What to read after “Hardwired” by Walter Jon Williams: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
Case is a washed-up computer hacker living in a Japanese city, until a mysterious employer hires him for one more job. Working with a street samurai and a woman with mirrored eyes, he is drawn into a scheme far larger than the theft he was promised.
Seven years after Neuromancer, three strangers are drawn through a fractured near-future: a corporate mercenary sent to extract a defecting scientist, a teenage hacker nearly killed by a black-market program, and an art expert hunting the maker of strange boxes. Their paths converge as something new moves through cyberspace.
In a near-future Los Angeles reshaped by a media company's neural-socket technology, a loose circle of musicians, programmers and addicts drifts around the industry that made them. When the network begins to swallow minds, they must work out what the technology is really doing to the people wired into it.
Abelard Lindsay is a trained diplomat moving between two posthuman factions, the Shapers and the Mechanists, as humanity spreads across space. His long career of alliances and betrayals carries him across a changing solar system.
In a future Los Angeles split between franchised city-states, a hacker and a teenage skateboard courier chase a drug that works on both computers and human minds. The trail runs from the neon Metaverse to ancient languages and a plan to reshape civilisation.
In a world split between rich enclaves and crowded cities, an engineer builds an interactive book meant to teach his daughter. It changes hands until it reaches Nell, an orphan whose slow education becomes the key to something larger.
Nickie Haflinger is the only person ever to escape Tarnover, a secret programme that raises hyper-intelligent children to keep the state in power. Hunted across a continent bound together by computer networks, he keeps reinventing his identity while looking for a way to fight back.
Marid Audran survives in the Budayeen, a crowded quarter of a future Middle Eastern city where people can buy and wear other personalities as implants. When a killer starts murdering with the minds of psychopaths, the local crime boss forces Marid to hunt him down.
Gully Foyle survives a wrecked spaceship and swears revenge on the vessel that left him for dead. His hunt across a future where people can teleport by thought turns him into a wealthy, dangerous man chasing a weapon that could end the war.
A prisoner named Takeshi Kovacs is downloaded into a new body and sent to Earth to solve the death of a wealthy man. His search through the powerful Bay City elite uncovers a wider conspiracy about who is allowed to live forever.
In a polluted future, most people escape into the OASIS, a vast virtual world. When its creator dies, he leaves his fortune to whoever finds the hidden egg, and teenager Wade joins a hunt that turns deadly.
In a flooded, calorie-poor Bangkok kept alive by genetic engineering, an American trader hunts for lost seed banks while a manufactured woman bred as a servant tries to survive. Their paths cross with corporate enforcers and a city about to boil over.
A security android that has quietly hacked its own governor module would rather watch soap operas than protect the survey team it is assigned to. When the planet turns hostile, it must choose between staying hidden and risking everything for the humans in its care.
Cara earns her living travelling to parallel worlds where her other selves have died. When a traversal goes wrong, she is thrown into a revolution in the wasteland and uncovers a secret about the multiverse that threatens the powerful people who rely on her.
A soldier who was once a starship's artificial intelligence wakes in a single human body. Cut off from her many selves, she crosses a collapsing empire to find the officer who destroyed everything she was, and to settle a debt of revenge.
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to build a new world, a mission split between those who want to preserve the planet and those who want to change it. Over decades their disagreements grow into open conflict with Earth.
Years after the war against the Formics, Andrew Wiggin travels as a Speaker for the Dead, revealing the truth of the departed. On the colony world Lusitania he is drawn into the fate of a human family and the alien Pequeninos, whose customs hide a terrible secret.
A wanderer in a ruined America puts on a dead postman's uniform and invents a story about a restored postal service. The lie gives scattered survivors hope, then grows into something he must defend.
A colony ship bound for a distant star suffers an accident that leaves it unable to decelerate. As the crew repairs the engines, relativistic time dilation turns their journey into a passage through the far future, and they must decide whether to keep going.
When an alien corporation turns Earth into a lethal dungeon for an intergalactic reality show, Carl and his ex-girlfriend's cat, Princess Donut, enter the levels. Carl's only plan is to survive the cameras, the monsters and the audience.
An aging astronomer stays behind at a remote Arctic research station after the world loses contact with everyone else. Far above, the crew of a returning space mission hears nothing from Earth. Their two stories move toward each other across the ice and the dark.
A climate crisis is already killing people when a new international ministry is created to protect future generations. Scientists, economists, activists and officials try to keep the planet livable, while ordinary people organise in the face of drought, heat and political resistance.
On a world being made habitable, engineers, rangers and uplifted animals keep the terraforming project running. When a corporation tries to sell the planet, generations of residents organise to defend the land, its creatures and their own right to decide its future.
Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes in 1963 in his eighteen-year-old body, with every memory of the years ahead intact. He lives that span over and over, each replay starting later, and slowly realises he is not the only one caught in the loop.
Start with “Neuromancer”, “Count Zero”, “Synners”: they are the closest to “Hardwired” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Hardwired” these are Cyberpunk, Betrayal, Survival), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “Altered Carbon”, “Ready Player One”, “The Windup Girl”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
