Hardwired — (1986-1987) Publisher: 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.

Drake Magistral — (1987-1995) Publisher: Peleng is a planet ripe for the plucking, and Drake Maijstral is an Allowed Burglar rated in the Top Ten by the Imperial Sporting Commission. But what should be a simple case of breaking-and-plundering turns into an intergalactic crisis when Maijstral steals something so rare, so valuable, so utterly desirable, that everyone wants it — everyone including well-armed Imperial spies, gun-toting human militias, a homicidal maniac with a very large sword, and a fanatical countess with a really, really nasty croquet habit. The Crown Jewels, by award-winning author Walter Jon Williams, is sophisticated science fiction comedy at its best.

Metropolitan — (1995-1996) Publisher: Nominated for a Nebula Award. Walter Jon Williams’ classic science fantasy Metropolitan is once again available for a new generation of readers. Aiah has fought her way from poverty and discovered a limitless source of plasm, the mysterious substance that powers the world-city. Her discovery soon involves her with Constantine, the charismatic, dangerous, seductive revolutionary who plans to overthrow, not simply the government, but the cosmic order…

Dread Empire’s Fall — (2002-2012) Publisher: All will must bend to the perfect truth of The Praxis. For millennia, the Shaa have subjugated the universe, forcing the myriad sentient races to bow to their joyless tyranny. But the Shaa will soon be no more. The dread empire is in its rapidly fading twilight, and with its impending fall comes the promise of a new galactic order… and bloody chaos. A young Terran naval officer marked by his lowly birth, Lt. Gareth Martinez is the first to recognize the insidious plot of the Naxid — the powerful, warlike insectoid society that was enslaved before all others — to replace the masters’ despotic rule with their own. Barely escaping a swarming surprise attack, Martinez and Caroline Sula, a pilot whose beautiful face conceals a deadly secret, are now the last hope for freedom for every being who ever languished in Shaa chains — as the interstellar battle begins against a merciless foe whose only perfect truth is annihilation.

Dagmar Shaw — (2008-2012) Publisher: Once upon a time, there were four of them. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games… Dagmar is a game designer trapped in Jakarta in the middle of a revolution. The city is tearing itself apart around her and she needs to get out. Her boss Charlie has his own problems — 4.3 billion of them, to be precise, hidden in an off-shore account. Austin is the businessman — the VC. He’s the one with the plan and the one to keep the geeks in line. BJ was there from the start, but while Charlie’s star rose, BJ sank into the depths of customer service. He pads his hours at the call-center slaying on-line orcs, stealing your loot, and selling it on the internet. But when one of them is gunned down in a parking lot, the survivors become players in a very different kind of game. Caught between the dangerous worlds of the Russian Mafia and international finance, Dagmar must draw on all her resources — not least millions of online gamers– to track down the killer. In this near-future thriller, Walter Jon Williams weaves a pulse-pounding tale of intrigue, murder, and games where you don’t get an extra life.

Stand-alones and story collections by Walter Jon Williams:

Frankensteins and Foreign Devils — (1980) Publisher: The Boskone 35 (February 1998) Book to honor the Guest of Honor, Walter Jon Williams, with cover and interior art by Boskone 35 Official Artist, Omar Rayyan. Limited edition of 1200 copies. The first 185 are numbered, autographed, and slipcased with special endpapers. The remaining 1015 constitute the trade state.

Ambassador of Progress — (1984) Publisher: An interstellar catastrophe has left humanity scattered on dozens of primitive worlds. Fiona is an emissary to one such world, charged with helping the inhabitants of Echidne rise from barbarism. But once she’s arrived on the planet, she finds herself in the middle of a war… the Brodaini, the world’s most ferocious warriors, have risen in revolt against their overlords. The combat threatens to become a war of extermination. Fiona is a neutral in the war. But Echidne is proving a perilous place for neutrals…

Knight Moves — (1985) Publisher: A Philip K Dick Award-nominated novel. Eight hundred years ago Doran Falkner gave humanity the stars, and he now lives with his regrets on a depopulated Earth among tumbledown ruins and ancient dreams brought to life by modern technology. But word now comes that alien life has been discovered on a distant world, life so strange and impossible that the revelation of its secrets could change everything. A disillusioned knight on the chessboard of the gods, Doran must confront his own lost promise, his lost love, and his lost humanity, to make the move that will revive the fortunes both of humans and aliens…

Facets — (1990) Publisher’s Weekly: Williams, best known as a writer of cyber-punk novels ( Hardwired ), branches out in this collection of nine well-crafted short pieces ”Video Star” and ”Wolf Time” are fast-action cyber-punk. ”Flatline” and ”The Bob Dylan Solution” edge into a new subgenre, bio-punk, more fully realized in ”Dinosaurs” and ”Witness.” The latter is the introductory story for George R. R. Martin’s Wildcard series, but it stands well on its own.what is this a reference to?/mc .”Side Effect” is also bio-punk, but is so depressingly contemporary and believable as to hardly qualify as science fiction. have restored cut phrase because it doesn;t make sense otherwise. sss The best story is ”No Spot of Ground,” set in an alternate universe where Edgar Allan Poe is a general in the Confederate Army.

Days of Atonement — (1991) Publisher: Loren Hawn is a traditional Western peace officer walking the streets of 21st Century New Mexico, and seemingly unaware that times have changed. And when a dying man named Randal falls out of a bullet-riddled car and dies in Loren’s arm, Loren finds he isn’t the only man living in the wrong time — because he remembers pulling Randal’s dead body out of a wrecked car twenty years before. He knows the car belongs to a scientist who works at the high-security laboratory built on the outskirts of town, and he knows that if he doesn’t work fast, all evidence of a crime will disappear into national security vaults. In order to bring justice back to his community, Loren will have to risk everything, his life, his job, his faith, and his family.

Aristoi — (1992) Publisher: Gabriel is one of the Aristoi, the elite class that hold dominion over a glittering interstellar culture, their rule more absolute than that of any Old Earth tyrant. When another of the Aristoi is murdered, Gabriel finds that the foundations of his civilization are tottering, and that his own power may have its roots in the greatest lie in all history. In order to defend himself and the interstellar order, Gabriel must go on a quest into the heart of barbarism and chaos, and discover within himself his own lost, tattered humanity.

The Rift — (1999) Publisher: It starts with the dogs. They won’t stop barking… And then the earth shrugs — 8.9 on the Richter scale in the world’s biggest earthquake since 1755. It hits New Madrid, Missouri, a sleepy town on the Mississippi. Seismologists had predicted the disaster… but no one listened. Within minutes, there is nothing but chaos and ruin as America’s heartland falls into the nightmare known as the Rift — a fault line in the earth that wrenchingly exposes the fractures in American society itself. As a strange white mist smelling of sulfur rises from the crevassed ground, the real terror begins for the survivors, including a teenager separated from his mother, an African-American engineer searching for his daughter, a TV preacher whose visions of hell have become all too real, and a sheriff cum Ku Klux Klansman who seeks racial vengeance in the midst of disaster. It can happen. And sooner or later, it will.

Implied Spaces — (2008) Publisher: Aristide, a semi-retired computer scientist turned swordsman, is a scholar of the implied spaces, seeking meaning amid the accidents of architecture in a universe where reality itself has been sculpted and designed by superhuman machine intelligence. While exploring the pre-technological world Midgarth, one of four dozen pocket universes created within a series of vast, orbital matrioshka computer arrays, Aristide uncovers a fiendish plot threatening to set off a nightmare scenario, perhaps even bringing about the ultimate Existential Crisis: the end of civilization itself. Traveling the pocket universes with his wormhole-edged sword Tecmesssa in hand and talking cat Bitsy, avatar of the planet-sized computer Endora, at his side, Aristide must find a way to save the multiverse from subversion, sabotage, and certain destruction.

The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories — (2010) Publisher: From Walter Jon Williams, author of Implied Spaces, Hardwired, and Voice of the Whirlwind, comes The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories, a stunning collection of short fiction including the Nebula Award winning story The Green Leopard Plague, as well as Daddy’s World, Lethe, The Last Ride of German Freddie, Millennium Party, The Tang Dynasty, Underwater Pyramid, Incarnation Day, Send Them Flowers, and Pinocchio.

Prayers on the Wind — (2011) Publisher: All humanity is at peace. The Diamond Library contains all wisdom, and has incarnated itself as the Treasured King. But now the peace is threatened by the alien Sang, a species bent on conquest, and humanity’s response is fatally divided. At the height of the crisis, the Treasured King is found dead, and a dangerous new incarnation is born — beautiful, seductive, erratic, and very possibly mad. Walter Jon Williams combines cutting-edge science, Tibetan Buddhism, and hard-nosed political reality in this novelette, which was nominated for a Nebula Award on its first release.

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