Using faster-than-light technology, the human race has colonized dozens of star systems. Ubu Roy and his sister, Beautiful Maria are down-on-their-luck traders on the edge of human space. In a last-ditch effort to make money to pay their debts and repair their aging spacecraft, they are reduced to searching uncharted space for singularities to capture and sell. In a rare stroke of luck, Ubu and Maria happen upon an alien spacecraft and make humanity's first contact with an alien race. As chance would have it, the alien ship is also in dire economic straights. The alien technology is stronger than humanity's in some areas (such as biotechnology) and weaker in other areas (such as applied physics), providing ample opportunities for trade between the two ships. Both ships become rich in their respective societies by repeated trade with each other. However, Ubu and Maria's secret is discovered by their trading rivals, resulting in a struggle to determine who will control the lucrative trade with the aliens. Ubu and Maria ultimately succeed through Ubu's better understanding of the alien race's psychology and Maria's genetically-engineered psychic abilities.

The Orbital Corporations now control the world. In the ruins of an America ravaged by the Rock War, ex-fighter pilot Cowboy, who can be "hardwired" via skull sockets directly to his ride, has become a panzerboy, a hi-tech smuggler riding armored hovertanks through the balkanized countryside. He teams up with Sarah, another tough-as-nails gun-for-hire, to make a last stab at independence from the rapacious Orbitals. They gather an unlikely gang of misfits for a ride that will take them to the edge of the atmosphere.

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.

Solip:System begins shortly before the ending of Hardwired and continues beyond that point. In Solip:System, the main character is the computer personality Reno (a minor character in Hardwired). The author intended that this book would provide a link between Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind.

Etienne Steward is a clone, also known as a beta. When he awakes, his memories are fifteen years old, because the original Steward—the alpha—never bothered to have his memories updated. In those fifteen years, the entire world has changed. An alien race known as The Powers has established relations with humanity. The Orbital Policorp which held his allegiance has collapsed. He fought and survived the off-world Artifacts War, but dozens of his friends did not. Both his first and second wives have divorced him. More importantly, someone has murdered him, causing the activation of the beta back-up. Now Steward has to figure out who wanted him dead, if he doesn't want to die again.