Definitely worth the time, though. Don’t miss out.

36 Streets by Australian author T.R. Napper is a cyberpunk thriller set in a futuristic noir Vietnam that tackles identity in a unique way.

The protagonist, a woman born in Vietnam but raised in Australia, grapples with her sense of belonging—deported from her adopted country due to racist government policies, her body language and command of English is as an Australian, and she is painfully aware that her Vietnamese is heavily accented and uncertain, and that her body language doesn’t match the locals of her birth nation.

Add to that the ability to edit human memory and to experience VR so realistically that you can live as someone else, and you have a story that questions the very fabric of identity.

Neon Helix is probably the most cyberpunk book of my recommendations, at least in a classical sense. It’s set in a mega-city of the future and features mega corporations, rogue AI, clones, and some really crazy scientists. It’s a fast-paced story told from multiple perspectives and the first book in a series. 

William Gibson’s latest novel Agency is as prophetic as his establishment of cyberspace and cyberpunk culture in the 80s and 90s. His latest novel chronicles reality-busting skirmishes among gangsterish multi-generational families based in a glitzy post-apocalyptic 22nd century London. In this future, nano-machines conjure luxuries from nothing while sky-high scrubbers struggle to restore a ravaged atmosphere after the jackpot, a global environmental catastrophe. Agency tells a heist-type story about the emergence of Eunice, a sentient AI born in our stub out of American special operations research. Leading a cross-dimensional band of techies, publicists, hipsters, and hackers, ace software designer Verity fights to introduce Eunice to her world in order to save it. Yet Gibson is telling us about today's ecological and technological forces. He writes of pre-jackpot life in our era: “‘Did we ever come to terms with the sheer cluelessness of it?’

This is a cyberpunk novel, and while most books in that genre focus more on characters like criminals or rebels, this one narrows in on a former police detective and private security contractor. This is one of the few books in the genre that looks at the working stiffs of the cyberpunk future, instead of the punks with mohawks & machine guns or the corporate suits with their android bodyguards and elegant penthouses.