The Peripheral

Jackpot #1

by William Gibson, Lorelei King (Narrator)

The Peripheral by William Gibson is a thrilling new novel about two intertwined futures, from the bestselling author of Neuromancer

Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural near-future America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she's keen to avoid. Her brother Burton lives, or tries to, on money from the Veterans Association, in compensation for neurological damage suffered in a Marines elite unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She used to make more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she's had to let the shooter games go.

Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren't many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself as a romantic misfit in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.

Burton's been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He's got his sister taking over shifts, promised her the game's not a shooter. Still, the crime Flynne witnesses there is plenty bad.

Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf's, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cyberpunk, Audiobook, Time Travel, Dystopia, Thriller

15 pages, Audible Audio

First published October 24, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the father of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction, having coined the term cyberspace in 1982 and popularized it in his first novel, Neuromancer (1984), which has sold more than 6.5 million copies worldwide.

While his early writing took the form of short stories, Gibson has since written nine critically acclaimed novels (one in collaboration), contributed articles to several major publications, and has collaborated extensively with performance artists, filmmakers and musicians. His thought has been cited as an influence on science fiction authors, academia, cyberculture, and technology.


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William Gibson. (2007, October 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:30, October 19, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?t...

Reviews

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Publication meeting at Berkley Publishing in early 2014.

Publisher: So, I liked it. But … what was it about?

Publicist: It was great! It’s Gibson, it’s going to sell.

Publisher: I know, it’s Gibson, and it’s going to sell. But it was … a little hard to follow, you know? What was it about?

Publicist: You know, I’m interested to hear what you think it’s about.

Editor: O for God’s sake! It was about a lot of stuff, it’s Gibson after all –

Publicist: It’s going to sell –

Editor: - it was about time travel and alternate history and post-apocalypse and corporate espionage, and avatars and –

Publisher: Ok, I got all that, I think, and Gibson’s great, witty, sophisticated and stylish writing, and also lots of great characters and snappy dialogue … but what was it about?

Publicist: What do you think it’s about?

Publisher: I’M ASKING THE EDITOR!

Editor: It’s about a lot of stuff, Gibson can stuff a lot into a book –

Publicist: It’s going to sell –

Editor: - but it was a little hard to follow, maybe he could have added a glossary, or a prologue, you know, just to help us out a little –

Publisher: That’s what readers love about Gibson, he drops you into a great world building and you just have to keep up –

Publicist: It’s why they keep coming back, it’s gonna sell –

Editor: Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna sell, but you think we can get him to add in some explanations, some crumbs along the path, I mean we’re not all Gibson, the rest of us need him to step it down a little –

Publisher: He’ll never agree to that, Gibson, he’s sophisticated and stylish, he’s avant garde, he’s state of the market, forward looking, progressive, he puts it out there and we have to catch up –

Editor: But this one is hard to follow, maybe he could do a glossary for the language, it’s not Burgess, but, you know, just a little hard to follow –

Publicist: It’s Gibson, it’ll sell –

Publisher: - but what’s it about?

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”



Thirty years ago Neuromancer by William Gibson was published. The award winning novel was a breath of fresh air for a genre that had become too inbred. The new science fiction writers were too like the granddaddies of the genre only paler in complexion and not as bone deep on science. Then the term cyberpunk appeared:

"Classic cyberpunk characters were marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change, an ubiquitous datasphere of computerized information, and invasive modification of the human body." – Lawrence Person

Neuromancer fit that definition in spades. What made the Sprawl trilogy by Gibson must-read-books for me was the noir aspects that Gibson wrapped around all his plots. The future looked just like the 1940s only with synthetic clad hackers as the main characters instead of cotton and wool gumshoes. Hackers against megacorporations instead of detectives against governmental forces controlled by rich people. The one thing they have in common they are always outgunned and always outnumbered. We love the underdog.

People who try to read Neuromancer today have mixed results. I see a lot of one star and two star reviews and feel more than a mild irritation, but it isn’t the reader’s fault. Most people do not see novels as history, but they are. In 1985 when I read Neuromancer I had never read anything quite like it. I could feel the electric hum (or that could have been the circuitry of my Macintosh computer) of something new in the air and felt excited about a future that looked a lot more interesting than the present. Most readers do not read any background on novels or have any idea of the significance of a novel except the entertainment value it can provide. They may know that Neuromancer won some awards and is a “famous” novel, but it is difficult for them to grasp how this novel helped spawn a whole new line of publishing. They have read many of the descendants of Neuromancer so the basic concepts are not new to them; in fact, some of Neuromancer actually feels dated now. Without a time machine and a strategic mind wipe I can’t give them the experience that I had. (I’m working on both concepts, but I’ve hit some snags.)

So here we are thirty years later, William Gibson is 66 years old, and has just published his eleventh novel although I want to say twelve, but Burning Chrome is actually short stories. This is his largest novel. I was a little surprised when it arrived in the mail and didn’t have the sleek, modelesque appearance of a usual Gibson novel. He introduces us in this book to two worlds. One is a world in the near future that Daniel Woodrell would feel extremely comfortable in and the other is a world seventy years in the future after the “jackpot” has happened.

”No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.”

No sexy biological agent escaping from a lab or zombies or a complete climate meltdown, but rather a slow agonizing slide into self-destruction. Only the very rich survived. I don’t know a more depressing statement than that.


Daniel Woodrell is probably wondering how in the world he ended up in this review.

In the Daniel Woodrell World Flynne has agreed to help her brother Burton out on a project he has already agreed to do. Legal issues that must be cleared up keep him from being available. He and his friend Connor, who came back with psychological difficulties and in the case of Connor missing body parts from an unspecified war, are trying to adjust to a society too crippled to worry about their wounded warriors. Everyone, including Flynne, earn a living through a variety of short time jobs. Most of the work available is outright illegal or at least in the gray area of bending the rules. Flynne hates video games, but she happens to be very good at them. She isn’t thrilled that Burton has saddled her with test driving this software, but the money is good, maybe too good.

She sees something she isn’t supposed to see. Nanobots eat a woman down to the last morsel. It’s just a game right...wrong. She has just seen a murder in the future.

Whoa...wait...what?

Yeah, come to find out there is a mysterious server in China that has somehow connected to the future. Data can stream between the two different time eras. There is an economic war going on in that future, a power struggle that spills back into the pass as warring factions compete for power. Flynne becomes a very important pawn.

“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.”



Wilf Netherton is a publicist in the future. Well the present for him, and the future for Flynne. He drinks too much, sleeps with his clients, and generally is on the verge of cratering his career. He might seem like an unlikely candidate to be the representative of the future, but he has one asset that always proves useful, people like him. Flynne is no exception. They can stream her from the past into what is called a Peripheral, a highly advanced cyberorganism. As Wilf is pulled further and further into the push and pull surrounding Flynne he finds his powers of deception inhibited by the wholesome honesty, not to be mistaken for naivety, of Flynne. Those are characteristics so rare in his future that he has very little experience with it.

Human nature does not change and those in power, those consumed with greed, must exploit this new technology to gain leverage or advantages in their quest for more and more power. If they destroy two worlds, two different time lines, then so be it, their competitors won’t have it either.


William Gibson

Gibson is certainly taking on a larger theme for this novel. The first half of the novel had me scrambling to keep up just to understand the two worlds he was presenting. I had several moments, not unusual for a Gibson novel where I wondered if I was smart enough in a black jacket, dark sunglasses, skinny black jeans kind of way to keep up. The second half of the novel starts to bog down (in need of a bit of nanobot tidying) as the plot seems to be held hostage by Gibson while we explore the concept of these Peripherals. We are also introduced to a flurry of characters all integral in some fashion to the grand finale set in a reassembled version of Newgate Prison, ”its granite face, bristling with iron” in London.

This novel may stretch your brain a bit or if you are a smarty pants it might make the right connections that inspires you to put the finishing touches on your own version of a Peripheral or a Michikoid or a Medicis. For those wanting tips on what to invest in for the future, Cosplay just gets bigger and more elaborate.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was great to experience Gibson back in futuristic mode after a 12-year period of writing contemporary techno-thrillers. As typical of his classic cyberpunk stories, you are thrown in the middle of the action and have to figure out what the characters are up to from context. That includes strange new technologies and odd new terms. It’s always a kind of a thrill that you can learn to swim this way. The approach is frustrating and aversive to many, but it seems to be how Gibson inspires a motivation to get actively engaged in the problem solving that is a continual core to his mode of plotting.

The story evolves by alternating between two sets of characters in a myriad of short, punchy chapters. One set work for a company called Haptic Recon, which hires itself for all sorts of information gathering and security missions with a focus on computer hacking and projecting themselves virtually through robot drones. The main characters are two ex-military guys, Burton and his buddy Conner, and Burton’s sister Flynne. Conner has lost limbs in some war and depends on cool equipment and prostheses to get around. Flynne substitutes for Burton on a job she is told involves beta-testing a new game and witnesses what appears to be a real murder of a wealthy woman in a high-rise by some strange new technology, some kind of molecular disassembler. Soon it appears that witnessing has made her a target by unknown enemies.

The other set of characters also work for a new kind of corporation that mixes publicist work for celebrities, security, and mercenary missions. A woman Rainey and her male boss Netherton are trying to manage a celebrity journalist and performance artist of some sort. She has her tattooed skin replaced periodically and sold to museums. Their client gets in trouble by invading a floating island of recycled plastic where a cult of neoprimitivists have set up a kingdom and riling them up to the point that her defensive drones implement a bloodbath.

Thus, you see the theme of problem solving efforts of hired hands being tapped when the wealthy create messes that get out of control. The two sets of middle-level techs find that their shadowy corporations are larger than they imagine and are engaged in a crisis and conspiracy of a large magnitude. The characters are forced to up the ante by stealing classified technology. In a marvelous projection of today’s 3D printing, they can contract fabrication of powerful biological robot drones or drugs that turn people into “homicidal erotomaniacs” To whet potential readers I will share that the premise has something to do with one set of players monitoring and manipulating the activities of another set 70 years in the past. The reader can’t escape a powerful quandary of whether to identify more with the folks in recognizable near future world, which is in the middle of a slow apocalypse of disease, famine, extinctions, and corporate scrambling, or with the cool cats in the more distant and alien future that is more stable due to government by corporate oligarchies that harness nanotechnology, AIs, armed micro-drones, and robotic avatars.

Gibson is often dissed for his sketchy characters that don’t lend themselves much to emotional engagement by his readers. For others that same cool detachment is the right stuff in noir traditions and hacker-chic that makes them heroic Davids against the corporate Goliaths (our intrepid Goodreads, Jeffrey Keeten, borrows from Walter Mosley’s title to tag Gibson’s leads as “always outnumbered, always outgunned”). The characters are created with a few strokes and select revelations of emotion, but it feels pretty masterly to me. They really sick in the mind with their quirks, ambitions, worries, their domestic lives. Often it’s hard to pick a lead character in Gibson’s tales. Here our omniscient observer hops among the perspectives of ten or so characters, but the two women characters Flynne and Rainey got my empathies for their humanity. Still, the briefer time in the narrative with the real anti-heroes was even more of a pleasure. One wealthy power broker was a star for me in bearing her power in such a charming package. LowBeer is an ancient director of an official MI5-type of state security agency, but she seems to have more world-wide power as a puppetmaster supreme between the two timelines. Her spyware is built into the network everyone uses and gives her powers from all accessible secrets. As evil as that sounds, I homed my hope in the prospect that she would turn out to be one of good guys. The edge of suspicion kept me on my toes, like when she pulls an Orwell when the publicist speaks of terrorism:

“We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.”

She really gets me worried when she speaks of the impact of tapping communications with the past, using a term that may or may not emphasize how little she might care about the fate of a past that is drifting away from her timeline:

The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.

Mind boggling and fun is my best summary. Two cautionary futures for the price of one. A lot more angles on the old pleasure meter may be reaped from Jeffrey Keeten’s great review.

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought for a long while about how to rate this book. I had been initially intrigued by the premise, and there were a few strong scenes in the first half which while reading gave me hope of an enjoyable read. in the end however I found Gibson's The Peripheral disappointing.

My first difficulty with the book was the overdose of concept. Certainly Gibson would have wanted his futuristic novel to have a certain degree of jargon and new technical terms (and no-one wants to bog their book down explaining every one) but i found the book to be overwhelmed with terminology and assumed future concepts that for me did not gel well with a smooth story. I even went so far as to purposefully slow my reading speed down and try and comprehend better what was going on. Honestly the exercise only served to provide evidence that the action and description in this novel were poorly balanced.

Second on my list of justifications - the characters. Aside from their esoteric names, Macon, Wilf, Netherton, I honestly could not tell you anything about the people in this book. I couldn't even tell you who was the protagonist and who were secondary characters. Sure there was a bit of action and drama, I challenge any reader to tell me a personality trait or characteristic of any of the players in this novel, as everyone seemed more present to discuss futuristic politics than have genuine personalities.

My final beef (final I promise) is that the general presentation of the prose was sporadic at best. With chapters ranging from short to very-short the pacing was jerky. The overall one of the novel started as quite serious and dark, and somehow by the end of the novel was almost comedic (particularly the chapter titles) Of course often sci-fi has elements of satire and humor, in this case however it left me wondering whether I was reading a thriller or a black comedy.

It was a shame to not enjoy The Peripheral, I respected the concept, and there were some definitely strong scenes in the book. Ultimately I felt like I was reading a draft that needed 3 more editorial sweeps and rewrites before it became marketable.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-Read 11/9/22:

I got the hankering to re-read with a buddy in preparation to watch the TV show. Not regretting it. :)



Original Review:

In a genre overloaded with lighter fare and simply garnished SF tropes, a novel like this from the wonderful William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) comes along and not only displays gorgeous tech and implications overloading the text, but does it with fantastic prose, delicious turns of phrase, and a boatload of subtlety surrounding some very stark SF events.

His earlier period was the one I was most interested in, ushering in the very term we use today, "Cyberpunk", with equal amounts Noir underdog hacker (replacing gumshoes) against multinational corporations and governments, equally handy with a gun and a fist alongside a computer terminal, heavy experimental tech, and even the odd pantheon of AI gods. :)

The middle period is known for technothrillers and fantastically subtle explorations of culture, specific techs, and how they change us in every walk of life. I really appreciate his writing skill and scope, here.

But now he has returned to the SF I loved most... but I should mention this is NOT Cyberpunk. Gibson has long left those roots behind, instead forging his own ideas of the future in the same way he brought about the genre's revolution in the mid-80's.

The Peripheral is more of a huge-scope indictment of our modern world and the directions it is taking. What direction? Oh, just the slow decline and multi-front failures on every front, giving us a dark look at what we will become in 30 years, kept focused on a small cast but with tons of subtle cues everywhere for everything else.

But things don't stay there. We also have a kind of invasion from a hundred years in the future where most of humanity has died to leave only the decadent rich behind, using quantum tunneling technologies to reach back into the past, 70 years in the past, to be precise, to play their own games without remorse or much empathy.

Here we cross paths between these two complex timelines when our blue-collar buddies from the nearer future get caught up in the games of the future, including murder... and one particularly decent guy from that farther time tries to do the right thing. The characters are pretty damn cool. The worldbuilding is very detailed, and the tech never lets you take a breath. We as readers are all supposed to take an active role. :)

A disabled military guy with tattoos that used to let him control complex drones? Hell yeah. Gaming systems that are more like souped-up cosplay run through android-like Peripherals? Hell yeah! Now how about using some of those more powerful techs to game the living hell out of the past?

Muahahahahaha... the scope of this novel is MUCH larger than the blurb would let you guess.

I'm reminded, first and foremost, of William Gibson when I think about this novel. Secondarily, I'd place him in the same complex turns as Daniel Suarez and Iain McDonald and Neal Stephenson. This kind of novel is not meant to be popcorn trash. It seriously considers so many huge points and does it with style and panache while never stinting on the blow-you-away tech and implications. :)

Do I recommend? Hell yeah!

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

“History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral



Gibson might not always be the most accurate futurist, but he's probably the glossiest, the most polished. I actually really dig Gibson. I don't think he's perfect. Sometimes his schtick gets worn a little thin, but I loved Neuromancer and really liked his Blue Ant series (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History). 'The Peripheral' shares a similar aesthetic with the Blue Ant books, but jumps into the speculative zone that he mastered with the Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive).

'The Peripheral' is set in two futures. One about 30 years from now, and another about 70 years from now. The novel links these two by imagining that through a server in the far future, there is an ability to communicate with the near future. The near future becomes almost a virtual game to the far future. A place where Russian oligarchs and the elite fight tribal wars because they are bored, super rich, and a bit damaged by their own history.

The novel allows Gibson room to explore his favorite issues: technology, paranoia, tribalism, corporatism, information, and mix it with a far future that possesses the ability to indulge their rich 'continua enthusiasts' with an ability to communicate information (not actual time travel) back and forth with their past (our future). That jump/postulation allows Gibson room to riff on how a window, a thin window between time, allows for the transfer of technology, etc., that can unsettle both economies and nations (duh, but most things that ring true seem almost innately obvious before written down). It also, because it is written by Gibson, lets him verbally play with fabric, fashion, tattoos, and other cultural eccentricities that he seems to always seem to understand a couple decades ahead of the rest of us.



One thing I've noticed about Gibson is his ability to desex his novels. There are both women and men in his novels. Heroes and heroines, but they operate with similar skills and capabilities. They both seem to exist in an androgynous asexual universe that isn't genderless or without sex, but almost seems to exist beyond sex (Postgender?), where gender is almost immaterial; an after thought. Gender exists with Gibson as a hanger to drape a clingy dress or a cashmere coat on and that is about it. Perhaps, this came from his quick uptake on how the cyber world would melt the edges of sexuality. The loss of a body through the Internet or the transference to another body (interacting with the world through a drone or a robot/cyborg) suddenly removes gender all together, or allows for a bunch of different interactions and iterations with gender.

Anyway, if you like speculative fiction, fashion, or just a well-crafted story, you could always do a lot worse than William Gibson. And if his track record is any clue, reading Gibson might just be a window on what ONE stub of our near or far future might look like.

[Велислав Върбанов · Rating 5 out of 5]

Великолепна постапокалиптична фантастика! Уилям Гибсън е сътворил невероятно стойностна и любопитна история за пътуване във времето, развивайки две вълнуващи сюжетни линии, които се преплитат... Освен това, авторът е добавил силни антиутопични и киберпънк елементи, но централно място в нея заема темата за осъзнаването на Апокалипсиса (наречен Джакпот), към който човечеството се е запътило... Първоначално четенето ми вървеше по-трудно, тъй като Гибсън директно потапя читателите в сложна футуристична ситуация и използва доста жаргонни думи, обаче след като вникнах в умело разгърнатите от него идеи, то си я дочетох лесно и с голямо удоволствие. „Периферни тела“ има значителни различия с „Невромантик“, понеже е фокусирана върху различни обществени проблеми, но и двете книги са брилянтни по свой собствен начин, и са ми еднакво любими!






„— Предпазлив си, Мейкън — съгласи се Флин. — Тогава защо се захващаш?
— Предпазлив, но любопитен. Трябва да има равновесие.“


„— Аз от първа ръка си спомням света, който вие само си въобразявате, че е бил по-приятен от този — заяви Лоубиър. — Носталгията по отминалите епохи е удобно нещо, особено за онези, които не са ги изживели на гърба си. Пишем историята от обобщения, които изобщо не разбираме. Завинтваме етикети на резултата. Дръжки. След това говорим за тях така, все едно те са самата същност на събитията.“


„Уилф си спомни лицето на Флин, озарено от лунната светлина и изпънато от ужас. Не му беше харесала необходимостта да ѝ разкаже за джакпота. По принцип ненавиждаше наративните аспекти на историята, особено тази тяхна част. Хората днес или бяха ужасно отегчително деформирани от нея — като Аш, или пък почти не ѝ обръщаха внимание — като Лев.“


„Местните вече си мислят, че всичко това е заради Леон. Теорията на конспирацията гласи, че е спечелил много повече, отколкото щатската лотария обявява.
— Това е глупост.
— Теориите на конспирацията трябва да са прости. Усложненията са ненужни. Хората са по-уплашени от това колко сложна е ситуацията всъщност, отколкото биха се стреснали от онова, което се предполага да стои зад конспирацията.“


„— Онова, което са наричали „риалити шоу“?
— Не знам. Защо сте спрели да ги наричате така?
— Понеже накрая само това даваха, като изключим Ciencia Loca и аниме, и онези бразилски сериали. Старомодни, ако може така да се каже.
Уилф спря, зачетен в нещо, което Флин не виждаше.
— Да. В определен смисъл Дийдра е произлязла от това. Риалити телевизия. Сляло се е с политиката. След това с пърформанса.“


„Понеже хората, които не си представят, че са способни на зло, са лишени от голямо предимство при заниманията си с онези, които нямат нужда да си представят, понеже вече са зли. Каза също и че винаги е грешка да вярваш, че тези, другите, са различни, специални, заразени с нещо нечовешко, подчовешко, фундаментално чуждо. Което напомни на Флин определението на майка ѝ за Корбел Пикет. Че злото не е лъскаво, а е просто резултат от обикновена безсърдечна лошотия, гимназиална злоба, намерила достатъчно пространство, независимо как се е случило, да се разрасне като буренак.“

[Jeff Jackson]

I'm not rating this, partly because it doesn't come out for a while and partly because I'm torn about my overall reaction. The first half of The Peripheral contains some of the most visionary writing of William Gibson's career. He returns to science-fiction and offers up detailed versions of the future that feel as prescient and compelling as his work back in the Neuromancer days. It's exciting, thought-provoking, and wonderfully dizzying stuff.

Unfortunately, the second half of the novel grows increasingly slack and ponderous, much of it padding for what's already Gibson's longest book. His past few novels have featured excessively happy endings, making sure the main characters come out perfectly unscathed and amply rewarded for playing a part in his narratives. The Peripheral amps up this unfortunate tendency to new levels with a conclusion that would make even Steven Spielberg roll his eyes and call for a rewrite. Ultimately I'd say the book is worth reading, but there's a truly excellent novel embedded in here that simply slipped away.

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only one other SF writer I find as challenging, and that is Greg Egan: Egan through concepts, Gibson through writing style. And in both their works there are original and unique ideas, and that is what I look for most in SF.

I saw in some reviews that the readers gave up after a few chapters (which are quite small) because nothing made sense. In a way, they are right - the story starts to make sense after 16% when the key word is thrown in casually, catches you by surprise, and makes you exclaim: whoa! So that's what's going on! And gets you hooked.

In my case, I saw the TV series first, so I knew what to expect. But even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have given up, because I find Gibson's stories compelling, and I know a few surprises awaits me. I would just have struggled more to understand what is happening until that milestone.

The TV series keeps the main theme and worldbuilding but differs in most details and events from the book. However, it is an exceptional adaptation - it wouldn't have been possible to follow exactly the book, it's too intricate to made it like this on the screen. But both are truly remarkable the way they are.

Gibson always has an ace up his sleeve, so if you want something out of the ordinary, pick up one of his books; you'll definitely get it if you can get used with his writing style, which is more often than not truncated, and filled with slang and jargon. Don't expect "tell", you'll get only "show", even if not exactly into the open.

I'm glad I saw the TV series first; it made it easier to understand the book, and I got two versions of events happening in one of the most original (post)cyberpunk worlbuildings ever.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a 5-star idea, but it was definitely not a 5-star reading experience. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten beyond the first couple of chapters if I weren’t reading it with a reading group. I suggested it because it’s a time travel novel by a well-known sci-fi writer and because so many of the reviews for it have been 5-star reviews. Plus, the premise sounded interesting.

The beginning of the story is set in the near future when using local 3D printing (sometimes with pirated printing plans) is the norm and where the military uses a temporarily-tattooed haptic system to help guide soldiers at war. Burton is a military veteran and makes money from such a 3D printing business as well as from a paid online job where he does security remotely. He’s not sure whether he’s doing security within a game or whether the game environment is just an overlay for a real location that he’s monitoring and defending remotely. However, he doesn’t really care since he’s getting paid for it either way. He has to be out of town a few nights, and offers to pay his sister, Flynne, to take his online work shift for him. While she’s on duty, she witnesses something that sends life as they know it into chaos.

The story is written such that every odd-numbered chapter is written about Flynne and her friends’ involvement in the chaos while every even-numbered chapter is written about a man named Wilf and his friends’ involvement in the chaos. The writing is extremely dense, and the first 18-23 chapters are slow-going as the reader tries to absorb the changes that have happened in the world of the future, the technology, and the lingo. I had to read many of the paragraphs 2 or 3 times in the beginning to try to wrap my head around what was going on. The author makes the reader work to unravel the mystery of the world he has created, not giving any sort of info dump until well into the novel. Some may find this process of trying to figure out the world of the novel to be enjoyable, but very few of the readers in our group did. The difficulty in understanding of the book is exacerbated by sometimes having difficulty determining who the pronouns are referring to. I got about 80% through the book thinking that one of the male characters was female and that a cousin was a brother. The book is also written such that many of the sentences are sentence fragments rather than complete sentences, more like the way a person would tell the story aloud than the way a book is generally written. The book would have been helped with a glossary. I created one for the book group hoping that it would help those who were late to start reading, but they didn’t think that it helped much because the writing was so dense.

Because of what Flynne witnesses online while she is working security for her brother, her life is in danger. A great portion of the book is spent trying to keep her safe and determine who is after her and why. The time travel aspect of the book is achieved through a virtual reality type environment where the person uses a robotic body on the other side of time to interact with people and move around in the environment of the other time. I did find that portion fascinating. However the parts where they’re regrouping, going to the bathroom, and eating pork nubbins and sushi are less than interesting. Unfortunately, there’s too much of that sort of thing except when Flynne gets temporarily kidnapped.

Finally, the reader reaches the 80% point hoping for a pay off in return for their hard work of figuring out the world of the future and waiting around for things to happen. 90-something% in, the climax feels anti-climatic and the big secret of who is after Flynne turns out to be a let down. All the surviving shallowly-developed characters live happily ever after in Po-Dunk, Alabama, as millionaires who feed themselves silly on pork nubbins. The end.

I hate that I didn’t enjoy this book more. I want big ideas to have great follow-throughs. I cannot subscribe to the idea that a book is great simply because it’s written by a famous author and because it has a great idea behind it. The characters, the story, the writing, and the parts in between the big ideas need to also be good. I’d love to see a movie version of this with someone else writing the screenplay. However, it would need to be the type of movie that deviates from the main storyline of the book, pulling out a better storyline, a better ending, and more 3-D characters. While I’d give this book 5 stars for the idea behind the book and Gibson’s imagining of the future, I’d give the other parts of the book 2 stars. So I’d call this book a 2.5-star book which I’ve rounded up to 3 stars because of the concept behind it. Read at your own risk.

[Gerhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ‘what the fuck?’ quotient tends to wobble right off the scale when you start a William Gibson novel. The neologisms come thick and fast as you try to parse the texture of Gibson’s particular future this time round (it is hard to think it has been four years since Zero History, let alone any meaning (or, dare one say, plot).

The beginning of The Peripheral is particularly abstruse and obscure, even by Gibson’s standards: I only started to understand what was going on at about 20% of the ebook. Reading Gibson, of course, is very much an immersive learning experience. Unfortunately, once the reader becomes acclimatised to the initial sense of wonder, the book disappointingly and very quickly becomes a rather repetitive police procedural (with a rather uncharacteristically upbeat ending).

This is despite the fact that The Peripheral is probably Gibson’s most obviously SF novel since Neuromancer. Here he tackles that hoary old genre chestnut, time travel, but puts a fantastic spin on it: there is not one future here, but two. In the one, we meet Flynne Fisher, whose part-time occupations include beta testing video games. She happens to witness a murder in one game, which brings her to the attention of a future 70 years ahead of her timeline.

Gibson has great fun contrasting and comparing the two futures, one set in small-town America and the other in a London ravaged by the fallout of an ‘androgenic’ apocalypse. Science has delivered such miracles as pervasive nanotechnology, but not in time to save humanity or the planet.

One of the crazier ideas of the novel is that Flynne is able to participate in the future timeline by means of a robot proxy called a Peripheral. I almost thought Gibson was attempting a screwball comedy, as at one point we have various characters jumping backwards and forwards into variously gendered Peripherals and even objects.

The description of this process, and the implications for both gender and identity, are thought-provoking and convincing. Gibson has always been fascinated with the marginal and the bleeding edge of things, and the Peripheral is a truly inspired McGuffin to allow him to explore these ideas on a much larger canvas.

Gibson also has some mind-bending fun with the idea of time travel, and how past/present can interact with and transform each other, like a Möbius strip of causality:

“You from the future, Mr. Netherton?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m in the future that would result from my not being there. But since I am, it isn’t your future. Here.”

I had forgotten how droll Gibson can be – he is often portrayed as this grim futurist – but there are some very funny moments here, as with Flynne’s sudden desire to have a breakfast burrito while being transported in a security convoy (said burrito is delivered by remote drone).

Gibson is also a master of dialogue, and delights in laconic exchanges that often reveal far more than what the protagonists intended. This often makes for rapid-fire chapters – there are 124 in total – that belie the considerable length of this novel (490 pages).

Unfortunately, the usual problem of a Gibson novel is manifest here as well. This is the perfunctory characterisation, with characters largely differentiated in terms of what they wear and the fashionable backdrops they are paraded against. These range from a vintage Airstream RV (in the past) to a fantastically bio-engineered Oxford Street in London (in the future).

The Peripheral cannot be dismissed out of hand, however. It does represent a refinement of the particular flavour that is a Gibson novel. Like Murakami, Gibson is in danger of becoming a literary commodity. But there is enough strangeness and intellectual frisson here to make The Peripheral one of the more interesting SF novels of recent times.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look, I'm not going to be remotely impartial here, okay? I'm a Bill Gibson fan. In addition to which, and to my enduring delight and the bewilderment of my 16 year old self, we're kinda friends now. I got this book early direct from the author, it's out in the UK today, and I'm going to go and buy a copy because that's what you do when a book is good.

This book is very, very good.

There are ten thousand people out there right now writing critical exegeses of The Peripheral. There's a great interview by Ned Beauman in Sunday's Observer. You want summary, assessment, disquisition? I am not your huckleberry. You need someone else. With a book by a name author the only question is ever whether it's a yes, or a no.

This book is a yes, with honours.

[Libby · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The non-mediated world has become a lost country. I think that in some very real way, it’s a country that we cannot find our way back to. The mediated world is now the world. We are that which perceives a mediated reality. I don’t think it’s possible to know what we’ve lost. I think there is a pervasive sense of loss and a pervasive excitement at what we seem to be gaining. (quote from the 2000 documentary, ‘No Maps for These Territories’) William Gibson

Gibson’s book, Neuromancer is touted as the frontrunner of the cyberpunk genre, which may be its own genre or a subgenre of science fiction, depending on what you read. It’s first line, The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel is listed as number 30 in 2007 American Book Review’s list of “100 best first lines from Novels.”

The first line of ‘The Peripheral’ reads:

“They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.

I’m drawn into Flynne’s world right away. She lives in a near future version of America where jobs are hard to find. Her brother, Burton, draws a small disability check from the Veterans Administration for his haptics glitch. Flynne assembles products at a Fab business in town, but has previously made money in online games. To start this story off, Burton asks her to sub for him in a game that he’s been playing where he’s making lots of money. He promises to pay her well for her time. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that Flynne sees something she’s not supposed to see and the game is not really a game.

I wanted to read something different and when I’m in that kind of a reading mood, I will sometimes fall back to science fiction or fantasy. After reading the novel, I watched a virtual lecture by Professor Dr. Pawel Frelik of Maria Curie Sklodowska University in Poland to learn about cyberpunk. A compound work, Dr. Frelik describes the cyber as dealing with implants/grafts/prostheses as well as designer drugs, disembodiment, and reality as information. In ‘The Peripheral’ Flynne’s brother, Burton, has an Army buddy, Conner, who came back from war with a lot of missing body parts. When he ‘plays the game’ with Flynne, his peripheral is an athletic dancing master. In this new world, he has no missing body parts, so Conner becomes a technological miracle. At one point in the story, an implant is inserted into Flynne’s brain so that she can talk knowledgeably about art. Flynne is also told about a near apocalyptic event called 'The Jackpot’ that is supposed to happen soon. She receives information that could become reality.

Inside the game, we meet Wilf Netherton and Detective Lowbeer. Every other chapter is Netherton’s point of view, and he will travel to Flynne’s time in a ‘Wheelie Boy,’ a forerunner of the peripheral that Flynne and Connor will use to travel to Netherton’s time. In Netherton’s time, the world has given itself over to information and who has the most of it and can manipulate it the best gains power. This world is not as attractive to me but I am interested in Flynne’s journey as she navigates between the two worlds. Her peripheral is attractive and athletic, but as I wait for a relationship between her and Netherton to materialize, my interest cools.

The punk part of cyberpunk, according to Dr. Frelik means no future, no illusions, and no corporations. This suits the anti establishment message of the 1980s punk subculture. This novel, however, is dominated by large corporations. Money pours into Flynne’s time and she and Burton become top executives, which I found confusing. Is the message… there is no way to circumvent ‘The Corporation?’ Perhaps that is what is meant by ‘no illusions’ in cyberpunk, but the ‘no corporations’ part doesn’t work here.

I enjoyed this story, and enjoyed learning more about this author as well as cyberpunk. The new vocabulary was stimulating. I wanted more and deeper characterizations and more from interrelationships. I wanted Flynne to have more paranoia about who she trusted. The settings, details, and technology were captivating. The genius of William Gibson’s ideas and his stylistic writing are two reasons I stayed engaged. On October 21, 2022, this will be a new TV series on Amazon. I will be watching. I’m curious about how technology will affect writing in the future, so I expect that I may continue to read cyberpunk and/or science fiction.

[Althea Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves."

Yes... but I just have to say, speaking of eras... WOO-HOO - William Gibson is back in the era of the definitely-pretty-far-in-the-future! Not that I didn't wholly love his recent books that were in the right-around-the-corner-future, but I felt like we were catching up... 'The Peripheral' leaps ahead, again, with speculation and extrapolation based on today's technological and social concerns, making the book feel every bit as fresh and timely as 'Neuromancer' did in the 80's.

It also has a purely science-fictional premise: a method of contacting alternate realities has been discovered. The exact mechanics of this are hazy, but once an alternate timeline has been contacted, the two remain locked in parallel. It's not possible to physically travel between the two - but information can get through. This means that communication is possible - and, with the creation of 'robot' bodies, a 'virtual' presence can be maintained.

Human nature being what it is, any technology with a potential for abuse probably will be abused.

In a world very much like what our own near-future will probably be like, a group of young adults is caught in a dead-end small-town. The local economy is dependent on illegal drugs. Actual medicines are nearly completely unaffordable for the average person. Veterans of foreign wars are physically and emotionally damaged - and pretty much on their own, with only minimal government benefits. Our protagonist, Flynne (known online as Easy Ice) and her brother occasionally pick up some cash by playing online games for wealthy players' campaigns. They both assume their latest offer is like previous ones... but it turns out to be something weirder. What they're told is a 'game' is no virtual sci-fi world, but an actual future.

And when Flynne witnesses something while online that some people wish she hadn't seen, she and her friends find themselves in danger from people whose existence they can't even have imagined, and up past their necks in bizarre power games in which the fate of their world could be at stake.

"People who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were. ... It was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other."

Excellent, excellent book. (As always, from Gibson.) Highly recommended.

[David V. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Received this as an ARC via my employer Barnes & Noble. I began it today and after 24 pages, I remembered why I didn't like Mr. Gibson's books. If you're not a computer geek or a gamer, then you don't know what the hell he's talking about. The jargon and slang expressions meant nothing to me, and it was difficult to ascertain from the context------so, unfortunately, I'm giving up and moving on to another book. I'm not going to live long enough to read everything I want to read anyway, so I have to set some priorities, especially if reading is supposed to be fun and interesting. Others find his books to be fascinating. If anyone wants this ARC, I'll be happy to mail it out---I'll even pay postage. First request gets it.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was ... even better than I had thought.

What I had expected was a clever scifi story laced with action and neat technology. What I got was a clever scifi story laced with action and neat technology that was interlaced and spiced up with creepy implications springing from accute socio-economic commentary and spot-on observations about environmentalism.

Flynn is a young woman growing up in a small American town in the near future. Her brother has served in a very special tech unit of the USMC doing Recon until he was medically discharged. And let me tell you, I immediately fell in love with the idea of tattoos as part of tech that controls all kinds of other tech, augmenting humans.
One day, a company is offering her brother a very lucrative job, which he accepts since he lives on VA benefits as best he can and money is tight (it's also not really worth a damn anymore). But because of another event, he needs his sister to take over one night. This eventually leads to her witnessing a possible murder in the VR.
But is it VR? And if so, is it just a game? Or do they get transported to another location on the planet? Or is there even time-travel involved?
The reader really doesn't know much and unraveling the mystery was a fantastic way to get hooked.
We also meet Wilf, who is having an agenda of his own - which gets derailed spectacularly upon which he meets Flynn. From then on, both are in danger.
Why, I hear you ask? That is another of the many questions one asks oneself while following Flynn from one crappy job to the next to be able to afford food until she has to run for her and her family's life while trying to prevent the Jackpot.

I loved the stark contrast of Flynn's and Wilf's worlds. I loved the combination of run-down rural America and futuristic tech. I loved the commentary on the worth of humans, the state of the planet, where we're headed, how we MIGHT create a future in which we can actually survive, and the sheer mindfuckery of it all.

And I loved the writing style. No-nonsense prose that was nevertheless nicely descriptive, saying much more between the lines than anything, with fantastic worldbuilding and very lively characters.

No wonder this got picked up to be adapted for the silver screen. And yes, I watched episode 1 tonight. There are some changes, but I think they managed to capture the tone of the book nicely (I'm as in love with screen-Conner as I was with book-Conner). We'll see if they can keep it up.

But definitely read the book - they are always much more intricate and that is so very important in case of this story.

[Brent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gibson takes on a traditional Sci-Fi trope in his own cyberpunkish, quasi-dystopian style.

It took me few chapters to click with this. I'm not sure, but I think its because Gibson's deep-end, figure-it-out-as-you-go narrative style works better with plots that aren't all that scientifically intricate. When added to some brain-stretching scientific paradoxes, his style can lead to some slow processing.

But by the first third, I was totally in sync. And by the end I was eager for a showdown.

Spoily addendum:
Also, the idea that we are in a stub, being tormented by a sadistic and powerful figure from the future would explain a lot about how society seems to have fallen so far so fast over the last few years.

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a new William Gibson novel is both delightful and exciting. He delights with the cool, sardonic yet imaginative visions of the present and future. He excites with his uncanny glimpses of the future, grounded in canny selections from our time.

The Peripheral offers another pleasure, that of Gibson trying something new. His recent brace of novels looked at the very near future, each following a normal linear path. His classic cyberpunk or Sprawl trilogy envisioned a medium-term future, also tending to thriller linearity.

But in The Peripheral we see a very different conceit and narrative structure. This novel relies on two timelines, one in the near-to-medium term future, and one almost a century away. At first we follow these in parallel, trying to infer connections. Then we learn that the further-along future has discovered a form of time travel - well, information exchange with the past, to be precise. The far-future signals the closer-to-us future, and has a proposition. Or two. Then more, which aren't propositions but assassinations.

This dual-track time-travel-ish idea owes much to Gregory Benford's 1980 novel Timescape . Other parallels appear; see spoiler section below.

The future-near-to-us characters are also the more sympathetic. They focus on a young, poor Southern woman, Flynn Fisher, and her family. They live in a postwar backwater, where the economy barely exists apart from illegal drug manufacture. Flynn helps her vet brother, Burton, with an online job and witnesses what seems to be a strange murder. In the future-farther-away we see a PR flack, Wilf Netherton, working with a Russian crime family and their staff. Wilf has made an unspecified bad move, and is trying to improve his situation.

To say more will spoil things, so in this paragraph I'll try to sum up what happens next. One agency in the far-off future is manipulating the past for its own reasons, and hires the Fishers as proxies. Another far-off-future group hires others to kill the Fisher family. Ainsley Lowbeer, a London cop, or something like that, appears in the far-future, with unusual connections to the Fishers' time. Flynn and Burton are able to interact with their far-future employers via telepresence robots, the titular peripherals. Wilf explains the Jackpot to Flynn, describing a series of interconnected, overlapping crises that killed the majority of humans:

droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but just big enough to be historic events in themselves...

Flynn also learns that by intervening in her time, the far-future team has effectively broken off her world from the stream of time, creating a "stub" which can't affect their future, and avoiding neatly some classic time travel problems.

The plot ratchets up slowly and steadily to climax in a party, where multiple schemes intersect. Some, not all, is revealed, and the Fishers end up alive, very rich, and with a powerful edge on their present. Wilf somehow survives, and ends up in a relationship. This is too brisk and cursory a summary, but will do for now.

I mentioned earlier that The Peripheral has links to Benford's Timescape. There are more, but they, too, are spoilericious. Benford's future world is facing an existential crisis, due to events occurring in the past, so they reach out to communicate with the past to get them to change their ways. Gibson's far-future has already experienced the Jackpot, but some of the survivors want to change the past to mitigate the experience. I dimly recall Benford's future coming to an end, somehow, and the past branching off into a new, better world. This recalls Flynn's world cutting its way into a different, hopefully non-Jackpotted world.

One of the pleasures of reading William Gibson is tracking his experimental words and phrases. These are concentrated projections of a possible future. Let me list some that caught my eye: klepts, artisanal AIs, battle-ready solicitors, court-certified recall, the viz, hate Kegels, autonomic bleedover, continua enthusiasts, drop bears, period trains, neo-primitivist curators, quasi-biological megavolume carbon collectors, heritage diseases, directed swarm weapons, a synthetic bullshit implant, surprise funeral, mofo-ettes, and a neurologer's shop. One near-future treat is the "freshly printed salty caramel cronut".

Some of today's words mutate in these two futures. For example, poor folks don't cook, but build drugs. "Homes" refers not to homies or residences, but to Homeland Security. A very bad crisis happened between now and 2025 or so. People afterwards refer to it as the Jackpot.

Some of the language is simply cute. One character has her name changed slightly, and refers to it as "amputating the last letter of her name." Another speaks of "cleaning up the afterbirth of Christmas ornaments". The Fisher family shops at a Hefty Mart.

In a sense The Peripheral is Gibson's gloomiest novel. Like the recent film Interstellar, this story begins in a bad situation then gets worse. The Fishers are poor and ill (the brother has seizures, the mother seriously ailing) in a society that clearly doesn't care for them at all. Their story reads like something from a late 19th-century Southern backwater, or like today's worst countryside. Characters have little help for the future. What we learn about the Jackpot not only makes things horrible, but sets up a future that's inhumane. Across all of these times looms the specter of vast economic inequality, of a society caring only for the <1%.

There is a powerful sense that the far-future is a kind of 1% taken to an extreme: a lonely elite, casually breaking off temporal worlds as a hobby, easily committing murders. Our lack of information about the world around London's far-future elite disturbs me, the more I think of it. Conversely, the far-future world is situated in such total surveillance that they see our/Flynn's sense of surveillance as charmingly antique.

How does this gloomy novel end, then? Ah, spoilerizing: it's a happy ending, pretty much, although we don't learn enough about what happens in the future. We - well, the Fisher stub - get to avoid the Jackpot. Whew!

But Gibson doesn't want us to relax. Note his comments in a Tor interview:

there may be readers who get to the end and they go, “oh, well, that’s okay, everything worked out for them!”
... But these guys had an immensely powerful—if possibly dangerously crazy—fairy godmother who altered their continuum, who has for some reason decided that she’s going to rake all of their chestnuts out of the fire, so that the world can’t go the horrible it way it went in hers. And whatever else is going to happen, that’s not going to happen for us, you know? We’re going to have to find another way. We’re not going to luck into Lowbeer.

Worse, the Fishers seem like good folks. But what will keep them (or their inheritors) from becoming klepts, with their vast power and advantages?
So this book ends up as a cautionary tale, a huge warning, and a goad to get us hauling ourselves away from the Jackpot.


Overall, The Peripheral offers solid future thought in an engaging narrative. Recommended.

I didn't read this one, but listened to it on audiobook. Lorelei King was the reader and did a fine job, with the whole file running a touch over 14 hours. King does different nationalities well, which matters in the kind of multinational world Gibson loves. She reads with the right level of cool, too - not a thriller's burning pace, but with a kind of observation acuity that I always associate with Gibson.

[Tonya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew mind spinning, what a wild ride! Definitely recommend!

[Jen Fairbanks · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book wasn't as terrible as many of the reviews made it sound, but it suffered from some issues that I can see alienating the vast majority of people who pick it up.

For one, Gibson immediately bombards you with made-up technological and cultural terms. There were a few that even by the end of the novel weren't clear in my head. If the first 50 pages of a book are so garbled with terms context can't help a reader unravel, then they're going to put the book down and never come back to it. I persevered, because I have patience for it, but it wasn't easy at first (see next point).

The story doesn't start to actually become a plot until the first 1/3 of the book is read. That is way too freaking long. Additionally, as long as the book is getting started, it's nothing compared to how quickly it ends. It's like Gibson just wanted to be done writing, since the middle part of the book drags on forever, and is actually repetitive. The main character just gets kidnapped/shot at a bunch and it happens over and over. She barely reflects on it, and certainly doesn't learn anything from it. Then at the end, there's this sort of deus ex machina that feels like BS.

The big bad of this novel is so poorly explained motive-wise, that when they do the big reveal, you're like "Huh? Oh, they mentioned this guy ONCE before, in relation to crypto-babble economics something something exploiting resources...The only defining trait of the thing is that he's mean, and he's tied to a VIP in the future government whose function they NEVER explain.

And perhaps that's the problem. The writer clearly has a fully formed universe in his head, where all the answers to all of the novel's questions reside. But the novel just states that everyone is hiding the truth from everyone else, and even the reader, inside their heads, never hears what those secrets are. As a result, the characters don't really appear to have motives or agency. They just kind of go along with whatever, even when their lives are constantly threatened.

Things I want explained that are either done poorly or not at all:

-What is the function of the City Remembrancer? At the end he's one of the big bads, but they don't explain what his job is, why he's important, or even what he gains from being the antagonist.
-What the heck is the political situation in the future world? They insinuate that it's just a bunch of rich assholes, but that's really not enough to determine how anything functions. I don't find it really believable that 80% of the population would die off, and then the remaining 20% are all rich people, and somehow all technological geniuses that can then suddenly burst into creative prosperity.

-What is the jackpot really? The book literally just says it's a bunch of bad things that compounded into some meta-problem that killed everyone. Way to think that one through Gibson. If you need to make the reason something complex, please put some effort into actually explaining that reason.

-What and where is the server that connects the two universes? The characters make a huge deal out of it being mysterious, and its never solved. Another instance where it felt like the writer couldn't be bothered to conclude a thought.

-What the heck does the term 'klept' mean? All I was able to pull from it was some vague Russian mafia situation, but it wasn't enough to really create a wider picture of their power, relationship to politics, etc.

-Am I supposed to like these characters? They don't have much personality, and since the plot is all "That's something we can't tell you" anytime a character asks a question the reader would want answered, I just hate them for accepting that as a reasonable answer. A mystery is only as good as its reveal. Hint: there is no reveal.


Other miscellaneous gripes:
-All Americans in the book are white trash. All the Europeans are snobby jerks.
-Flynne has about as much emotional range as the chick from Twilight
-Burton spends all his time hiding stuff from Flynne, and it seemed like it was because she was female. Maybe I'm attributing motive where there is none though...because nothing is transparent.

-The ending. It was fairy tale everyone wins cop out crap. So the main characters are basically the biggest economy in their universe just because. None of them, even at the end know what their role in their puppet corporation is, as they're all white trash military brats who before the book started all worked retail or collected disability pay. Somehow they're going to make their branch universe not suck because the future universe doesn't want them turn out like they did. So the best way to do that is to completely fuck the past's economy by flooding trillions of dollars into the hands of some future version of our millennials. It's too much of an easy out, given the characters themselves admit they don't know what the hell the paperwork they sign is, what assets they own, or how to do the fancy jobs they've been assigned. Also, everyone falls in love with someone else from the book and make babies and the end. I want to barf in my mouth a little.

-I just wanted more substance. Hidden under all the crap there's a universe that feels like it could be compelling if any of it were explained. Whenever the book would forego that depth with another stupid kidnap scene, or Wilf staring at Flynne's boobs or whatever, I could just feel the potential of that universe leaking away. Please Gibson, tell me WHY stuff happened. As it is, it feels like everything in the book was predetermined, and the characters were just actors playing roles they didn't study up on.

The verdict: I'm not sorry that I read this novel. There were some interesting ideas there, but they were half-completed. The characters needed to be differentiated, as they all just seemed vaguely bored, despite people constantly trying to kill them. Better pacing would have done wonders for the story as well.

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't give less than 5 full stars to "The Peripheral". One of the most beautiful, inventive and satisfying science-fiction books I've ever read. I knew William Gibson and I had read his "Pattern Recognition", a very clever thriller with some science-fictional themes based in our present time.

This is what the greatest science-fiction is and should be: a literature of ideas. Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, Silverberg, they all peppered each page of their short stories or novels with a myriad of really original, hold-on-a-second kind of ideas.

Gibson does the exact same, and this is why, in his own words, his writing process is painstakingly slow.

As for the reading process... let's be honest, you need to take it slow with this book, otherwise (if you read at Stephen-King-reading-speed) there is no way you will be able to capture all the infinite details and inventions and minutiae that Gibson stuffed it with. It’s a 500 pages book that took me the time I usually need to finish a 750 pages book, but it was entirely worth it.

From a review in "The Guardian" : "If you were to plot your reading of a William Gibson book on a graph – reading speed on one axis, progress through the book on another – it would produce a strange, choppy waveform. The first 30 or 40 pages take a good couple of minutes each, as you struggle to place yourself in the novel’s world, acclimatise to its language and make out what is going on. By the time you’re properly drawn into the plot you’ll be burning a page or two a minute; then some fresh development will slow you up again."

I actually spent at least 5 minutes flipping pages back and forth only to understand the VERY FIRST sentence of the book! Which is the following:

“They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him ”

By the end of the next page we’ve had unexplained mentions of “pickers”, “Hefty Mart”, “Luke 4:5” and Flynne “walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa”. (In reverse order: being paid to play in a first-person shooter game; a religious protest group along the lines of the Westboro Baptist church; Walmart’s mutant offspring; and God alone knows.)

I am infinitely grateful to some Goodreads reviewers who described the same difficulties I had in getting into those first pages, but who also explained that this is all done by Gibson on purpose, and that right after page 50 or 60 the book takes off. Because that is absolutely true!

Note: if you google “the peripheral book glossary” you will even find a limited glossary of terms that a helpful and slightly crazy reader uploaded to help you follow the book.

In “The Peripheral”, there are two futures to be deciphered: the future containing Hefty Mart (around 2030?) is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. The only real money in the economy comes from “building” drugs. “Homes” (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get “fabbed” at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job.

The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future (maybe 2100? Never specified) after a hazily described apocalypse known as “the Jackpot” has wiped out 80% of the population. The streets are all but deserted – though there are androids amusing tourists in bleak Dickensian cosplay zones – and power resides in the hands of unimaginably wealthy Russian oligarchs, or “klepts”, while the police don’t like to talk about terrorism because “terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state”. In this world we meet Wilf Netherton, a fecklessly charming alcoholic PR man who “looked like a low-key infomercial for an unnamed product”. Wilf has a problem. One of his clients is Daedra – a post-postmodern celebrity who gets naked a lot, tattoos herself liberally, and periodically has her skin flayed and then regrown, selling miniature figurines of her previous skins to subscriber-collectors. But a publicity stunt goes wrong and all kinds of hell break loose.

The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called “continua enthusiasts”, that allows people to reach into the past. Paradox is avoided because, at the moment they make contact, that past splits off: it ceases to lead up to the present and becomes a “stub”, another fork in the timeline. Flynne’s world is – unknown to her – one such “stub”. A melancholy undercurrent of the book is how the inhabitants of Wilf’s world envy the inhabitants of Flynne’s seemingly more innocent age.

The plot whirrs off: after beta-testing what she thinks is a new video game, Flynne witnesses a murder. She wasn’t, as it turns out, playing a drone-piloting simulation game: she was piloting a real drone in this divergent future.

This happens in the very first pages so it’s really not a spoiler.

There are so many beautiful moments in the book, some of them full of inventiveness, some of them very poetic: for example on page 403 of the US paperback edition, the moment where Wilf, from 2100, is visiting 2030 through the limited capabilities of a kid’s toy, a “Wheelie Boy” (basically a stick with a screen and a camera on wheels), and “he” is left by himself , wondering through a house that to his eyes looks ancient. That was such an extraordinary scene.

At this link you can find a crazy guy who created a “Wheelie Boy” 3D visualization after reading this book: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.redd...

Finally, let me add here the end of the Guardian's review I already quoted, because I agree with it, while still thinking that "The Peripheral" is an incredible masterpiece:

"Gibson is such a polished and propulsive writer that you nearly won’t notice that the plot is sort of a mess, that he’s peopled the novel with too many characters too sketchily delineated, that hinted-at arcs involving the macroeconomy of Flynne’s stub and a plot to assassinate the president are cursorily wrapped up, and that the ending – from the imagination that brought us Neuromancer – needs only a “Goonight, John-Boy” to be The Waltons. The strength of The Peripheral is that its technology isn’t weightless; its weakness is that, too often, its characters and its situations are. But, my goodness, what a glorious ride."

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to pick the right rating for this one. It's as though I've ordered a chicken parma because I like chicken parmas, and this certainly is a very tasty chicken parma, but somehow I'm disappointed that it tastes like so many other chicken parmas.

Replace chicken parma with "book with a near future settings where some rich people with inscrutable motivations do something via, then for, then ulitmately via some spud from the lower social strata which boils down to one pivotal moment of agency close to the end which changes everything" and that's kinda that.

[Иван Величков · Rating 5 out of 5]

Книгата се оказа много приятна изненада. Изненада, защото видях Гибсън и купих, без да гледам анотации, цени и каквото и да е друго. Не съм си и помислял, че в шантавата глава на автора има място за други светове освен вселената на трилгията „Невромантик” и трилогията за Моста (единствените превеждани на български, а „Идору” - последната, преди горе-долу 20 години).

Тук Гибсън ни показва, че може да пише доволно сериозна фантастика, различна от мрачните му прогнози за близко бъдеще, но да запази шантавия си стил на светостроене. По същество двете времеви линии в които се развива действието донякъде са свързани със света от основните му произведения (едната малко го предхожда, другата го наследява) или поне с такова впечатление останах. Свързващата линия обаче е време-пространствена фантастика издържана в най-класическа традиция с Гибсънов ефект за разкош.

Флин е обикновено момиче със средни технически познания, което тепърва се опитва да намери мястото си в един много близък до нашето настояще свят. Когато брат и (бивш военен) е арестуван за хулиганска проява, тя поема смяната му като виртуален охранител в шантава игра. Там става свидетел на изключително грозно убийство. Оказва се, че играта не е точно игра и цялото и семейство, а и градът, а и донякъде светът ще си го отнесе заради тази работа.
Седемдесет години напред, земята е приживяла бавен и унищожителен колапс наречен „Джакпота”, който е заличил 80% от човечеството и повечето флора и фауна. Там Уилф е пиар специалист на арт медийна звезда с доста скандални идеи и поведение. Когато лиглата прецаква сериозна политическа среща, той се оказва уволнен и издирван, единственият му шанс за нормален живот е богатият му приятел Лев, който пък си има собствени проблеми.
Хобито на Лев е скъпо и странно. Той (и подобните нему богати и оттегчени) отваря портали във времето и благодарение на напредналата компютърна техника разработва отминали алтернативи на Земята, като ги модулира според собствените си интереси. Тези минали времена съответно се променят и поемат към собствено алтернативно бъдеще, а хобистите черпят от тях идеен и донякъде човешки ресурс.
Двете времеви линии се преплитат прескачат и променят една друга по възможно най-шантави начини, а съдбите на хората в тях се усукват като спагети.

Много от идеите вътре са заети от други ключови имена в жанра. Имаме Нийл Стивънсън, имаме Брус Стърлинг (книгата му „Mocart in Mirrorshades”, иконична за жанра, е ключова за това произведение, трябва да спра да я отбягвам), имаме Уолтър Джон Уилиямс, но пречупването през фантазията на Гибсън им дава едно свежо и реалистично звучене.

Използването на времевия „кочан” като ресурсен дохот (или както казва авторът „като страна от третия свят”) притеснително много наподобява това което се случва с нас от близо век. Ако англоезичният читател е леко потресен от възможността собственото му време и родина да попаднат в такава политическа хватка, и то от олигарси със свободно време и извратено съзнание, то на мен ми стана едно тегаво, защото тук това е тъжна действителност.

Трябва да добавя и че преводът е на доста високо ниво. Ако някой се е спънал в тежкия техножаргон, да си знае, че на английски положението не е по-различно. Тук дори Гибсън е успял да го облекчи в сравнение с предходните си произведения и доста добре да вкара разяснения, без да ги прави оттегчителен пълнеж.
Преводът, смелостта отново да видим Гибсън на български и възстановяването на колекция „Магика” с жанровите си произведения, чупещи стереотипа, дават петата звездичка в оценката, която давам само на книги, които носят емоционален товар за мен.

[☼Bookish in Virginia☼ · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE PERIPHERALS is just as frustrating as Gibson's other books. You might as well know that before you dive it. He has this writing style that throws the reader into the shark tank and it's up to you to provide some imagination and to just hang on, muttering all the while, before you are swept up and away.

Which is to say that I really enjoyed this book. THE PERIPHERALS is very much character driven and some how, without paragraph after paragraph of descriptions and explanations, he creates a world that's believable and concrete.

I don't actually remember whether Mona Lisa Overdrive and the other Gibson books I read eons ago were so character driven. But THE PERIPHERALS is. There are characters to like and characters to wonder about. The technology and 'forecasting' is still there and still strong, but different. The world/worlds you have in THE PERIPHERALS are at a different stage of their lives and so the tech is less shocking and trendy.
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THE PERIPHERALS is expansive tale that covers life on two different time fronts. And William works his magic by doing one of the things I think he does best, beside prognosticating; he introduces you to a wide range of characters in vignettes that leave you scratching your head and thinking how in H- can these people have anything to do with one another. And yet it all comes together in the end. A Good Read. I'm not sure I'm entirely satisfied with the ending. But it's A Good Read.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Addendum to my original review below:

The Amazon adaptation of The Peripheral is very good, because it excises much of Gibson's nonsense, improves on some of his narrative; i.e. Wilf's contact with Flynn in her timeline is accomplished via VR versus pasting his face on a tablet mounted on a broomstick on a Roomba, and makes much clearer the reason why the future folk are interested in Flynn's timeline: they want to use it as petri dish for testing medicines, bio-weapons and tech too dangerous to test in their own timeline. Chloë Grace Moretz is awesome in the series. Confident, mature; her best work. She is the show. Watch the series and skip the book.
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Let me start by saying I find Gibson overall to be a very imaginative writer, fresh, inventive and insightful, wonderfully prescient at extrapolating where technology may take us in the near future. The Peripheral is a muddle of these things.

Muddle (mŭd′l): n. A disordered condition; a mess or jumble. v. To think, act, or proceed in a confused or aimless manner.

True to Gibsons’s MO The Peripheral begins with the reader dropped into a familiar world but a step or two forward technolgy-wise from today. He liberally introduces new tech and lingo, none of which he explains, expecting the reader to figure it out. The writing is short and punchy. The plot moves quickly. Every 5-50 pages you encounter a orphan sentence or two that reads like a remnant excised from the final copy that makes no sense at all in it's current placement.

The premise is interesting. People from a future timeline have found a computer server that allows them to reach virtually (think online gaming interfaces) into the past, to communicate with and action all manner of change. People from the past can in turn be brought into the future to populate drones, robots and other synthetics, their actions there impacting the future.

The Peripheral opens with someone in the future contracting former USMC Sergeant Burton to fly security drones around a building in what Burton believes is a new video game. One night Burton asks his gamer sister Flynn to substitute for him. She sees a woman die. Unbeknownst to Flynn, the woman and the building are real. Flynn has witnessed a future murder. This sets off global machinations in both the past and future as the murderers seek to eliminate Flynn in the past while others in the future seek to save her.

Sounds crazy. It is. With better editing The Peripheral could have been great. Unfortunately, it suffers from authorial indulgence - Gibson committing seemingly every idea passing through his head to paper. The plot expands to so many pointless tangents, so many completely silly ideas that what is prescient and interesting is overshadowed by the excesses. Examples:

1. If folks from the future can literally buy anyone and anything - and they do in this novel to the point of almost triggering a global economic collapse - why don’t the folks seeking to kill Flynn simply buy armaments and blow her to pieces vs sending small time hoodlums or waging a silly economic war. They can buy companies, banks, politicians, even the White House, but can’t find one arms dealer? Apparently Gibson has never watched Die Hard et al.

2. The local drug lord thread is a waste of paper. He shows up, kidnaps Flynn, loses her, get’s blown up. No one cares. Adds nothing to the story.

3. Similarly the religious cult. The do nothing but wave signs. Why are they included?

4. The Victorian Diagon Alley? Interesting, but what’s the point? With most everyone dead in the future, the few survivors demand a faux Disneyland experience?

And so on and so on. Half the novel is filled with stuff that does nothing for the story. Gibson could learn from Vonnegut who wrote: “Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.” If not in service of one of these two, leave it out. More tightly edited The Peripheral would be half as long and twice as good.

The novel does have some interesting characters. Flynn, Ash and Lowbeer are cool. Deadra sorta. Wilf Netherton, who features prominently, is not. A drunkard publicist - which kinda says it all. If your only reason for being is to burnish someone else's image, do you even need to exist in fact or fiction? As for the rest, why does no one in the book except Flynn question what's going on, why, or the consequences? The futurists start throwing cash around and the entire past cast acts like Scrooge McDuck in a ball pit of money.

And the reason for it all - the murder, pursuit of Flynn, almost crippling the past economy - is a real estate play over a floating garbage patch in the middle of the ocean? Worst. Ending. Ever. Mr. Gibson, you should be ashamed.

Why three stars when I’ve panned every aspect of the book? Because it’s Gibson. As dumb as half the book is, the remainder has some thought provoking ideas and interesting twists. I wasn’t bored nor did I feel like chucking it across the room. Which sounds like faint praise, but flawed as it is it's still better than four out of the last five sci-fi books I’ve read, all of which suffered from similar authorial indulgence with less flair.

On my buy, borrow, skip, scale: The Peripheral is a tepid borrow.

[Kuszma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hm, annyi bizonyos, hogy a noir krimi és a tudományos fantasztikum pazarul passzol egymáshoz. Talán mert amikor az előbbi erkölcsi pesszimizmusa találkozik utóbbi technológiai pesszimizmusával, az nagyon termékeny táptalaj egy Gibson-féle jó kis varacskos agymenésnek.

Nem meglepő, ha úgy nyitok, hogy: a jövőben járunk. Érdekesebb infó, hogy mindjárt kettőben. Az egyik a közeljövő, ahol egy beteg, korrupt Amerika a színtér, ahol él egy bizonyos Flynne zakkant és erőszakos bátyjával. No most Flynne tanúja lesz egy gyilkosságnak - de hoppá, ez a gyilkosság a távoli jövőben esett meg, ahol Flynne tudata a tudtán kívül biztonsági feladatokat látott el. No most ebben a jövőben él Netherton, aki Chandler tollára való figura: morális kétségeit alkoholban oldja, szeretetnyelve pedig a cinizmus - igaz, szakmája szerint nem magánhekus, hanem PR-szakember. Mindenesetre ő az, aki felveszi a kapcsolatot Flynne-nel, hogy együtt kibogozzák a gyilkosság körülményeit - és bár közben nagy badass szövetségesekre találnak, de rejtélyes ellenfeleik is olyan combosak, hogy a küzdelem mindkét idősíkot alapjaiban rázza meg.

Bonyolult szinopszis, ugye? Pedig nem is beszéltem még a perifériákról, meg a haptikákról, meg a "szerelő" nevű nanorobotokról. Gibson masszív, aprólékosan felépített és riasztóan hihető technológiai fantáziája olyan szöveget eredményez, ami nehezen nyílik ki, de ha az ember átbukik az első 40-50 oldalon, akkor sebes vízként kapja el és sodorja magával. Mert ahogy létrejön olvasó és író között az íratlan szerződés, hogy ezeket a párhuzamos jövőket (legalábbis opcionális) valóságként fogadjuk el, onnantól kezdve már a noir krimi lendülete érvényesül - az a bámulatos húzás, ahogy a rövid fejezetekben egyre jobban kibomlik a rejtély, és egyben egyre mélyebbre merülnek hőseink a kulimászban. Marha tökös regény, erős írói vízió pompásan kivitelezett lektűreszközökkel megvalósítva - ahogy mondani szokták volt, berántott.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Executive Summary: A good, but not great techno-thriller of sorts. 3.5 Stars.

Audio book: I really didn't like Lorelei King at the start. But she grew on me. I'm not sure if she got better as the book went on, or I just needed some distance from my previous book. She's clear and easy to hear. She did a few voices, but they weren't very memorable to me.

I will say I started off pretty confused. I'm not sure if that would have been solved with some rereading of the early chapters, or if I just needed to get my bearings. Once I did though, I found it easier to follow. Audio is probably not the best choice though if you often distracted when doing audio books.

Full Review
William Gibson is one of those authors I keep meaning to read more of. I'm ashamed to say I've only read Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Burning Chrome. I've had Mona Lisa Overdrive sitting unread on my shelves for a few years now.

So I can't say how this really stacks up against his other works too well. It reminds me more of Daniel Suarez than the stuff of his I have read. If nothing else this book renews my desire to read some more of his work.

This one is hard to categorize. I'd guess techo-thriller is maybe the best? It's also a time travel book. Sort of. The time stuff definitely falls into the Back to the Future 2 category (altering the past forks it to a new future).

I think both protagonists are pretty good, though Flynne is easily the better of the two. She keeps herself together way better than I would under the circumstances she faces. Netherton is much less interesting, and took me a bit to warm up to, but by the end, I enjoyed his chapters almost as much as Flynne's. Though that may simply be due to the amount of overlap of the two.

The world building could have been a little better. There is this mysterious Jackpot, that while explained eventually, wasn't really explained in a lot of detail. I guess it was to move the plot along more than anything. We get glimpses of both Flynne's and Netherton's worlds, though not as much as I'd have liked.

There is a bunch of technology in this one. Some of it looks familiar like tablets and drones. The rest of it sounds familiar like robots, advanced haptic controls, and embedded phones. There is no big dreaming here. Everything Mr. Gibson writes seems feasible, and some of it probably not too far off.

At it's core though, this is really just a thriller. There are shady characters and a mysterious murder drives the plot. I probably would have preferred something more cyberpunk, but I have no idea if still writes those kinds of books anymore.

I found it a quick listen, at just over fourteen hours I did most of it over a busy weekend of chores and bike riding. Not a bad choice if you're looking for something shorter to fit in between other reads like I was.

[Jim Elkins]

A Misunderstanding of Fiction

Gibson occupies an unusual place between literary fiction and the kinds of fantasy and sci-fi that use language as a minimal, transparent vehicle for fantasy. He has been read by any number of critics, including Fred Jameson, as a measure of postmodernism in the digital age; and he has been taken as a kind of cyberworld version of Nostradamus, full of predictions about our future. The implied author of The Peripheral is engaged in both activities; the book is full of thought experiments about plausible or perfected technologies, and there are some extended meditations on the possible future courses of the world, climate, economics, and culture.
I am not interested in fiction as litmus test or predictor of culture, and that's one reason I don't read much science fiction, fantasy, or genre fiction. But I think there's another, more interesting issue here: it occurs to me there's a sense in which Gibson's books are made possible by a certain reading of literary fiction that could be described as a misunderstanding.

1. Writing
Gibson is a very good writer by literary fiction standards. Most every sentence is crafted. There are only a few passages that can be read at speed, just in order to get a sense of the story: most of the book needs to be read slowly because of what he's doing to language. His observations, dialogue, descriptions, and metaphors are often original. He describes Tasmanian tigers as "carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes" (p. 392).
At the same time, however, he seems to feel as if serious writing can often best be achieved by neologisms. In modernist fiction, purposively written language—I am thinking of anyone from Flaubert to Eimear McBride—defamiliarizes. Gibson's does too, but mainly by inventing things that don't exist. The Peripheral is full of imagined fashions and fabrics, tattoos that move, walls that are transformed by nanobots, teleportation of several sorts, out-of-body states, future weapons, future gardening with biogenic trees, different kinds of remotely operated surgical devices, and new kinds of encryption involving invented languages. Those are the things that make the language interesting, more than choices of trope or syntax. "Her hair white as the crown Macon had printed in Fabbit" is a good enough example (p. 222). It refers to a teleportation "crown" that had been 3-D printed by a company named Fabbit; the sentence is typical of the way Gibson avoids ordinary description, but leans on imagined technologies, technical and commercial terms, and neologisms. It's a very different sense of how to "make it new" from either Flaubert or McBride (whose most recent book has only one notable word of Gibsonian specificity, picallilly sauce—everything else is a manipulation of parts of speech and metaphors).


2. Affect
If I try to imagine this book without the specifics of its plot—which means subtracting hundreds of references to peripherals, sigils, imagined technologies, and time travel—and ask myself what feelings, what desires or anxieties, drive the narrative, then I come to two things in particular:

(a) A fear of the present. No character in this book wants to live in the present, with the telling exception of some romantic moments in moonlight, which are about wishing for an impossible ideal. The writing itself doesn't want to be in the present, and there's an ongoing effort to open a space between the writing and every experience we may know as readers. Here is an example. A "sigil," in the book, is a kind of logo or icon that appears in a person's visual field and can be expanded into a "video feed" or even into an immersive virtual reality. Gibson describes sigils the way a person might describe a logo. "An unfamiliar sigil appeared," he writes, "a sort of impacted spiral, tribal blackwork" (p. 236).
Here he's working hard, like an author of literary fiction, to defamiliarize. An "impacted spiral" is an interesting thing to try to picture, and a reader may have to look up "blackwork" to understand what he's conjuring. Imagining both the "impacted spiral" and the blackwork as an icon adds a layer of imaginative work.
The cumulative effect of sentences like this (which amount to maybe half the sentences in the book) is to make it seem that the author feels it's necessary to work continuously to produce even an incremental distance from the present. At the same time the project of shifting the present is fragile, because it's superficial (here he's only adjusting our notions of what an icon might look like). It's as if he needs to pry open a space between the present and the place he wishes to be, as if it constantly needs to be renewed, because the fragile invented future is in danger of collapsing back onto the unbearable present.

(b) A desire to disappear. Characters in The Peripheral nearly always prefer dream states, projections, out-of-body experiences, time travel, medication, and dissociative experiences to living where they are. The book must have hundreds of examples of things that help people disappear: robots they can inhabit, toys they can wheel around by remote control, game worlds they can enter, Matrix-style teleportation comas they can enter, walls they can walk through, stand-ins they can program, cars and clothing that can be cloaked, cosplay zones populated with avatars and cyborgs, invisible tables in restaurants (eg, pp. 227-8).
The characters are ostensibly driven by the plot, but affectively, in terms of their desires, they all want to vanish. As I read, I often thought of the author, as opposed to his narrative: to write a book like this, I thought, such a person needs to want to disappear. The language of The Peripheral is a concerted attempt to "cloak" ordinary writing in a veneer of micro-metaphors, translucent to ordinary meaning but safe from it. The technology described in the book is an equally forceful attempt to picture ways that machines might help us dissolve some of our bodily mass and material into a foam of biogenic digital projections.
The plot, too, can be understood this way, because it turns on time travel, and there are people in both the "present" (our near future) and "future" (seventy years farther on) who want to disappear, both within their own times, and within the "present"; and the plot is arranged in such a way that there are uncountable "presents," which diverge even as we read. What could be more comforting to someone who wants not to be present?
In a sense this is what's meant by "escapism" in popular fiction and film, except that here it's not only a matter of an invented world, transparently described, but of the act of writing, in a literary sense, put to the same purpose.

I don't mind the ongoing invention of neologisms, technologies, and time-travel plots, although I am often more interested in its underlying anxiety than its particulars. But it is a misunderstanding of writing in postmodernism to think that language can't be interesting unless it is injected with nanobots of unfamiliarity. That's one reason I won't be reading any more Gibson. The other tunnels under that first one: it's that the desire to escape, to vanish into time or the cyberworld is itself uninteresting because it is relentless and uninterrogated. It's the lack of reflection on the desire itself that puts this book to one side of the conversations of modernism and postmodernism.

[Tijana]

Periferal je dobar roman, solidan roman, Periferal je odličan roman, Gibson je verovatno u prvih pet SF autora kad je u pitanju jezgrovitost i funkcionalnost izlaganja, dijalozi su mu britki a svako malo sevne i neka neočekivana poetska iskra, likovi su upečatljivi i nekako instant simpatični,* budućnost sadrži scene zaslepljujuće i tuđinske lepote, radnja samo šiba, bojim se da je i dalje dobar prorok (jer ne predviđa ništa prijatno)... pa šta onda fali? Ništa, samo eto nije remek delo kao što je Neuromanser ili maltene svaka priča iz Burning Chrome. I čini mi se da to ima veze sa Gibsonovom okretanju srećnim krajevima koji su posle one prve trilogije gotovo obavezni. Dok je u recimo Idoru to bilo prijatno iznenađenje, sad je već više... onako... očekivano. Ne da se žalim, volim ja srećne krajeve, ali ovde je bio ajmo reći... preterano i malo neuverljivo srećan, kao neki poklon da se malo poveselimo pre nego što i nama krene ozbiljan džekpot.



*jedan sasvim sporedan lik je žena koja radi "hate Kegels" da bi ostala mirna kad god je neko iznervira, ni kraće ni ubedljivije karakterizacije.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finished it!! Loved it.