Review of Hotwire by Simon Ings

Making the reader feel uncomfortable is inherent to body horror fiction. The author wants you to squirm in your skin through primeval situations and visceral exposition. As a result, body horror is coconut fiction: you either like it or not, no middle ground. Simon Ings Hotwire (1995) is body horror in cyberpunk form. Let's see which side of coconut you fall on.

Hotwire is nicely edited to jump between varying scenes and circumstances, but all feeds the story of Ajay. Ajay once had a nice job working for the Haag Agency, a company which creates intelligent cities, but he is convinced to betray the Agency, and at the outset of Hotwire has been tasked with stealing a bit of exotic technology from a wetware expert named Snow who has an AI daughter named Rose. Ajay's quest for this tech anything but A-B-C, Ings takes the reader through the messy, bloody side of body augments in seeing whether or not Ajay can conclude his mission—alive.

Hotwire is extremely similar to Jon Courtenay Grimwood's early cyberpunk novels (neoAddix, Lucifer's Dragon, reMix, and redRobe). It's edgy. It's visceral. It's attempting to get under your skin with the manner in which technology can twist the meaning of being organically, naturally human. The dark side of body implants, new “business options” available to organized crime, the alternate meaning of being alive—they make drugged kidney theft look like child's play.

If William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, and other writers created the archetypes we now know are second wave of cyberpunk, then Ings (and Grimwood) are clearly third wave. The motifs, the color scheme, the patterns, the symbols—all the classic cyberpunk bits and pieces are present and in use. Another way of saying this is, Hotwire is predictable at the macro level, even if the plot details are unpredictable at the micro. Epic fantasy, romance, and other genres have their common touch points, and Hotwire touches most of cyberpunk's—not a bad or good thing, just a thing.

In the end, I don't have a lot more to say about Hotwire. It knows what it wants to be: shocking cyberpunk—clear in its symbols, sharp in its diction, and violating the reader's sense of physical being. Thus, for as brutal as Ings tries to be, these attempts at shocking the reader come across as bland and uninteresting knowing its trying to be a product—at least to me. It's entirely possible other readers will cling closer to the idea that Ings is attempting to demonstrate, possibly even warn humanity of the dangers of body modification. If I'm being truthful, there is a decent argument to be made, as long as it's beyond the over attempts at shock and awe. Regardless, if the image of cyberpunk is what you're looking for, Ings pens a sharp, minimalist tale that will have you squirming in certain scenes.