Fantastic world building, bizarre and deeply fulfilling.
5 stars
A really outstanding world, if you happened to watch the 'inspired-by' adaptation on tv, definitely read this for the full depth of the ideas.
audio cd
Published Oct. 28, 2014 by Penguin Audio.
Depending on her veteran brother's benefits in a city where jobs outside the drug trade are rare, Flynne assists her brother's latest beta-test tech assignment only to uncover an elaborate murder scheme.
"William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's New York Times-bestselling Zero History. Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he's supposed to do-a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He's supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That's all there is to …
Depending on her veteran brother's benefits in a city where jobs outside the drug trade are rare, Flynne assists her brother's latest beta-test tech assignment only to uncover an elaborate murder scheme.
"William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's New York Times-bestselling Zero History. Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he's supposed to do-a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He's supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That's all there is to it. He's offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder"--
"New novel from New York Times bestselling author William Gibson"--
A really outstanding world, if you happened to watch the 'inspired-by' adaptation on tv, definitely read this for the full depth of the ideas.
A pile of very interesting ideas, strung together with badly paced and incoherent plotting. The sci Fi concepts are fun and the writing is spare and engaging, but neither the plot nor the characters quite come together enough.
Compared to the TV show, this book has better sci fi coherence but its representation of the near-future Appalachia is a lot worse and less fun.
Content warning Spoilers for the plot of The Peripheral (novel)
This novel is based on some great concepts, but overall I don't think it did enough with them.
The premise is that the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic future have the ability to communicate with the past, which creates alternate timelines that they can continue to communicate with. They can recruit people in these alternate timelines (which they call "stubs") to control drones in their present, including humanoids that they call "peripherals".
This seems like a setup to explore wealth inequality and imperialist exploitation - the stub would be labour-rich while the future is depopulated - and it does have an element of that. However, it is portrayed more as a hobby, an intellectual exercise to see if anything can be done to avoid the apocalypse in the stub by making advanced technology available to it. The action of the novel is incidental to the nature of the stub or its relationship to the future - an accidental witnessing of a murder which makes it a battleground between forces that are alien to it, over matters that don't concern it.
In the end, this rich-man's fancy is unambiguously beneficial to the people living in the stub, and that's where it's left. Yay billionaire philanthropy, I guess.
I also found it quite difficult to follow what was going on initially. It starts out with one of my pet-peeves - a "game" that does not seem like something that an experienced gamer such as the protagonist would plausibly find entertaining: flying a drone around and bumping other drones out of the way for some unspecified reason. The TV show does much better with this by having the neural control tech for peripherals available in the stub from the beginning, and having it used in a way that could plausibly be an action-adventure game. But, this isn't a review of the TV show :P
A wonderful world to visit, a classic Gibson story that leaves you gasping "that escalated quickly"
I read this book in hardcover format, nearly five hundred pages in all. Once I got past the setup in the first third of the book, I found it absorbing and entertaining. It had been a few years since I'd read any of his books and was on board with his shift over his career toward more social and economic topics in his stories. This one is set in two time periods, one relatively near and recognizable as rural America and the other set in London at a much later stage technologically and socially. Through a method mysterious to all the characters, there is a way to transfer information between the two time streams, including sensory and motor nerve impulses in a kind of telepresence connection. There is a rampant faceless capitalism in each and advanced military prowess in both as compared to our state of affairs, though imperfectly controlled …
I read this book in hardcover format, nearly five hundred pages in all. Once I got past the setup in the first third of the book, I found it absorbing and entertaining. It had been a few years since I'd read any of his books and was on board with his shift over his career toward more social and economic topics in his stories. This one is set in two time periods, one relatively near and recognizable as rural America and the other set in London at a much later stage technologically and socially. Through a method mysterious to all the characters, there is a way to transfer information between the two time streams, including sensory and motor nerve impulses in a kind of telepresence connection. There is a rampant faceless capitalism in each and advanced military prowess in both as compared to our state of affairs, though imperfectly controlled by the central government in the near time stream, and not at all controlled by elected governments in the other.
The most effective way those in London timeline can change events in the other one is to inject large amounts of money into it using the link between them, manipulating financial markets. The trouble is that there is another organization attempting to do the same thing and supplementing their efforts with acts of violence. Both sides are essentially amoral, though we are led to understand that the group working with our viewpoint characters is trying to change events in order to avoid the global societal collapse which already happened in the other timeline. The idea is that the collapse of civilization is something that has already progressed too far to stop through normal means, leaving only this out of universe intervention to save the day.
The most interesting character is in the London timeline, that of Ainsley Lowbeer, who has the most agency of anyone in the book extending through both worlds. Her command of information, access to the AI oracles crunching the data, and her experience gained through advanced chronological age give her the kind of power familiar to us from the author's earliest cyberpunk novels. There are a few lines dropped about limits on what she can make happen, but it seems as though it was all Lowbeer's show by the end. Even at the climactic struggle by the main characters we learn that it was what she engineered and not their actions that saved them from death. Maybe using these other characters to accomplish her goals was to her mind the easiest way to bring them about, but I think this choice introduces some problems telling the story.
The author has a way with entertaining, frequently baffling, dialogue. He is fond of having characters talk about disturbing and sometimes horrifying topics alongside jokes and other nuggets of characterization. As for setting, Gibson finds places and environments that interest him and thinks of characters who would thrive in those locations, however outlandish their adaptations turn out to be. The bad guys suffer by comparison from having less attention paid to their habitats than our crew so they come off mainly as degenerate places of chaos. What is more sympathetic, a sparkly office tower or the sushi place and burrito breakfast joint the near timeline characters patronize? So it's hard to see the villains as more than artificial beings themselves, even by the characters in the story, who react with detachment when they are threatened with some messily painful fate. Maybe this kind of stoicism is just the way the author imagines everyone, unless they're jacked up on drugs or something, they don't seem to be at the mercy of their base emotions ever.
This kind of book isn't for every reader. There are no quick payoffs, and while the chapters are short you can get the feeling that you aren't getting anywhere and that you've lost too much of the thread. For me it was worth its imperfections and contrivances to see what felt like a truly new future vision
Part whodunit, part dystopian, part time travel, part thriller, and all Gibson. Very nice.
It's good to see Gibson doing work set in the future. His past couple of books were not placed in a future time. I am hoping this book turns into a short series. There are so many unanswered question.
Overall it takes a bit to get up to speed and understand the setting, but once done, it's a good murder mystery.
My review of The Peripheral originally appeared on The Newtown Review of Books
William Gibson is one of the most famous science fiction authors of the modern age. His now classic Sprawl Trilogy, Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Mona Lisa Overdrive, heralded in the era of cyberpunk, concerned with that shadowy interface between humans and self-aware artificial intelligences, which saw its cinematic culmination in the Matrix movies. The cyberpunk worlds he created were visceral and grungy. His was no gleaming, smooth-surfaced future, but one where hackers jury-rigged their way into non-real dataspaces to fight megacorporation black-ice security programs that would leave their synapses fried if they made one wrong move. It was heady stuff for readers who – in the real world – thought Microsoft Windows was pretty cool.
The Sprawl was a tough act to follow and after his initial success there followed a handful of novels that …
My review of The Peripheral originally appeared on The Newtown Review of Books
William Gibson is one of the most famous science fiction authors of the modern age. His now classic Sprawl Trilogy, Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Mona Lisa Overdrive, heralded in the era of cyberpunk, concerned with that shadowy interface between humans and self-aware artificial intelligences, which saw its cinematic culmination in the Matrix movies. The cyberpunk worlds he created were visceral and grungy. His was no gleaming, smooth-surfaced future, but one where hackers jury-rigged their way into non-real dataspaces to fight megacorporation black-ice security programs that would leave their synapses fried if they made one wrong move. It was heady stuff for readers who – in the real world – thought Microsoft Windows was pretty cool.
The Sprawl was a tough act to follow and after his initial success there followed a handful of novels that failed to cut through with the reading public as successfully as his other works. But Pattern Recognition, published in 2003, was hailed as a return to form, showing a sort of ‘five-minutes-into-the-future’ world that successfully highlighted our preoccupation with style over substance, concentrating as it did on the search by ‘brand whisperer’ Cayce Pollard for the origin of ‘the footage’, a series of obscurely connected film clips much prized by cool hunters. While the plot and protagonist were engaging, the book’s main drawcard was Gibson’s ability to create a detailed, functional near-future that felt completely real while you were reading it.
Spook Country and Zero History followed, again creating that immersive experience of a world that was familiar and disorienting in equal parts. They also utilised a thriller/ mystery framework to hang the story from, but in both cases the resolutions were less satisfying than in Pattern Recognition and perhaps hinted at a disconnect between the author’s intentions and the needs of the reader.
All this brings us to The Peripheral, which hits the high-water mark in terms of engaging the reader’s imagination and intellect, but is less successful in delivering the pace, tension and emotional investment expected of a thriller.
Flynne scrabbles out a living in the near-future United States doing piecework at a 3D print shop. Her brother Burton, who lives in a trailer on their property, is a veteran invalided out of whatever Middle East conflict the US was most recently embroiled in and plagued by uncontrollable shudders due to the surgical removal of his combat enhancements. There’s little real work around, the economy is down the tubes and the corporatisation of America seems all but complete. Smart phones are smarter than ever and other tech we can only currently imagine is easily available, but everything is covered by a greasy miasma, right down to the cardboard rental cars running on chicken fat:
Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of the foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn’t want to keep going back.
… Inside, the trailer was the colour of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Hefty Mart amber. She’d helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see stubs of burnt matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was.
… Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week or two, like washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with it.
‘You might begin by explaining this hobby of yours, Mr Zubov. Your solicitors described you to me as a “continua enthusiast”.’
‘That’s never entirely easy,’ said Lev. ‘You know about the server?’
‘That great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, since in our actual past, you didn’t. That rather hurts my head, Mr Zubov. I gather it doesn’t hurt yours?’
‘Far less than the sort of paradox we’re accustomed to culturally, in discussing imaginary transtemporal affairs,’ said Lev. ‘It’s actually quite simple. The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.’