SOJALS rating:

Good (3/5)

I first read this in December 1996.

Ajay's sister has been raped, mutilated and left for dead. He dedicates his life to rebuilding her, organ by expensive organ. He'll do anything to get the money.

Snow is a massive artificial intelligence, conscious but insane, commanding an ancient spacestation. Lost in her own fecudnity, she is playing at creation.

Lost in the space-station is Rosa, a child alone but for her deranged and deformed sisters.

"Hotwire" is set in the same world as "Hothead" but some years later. It's a moving cyberpunk, at times cyber-horror-punk, masterpiece. It is a story about rite-of-passage and it's a love story, in fact a rather tough love story, It's got some great lines, for example

"He wasn't built for freedom, but would ever be the gun another fires"

And look at the nanotech ("techniq"): the military spaceplane that proudly announces to its new pilot that it has flown two hundred and forty million missions. It's been abandoned, unused, for so long it no longer distinguishes between reality and its own internal simulations.

So what's it got? Superb nanotech and bioware, wild genetic engineering and cloning, artificial intelligence, and sex. Quite a lot of sex and occassionaly rather unusual sex.