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The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition
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Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made 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 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 Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she 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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBerkley
- Publication dateOctober 28, 2014
- File size1.6 MB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for The Peripheral
“Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer and all the maturity and sly wit of Spook Country. It’s brilliant.”—Cory Doctorow
“From page one, The Peripheral ticks and sings with the same controlled, dark energy and effortless grace of language....Like the best of Gibson’s early, groundbreaking work, it offers up the same kind of chewy, tactile future that you can taste and smell and feel on your skin; that you believe, immediately, like some impossible documentary, because the thing that Gibson has always been best at is offering up futures haunted by the past.”—NPR
“[Gibson is] revered not just as a unique and brilliantly talented SF novelist but a social and psychological visionary....[The Peripheral] creates a future that is astoundingly inventive and frighteningly plausible....A wonderful addition to a brilliant oeuvre.”—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Gibson's characters are intensely real, and Flynne is a clever, compelling, stereotype-defying, unhesitating protagonist who makes this novel a standout.”—Publishers Weekly
“The Peripheral is one of [Gibson's] most sophisticated attention-management machines, a culmination of his career, both a return to old themes and a step forward, and his most sustained experiment in helping us, even if only for a moment, see the world with new eyes.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“No one writes better about the near future than Gibson.”—The Washington Post
“Like any really well-designed thrill ride of mystery tour (or sonnet or string quartet), as soon as you get off, you want to get right on for another go-round.”—Locus
More Praise for William Gibson
“His eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.”—The New Yorker
“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.”—Details
“William Gibson can craft sentences of uncanny beauty, and he is a great poet of crowds.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Gibson’s radar is deftly tuned to the changes in the culture that many of us are missing.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Peripheral
By William Gibson
1.
The Haptics
They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.
Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that 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.
“Hey, Burton,” she called.
“Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.
Inside, the trailer was the color 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. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.
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.
Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.
“You going to Davisville?” she asked.
“Leon’s picking me up.”
“Luke 4:5’s protesting there. Shaylene said.”
He shrugged, moving a lot of muscle but not by much.
“That was you, Burton. Last month. On the news. That funeral, in Carolina.”
He didn’t quite smile.
“You might’ve killed that boy.”
He shook his head, just a fraction, eyes narrowed.
“Scares me, you do that shit.”
“You still walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa?”
“He isn’t playing. Busy lawyering, I guess.”
“You’re the best he had. Showed him that.”
“Just a game.” Telling herself, more than him.
“Might as well been getting himself a Marine.”
She thought she saw that thing the haptics did, then, that shiver, then gone.
“Need you to sub for me,” he said, like nothing had happened. “Five-hour shift. Fly a quadcopter.”
She looked past him to his display. Some Danish supermodel’s legs, retracting into some brand of car nobody she knew would ever drive, or likely even see on the road. “You’re on disability,” she said. “Aren’t supposed to work.”
He looked at her.
“Where’s the job?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“Outsourced? VA’ll catch you.”
“Game,” he said. “Beta of some game.”
“Shooter?”
“Nothing to shoot. Work a perimeter around three floors of this tower, fifty-fifth to fifty-seventh. See what turns up.”
“What does?”
“Paparazzi.” He showed her the length of his index finger. “Little things. You get in their way. Edge ’em back. That’s all you do.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Get you set up before Leon comes.”
“Supposed to help Shaylene, later.”
“Give you two fives.” He took his wallet from his jeans, edged out a pair of new bills, the little windows unscratched, holograms bright.
Folded, they went into the right front pocket of her cutoffs. “Turn the lights down,” she said, “hurts my eyes.”
He did, swinging his hand through the display, but then the place looked like a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom. She reached over, flicked it up a little.
She sat in his chair. It was Chinese, reconfiguring to her height and weight as he pulled himself up an old metal stool, almost no paint left on it, waving a screen into view.
MILAGROS COLDIRON SA
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Who we’re working for.”
“How do they pay you?”
“Hefty Pal.”
“You’ll get caught for sure.”
“Goes to an account of Leon’s,” he said. Leon’s Army service had been about the same time as Burton’s in the Marines, but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not that Flynne had ever thought Leon was anything but sly, under it all, and lazy. “Need my log-in and the password. Hat trick.” How they both pronounced his tag, HaptRec, to keep it private. He took an envelope from his back pocket, unfolded and opened it. The paper looked thick, creamy.
“That from Fab?”
He drew out a long slip of the same paper, printed with what looked to be a full paragraph of characters and symbols. “You scan it, or type it outside that window, we’re out a job.”
She picked up the envelope, from where it lay on what she guessed had been a fold-down dining table. It was one of Shaylene’s top-shelf stationery items, kept literally on a top shelf. When letter orders came in from big companies, or lawyers, you went up there. She ran her thumb across the logo in the upper left corner. “Medellín?”
“Security firm.”
“You said it’s a game.”
“That’s ten thousand dollars, in your pocket.”
“How long you been doing this?”
“Two weeks now. Sundays off.”
“How much you get?”
“Twenty-five thousand per.”
“Make it twenty, then. Short notice and I’m stiffing Shaylene.”
He gave her another two fives.
2.
Death Cookie
Netherton woke to Rainey’s sigil, pulsing behind his lids at the rate of a resting heartbeat. He opened his eyes. Knowing better than to move his head, he confirmed that he was in bed, alone. Both positive, under current circumstances. Slowly, he lifted his head from the pillow, until he could see that his clothes weren’t where he assumed he would have dropped them. Cleaners, he knew, would have come from their nest beneath the bed, to drag them away, flense them of whatever invisible quanta of sebum, skin-flakes, atmospheric particulates, food residue, other.
“Soiled,” he pronounced, thickly, having briefly imagined such cleaners for the psyche, and let his head fall back.
Rainey’s sigil began to strobe, demandingly.
He sat up cautiously. Standing would be the real test. “Yes?”
Strobing ceased. “Un petit problème,” Rainey said.
He closed his eyes, but then there was only her sigil. He opened them.
“She’s your fucking problem, Wilf.”
He winced, the amount of pain this caused startling him. “Have you always had this puritanical streak? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”
His eyes, a size too large for their sockets, felt gritty. “She must be nearing the patch,” he said, reflexively attempting to suggest that he was alert, in control, as opposed to disastrously and quite expectedly hungover.
“They’re almost above it now,” she said. “With your problem.”
“What’s she done?”
“One of her stylists,” she said, “is also, evidently, a tattooist.”
Again, the sigil dominated his private pain-filled dark. “She didn’t,” he said, opening his eyes. “She did?”
“She did.”
"We had an extremely specific verbal on that.”
“Fix it,” she said. “Now. The world’s watching, Wilf. As much of it as we’ve been able to scrape together, anyway. Will Daedra West make peace with the patchers, they wonder? Should they decide to back our project, they ask? We want yes, and yes.”
“They ate the last two envoys,” he said. “Hallucinating in synch with a forest of code, convinced their visitors were shamanic spirit beasts. I spent three entire days, last month, having her briefed at the Connaught. Two anthropologists, three neoprimitivist curators. No tattoos. A brand-new, perfectly blank epidermis. Now this.”
“Talk her out of it, Wilf.”
He stood, experimentally. Hobbled, naked, into the bathroom. Urinated as loudly as possible. “Out of what, exactly?”
“Parafoiling in—”
“That’s been the plan—”
“In nothing but her new tattoos.”
“Seriously? No.”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”
“Posthuman filth, according to you.”
“The tattoos!”
“Something to do with the Gyre,” she said. “Abstract.”
“Cultural appropriation. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse. On her face? Neck?”
“No, fortunately. If you can talk her into the jumpsuit we’re printing on the moby, we may still have a project.”
He looked at the ceiling. Imagined it opening. Himself ascending. Into he knew not what.
“Then there’s the matter of our Saudi backing,” she said, “which is considerable. Visible tattoos would be a stretch, there. Nudity’s nonnegotiable.”
“They might take it as a signal of sexual availability,” he said, having done so himself.
“The Saudis?”
“The patchers.”
“They might take it as her offer to be lunch,” she said. “Their last, either way. She’s a death cookie, Wilf, for the next week or so. Anyone so much as steals a kiss goes into anaphylactic shock. Something with her thumbnails, too, but we’re less clear about that.”
He wrapped his waist in a thick white towel. Considered the carafe of water on the marble countertop. His stomach spasmed.
“Lorenzo,” she said, as an unfamiliar sigil appeared, “Wilf Netherton has your feed, in London.”
He almost vomited, then, at the sudden input: bright saline light above the Garbage Patch, the sense of forward motion.
3.
Pushing Bugs
She managed to get off the phone with Shaylene without mentioning Burton. Shaylene had gone out with him a few times in high school, but she’d gotten more interested when he’d come back from the Marines, with that chest and the stories around town about Haptic Recon 1. Flynne figured Shaylene was basically doing what the relationship shows called romanticizing pathology. Not that there was a whole lot better available locally.
She and Shaylene both worried about Burton getting in trouble over Luke 4:5, but that was about all they agreed on, when it came to him. Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. She had a feeling they were just convenient, but it still scared her. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. For Burton, they were a way around whatever kept him in line the rest of the time.
She leaned forward now, to squint under the table for the black nylon case he kept his tomahawk in. Wouldn’t want him going up to Davisville with that. He called it an axe, not a tomahawk, but an axe was something you chopped wood with. She reached under, hooked it out, relieved to feel the weight. Didn’t need to open it, but she did. Case was widest at the top, allowing for the part you’d have chopped wood with. More like the blade of a chisel, but hawk-billed. Where the back of an axe would’ve been flat, like the face of a hammer, it was spiked, like a miniature of the blade but curved the other way. Either one thick as your little finger, but ground to edges you wouldn’t feel as you cut yourself. Handle was graceful, a little recurved, the wood soaked in something that made it tougher, springy. The maker had a forge in Tennessee, and everyone in Haptic Recon 1 got one. It looked used. Careful of her fingers, she closed the case and put it back under the table.
She swung her phone through the display, checking Badger’s map of the county. Shaylene’s badge was in Forever Fab, an anxious segment of purple in its emo ring. Nobody looked to be up to much, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Madison and Janice were gaming, Sukhoi Flankers, vintage flight sims being Madison’s main earner. They both had their rings beige, for bored shitless, but then they always had them that way. Made four people she knew working tonight, counting her.
She bent her phone the way she liked it for gaming, thumbed HaptRec into the log-in window, entered the long-ass password. Flicked go. Nothing happened. Then the whole display popped, like the flash of a camera in an old movie, silvered like the marks of the haptics. She blinked.
And then she was rising, out of what Burton said would be a launch bay in the roof of a van. Like she was in an elevator. No control yet. And all around her, and he hadn’t told her this, were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of invisible fairy police dispatchers.
And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.
Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world.
Product details
- ASIN : B00INIXKV2
- Publisher : Berkley
- Accessibility : Learn more
- Publication date : October 28, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 1.6 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 498 pages
- ISBN-13 : 978-0698170704
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Book 1 of 2 : The Jackpot Trilogy
- Best Sellers Rank: #70,123 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #92 in Technothrillers (Books)
- #124 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #149 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

William Gibson is the award-winning author of Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine, with Bruce Sterling, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition. William Gibson lives in Vancouver, Canada. His latest novel, published by Penguin, is Spook Country (2007).
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find this book a satisfying read with rich, real characters and an intelligent storyline, particularly appreciating its interesting view of time travel and linkages between past and future. The writing quality receives mixed feedback, with some praising the crisp prose while others find it very difficult to understand. The pace is also mixed, with some describing it as fast-paced while others say it takes too long to get going.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book highly readable, describing it as a fantastic and fun read, with one customer noting they can enjoy each scene.
"...I absolutely loved ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson, although I generally don't read his books because they are monstrous doorstops that I don't have time..." Read more
"...you force yourself through the first half of the book you find a compelling story. Hats off to the writers, producers, and directors of the show...." Read more
"...kind of made Gibson's stuff moody, haunting, and ultimately very fulfilling reading for me...." Read more
"...Because the initial setup to Gibson’s story is itself so good that’s it’s better than most books out there. Now I’ve finished it, and if you..." Read more
Customers appreciate the plot of the book, describing it as intelligent and solid, with one customer highlighting its engaging interlocking set of now and future mysteries and twists, while another notes how it takes advantage of serious science fiction elements.
"...I'll tell you what - this is a really cool story with some really neat concepts...." Read more
"There is nothing better than intelligent and challenging science-fiction novel but reading this is like cracking the Enigma Code many times...." Read more
"...So he has remarkable sympathy for those square-peg-round-hole drones who get caught up in things larger than themselves, especially those who've had..." Read more
"...The series lacks the depth of plot and while many characters are carried over, the plot deviates quite a bit...." Read more
Customers appreciate the character development in the book, noting that the protagonists are solid and the viewpoint characters are written extremely well, with one customer highlighting the author's ability to paint engaging characters and settings.
"...Lorelei King was magnificent. She handled the voices of the different characters terrifically, in my opinion...." Read more
"...been so expertly, specifically, and hauntingly able to describe the nostalgia of anachronistic characters and to chart the narratives of those..." Read more
"I found the book hard to get into and the many characters hard to follow. I'd left the book unfinished for more than a year for that reason...." Read more
"...and more women over the course of his career and deepened their characters to full realism, but his casts tend to the masculine regardless of gender...." Read more
Customers enjoy the time travel elements in the book, appreciating its interesting view and linkages between past and future timelines.
"...Some portions of the farther-future timeline are compelling, like the Medici, and gratifyingly unsettling, like the Pacific garbage-patch world and..." Read more
"...It's more about leveraging modern concepts--things we know and in some cases may not without a quick Google search--and using the analogy to fill in..." Read more
"...She's pragmatic, defining telepresence in very practical terms: getting a haircut...." Read more
"...Each insightful at a minimum and some of them outright prophetic, but none ever again quite so engrossing...." Read more
Customers praise the book's intelligence, finding it visionary and insightful, with one customer comparing it favorably to Neuromancer.
"...a William Gibson science fiction novel. Gibson is unique, a true visionary, a major first poet and creator of both the cyberpunk genre and..." Read more
"...swept into the poetry of his wordsmithing and edginess of his entrancing creative vision...." Read more
"...all: you can enjoy each scene, and the characters and world-building are more than satisfying." Read more
"...Brilliant...compelling...well-written, every one of them. Each insightful at a minimum and some of them outright prophetic, but none ever again..." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's writing style, describing it as classic and perennially wonderful, with one customer noting it's not too baroque.
"...It's an interesting artistic decision, at odds with commercial success...." Read more
"...Gibson being Gibson, these characters are well-drawn, quirky, and authentic - although bewilderingly diverse...." Read more
"...The following eight science fiction books are, without par, so original and visionary that they easily win five stars using pretty much any applied..." Read more
"...A new classic, from arguably the best SF writer -- maybe the best writer, period -- of our generation." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book, with some praising its incredible creativity and crisp prose, while others find it not an easy read at all.
"...I'll tell you what - this is a really cool story with some really neat concepts...." Read more
"...Overall, great book for a slow undistracted read. Not for casual reading. The Silmarillion was an easier read!!!" Read more
"...to Gibson from Samuel R. Delany, another unique stylist, writer of uncanny sentences, and one of the first presenters of the cyber trope of “jacking..." Read more
"...If you enjoy reading his prose, always tight, imaginative, and multi-sensory, you feel as if you've been admitted into a fairly exclusive club --..." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book, with some praising its brilliant and fast plot, while others find it very slow to get going and take too long to develop.
"...away and the reader figures out the basics, the story moves along at a pretty good pace, and is a good read. The conclusion was, for me, satisfying...." Read more
"The book starts slowly and in a confusing manner. I expected that from other reviews but plowed on as I have been a long time fan of Gibson...." Read more
"..."The Peripheral" begins beautifully, rushing at you like a bull out of the gate...." Read more
"...The shortcoming here was that it took WAAAYYY too long to make the start of the novel comprehensible...." Read more
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Gibson reminds us why he is still relevant
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2015I have a confession to make. I've never read NEUROMANCER. I was one of those who had to be pulled kicking and screaming into the cyberpunk era. I didn't want to read cyberpunk at all. Not only didn't I read NEUROMANCER, but I didn't read the other really big cyberpunk novel of the day, Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. I wanted my space ships, I wanted my aliens, I wanted my galactic space opera. What the heck was this cyberpunk stuff, and why was it getting in my science fiction?
I swore I was never going to like cyberpunk. I read Gibson's COUNT ZERO and VIRUAL LIGHT. I read Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE. I decided I didn't like the style OR the subject matter. Heck, I even tried to read THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, by both Sterling and Gibson, and I decided that steampunk (yes, that was steampunk, but no one seems to credit it that way these days, at least not that I hear) was a waste of my time too.
That was 30 years ago. Times change. People change. Writers change. Genres change. I don't mind reading steampunk these days - I feel that some of it is really pretty good. I absolutely loved ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson, although I generally don't read his books because they are monstrous doorstops that I don't have time for.
And I tried Gibson again.
THE PERIPHERAL was being talked about on podcasts, in blogs, and everywhere else that I pay attention to in the field. It was getting good reviews, and it was being hailed as "Gibson's return to undeniable science fiction". I was dubious of that last statement, as I didn't think anything else he wrote was science fiction, so how can he return to it?
But as I said, things change. And since this was the year I was going to get ahead of the game by reading novels that would assuredly be on the Hugo ballot, I figured I would give it a try (and as far as getting ahead of the game, well, we all know how THAT turned out).
And wouldn't you know, I liked it.
THE PERIPHERAL takes place in a not too distant future. Well, I should rephrase that. It takes place in two futures: one not too distant, and one a century or so further on. The near-ish future, in America, or some form of it, is a bit of a mess. There's the drug trade, an updated version of what the reader presumes is WalMart, and a very bleak economy. The further along future that we see is in London, after an event called The Jackpot had killed off a great portion of the world's population.
We begin in the near future. Flynne lives with her brother Burton and her mother. Burton is a military veteran who suffers from trauma he suffered while serving in the U.S. Military. He is getting aid from the U.S. government because he's not supposed to be able to work. He has, however, found a job beta testing some video game software for a Colombian outfit called Coldiron. One day he goes off to be part of a protest group against a religious organization, and asks Flynne to cover for him on the job for a few days. His job in the game is that of security. He tells Flynne to keep an eye on a particular tower and fend off little nano-paparazzi type devices. However, on the second day of the job she witnesses a murder, and something doesn't seem quite right to her about it. And off we go into the story.
THE PERIPHERAL is a murder mystery, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so pure and simple, since we *are* talking a) science fiction, and b) science fiction by William Gibson. It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the murder was in the future, a future life is also stark and bleak - never mind just a bit weird - due to The Jackpot. One of the devices that the future has is some sort of mysterious server, built by the Chinese (but never really visited in detail or explained at all in the book) that allows residents of that future to travel back and interact with various different pasts, which may or may not be their own past (It really is all a bit wonky but kind of cool. I didn't let myself get too distracted by the lack of details or even the not quite understanding of how pasts and that particular future relate. It was better that way.), call "stubs". People who do that are called "continua enthusiasts", and while in the novel we don't much deal with them, the people we deal with do have to go back to the past to try and figure out what they can about the murder that took place.
I'll tell you what - this is a really cool story with some really neat concepts. While the idea of telling a story that takes place in two separate times is not new, the way of the two timelines interacting with each other is new - at least to me. Yeah, it's a bit of "hand-wavium", but hand-wavium is a time honored tradition in our field, and it is acceptable some times and not in others. I think it works well here. The future is populated with a bunch
of interesting - at least to me - characters, including an investigator, Lowbeer, who reminds me a lot of Paula Myo from Peter F. Hamilton's novels.
The novel is not without its faults, minor though they be. The first 100 pages or so (yes, I looked while I was listening to the audiobook) were a bit of a slog to get through. Gibson introduces new terminology that makes readers scratch their heads for awhile until they figure out just what it is he is talking about (although it could be argued that a science fiction reader, especially one who reads Gibson, should not only be used to it by now, but shouldn't need anything spelled out for them anyway), and it does take awhile to figure out that Gibson is switching back and forth between two timelines. However, once all that stuff is squared away and the reader figures out the basics, the story moves along at a pretty good pace, and is a good read. The conclusion was, for me, satisfying. Gibson wraps everything up fairly nicely with a little bow, which is something many writers don't do these days (although it can be argued that this is a standalone novel - for which I am grateful - and he darn well should tie things up nicely).
As far as the narration goes, well, I didn't think anyone was going to top R.C. Bray, the narrator of THE MARTIAN. I was wrong. Lorelei King was magnificent. She handled the voices of the different characters terrifically, in my opinion. The pacing was terrific, and I loved the accent. She didn't intrude upon the story; rather, she enhanced it from the very beginning. I would hope I run across her in other audiobooks I listen to in the future.
NEUROMANCER was one of those novels that comes along once a generation that changes the face of the field of science fiction, at least that's what I'm told. I will have to go back and read it, 30+ years after the fact. THE PERIPHERAL is not that kind of novel, but it doesn't have to be. It just is what it is - a terrific book.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2025There is nothing better than intelligent and challenging science-fiction novel but reading this is like cracking the Enigma Code many times. Once you force yourself through the first half of the book you find a compelling story. Hats off to the writers, producers, and directors of the show. Mr. Gibson really likes to keep the reader on their toes. I had to reread so many paragraphs just to decipher the plot points, many times there were none to be found. Overall, great book for a slow undistracted read. Not for casual reading. The Silmarillion was an easier read!!!
- Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2015If you've never read Gibson before, this is NOT the place to start.
I remember the first time I read Neuromancer. Jeeze, like 30 years ago now. Reading Neuromancer and its often dense, cinematic prose often made me with for a glossary with the book, like there had been when I read my older brother's late 60s paperback copy of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. But Burgess' was using Anglicized Russian as British English slang in that book -- you really needed the glossary.
For Gibson, everything is written in English, so you get no glossary. You have to figure out the meanings of new/invented/esoteric terms from the context of the prose. Now, it's got it's confusing, hallucinatory aspects that make it akin to reading Burroughs sometimes (but without all the drugs and homosexual sex). But Burroughs' stuff also was frustrating to read because of the cut-up, disjointed narrative style. Gibson's stuff is far more tightly plotted and less hallucinatory.
Figuring out the meanings of terms from the prose and context is less an issue in this novel than in some of Gibson's previous novels (like The Sprawl trilogy novels). But it is definitely much more of an issue here than it was with in the last three "Bigend" trillogy novels combined.
I did not have a problem figuring out terms/actions from the context with this novel. For people who are already aware of topics as disparate but technologically reliant as social media's geolocation capabilities, social media mood indication/tracking, advancements in 3D printing, and concepts such as string/mbrane theories of physics (in a PBS TV kind of way) and possible parellel multiple universes, this book should not be difficult to read.
For everyone else, yeah... it will be a problem.
I recently had a friend -- who hadn't re-read any of Gibson's first 3-6 novels since she originally read them, 30-ish years ago -- complain about 3 things with respect to this book. I, however, recently re-acquired ALL of his books in ebook format, after having lost paperback and hardcover copies over the years. So I was in a unique position to respond to her arguments.
First, she said the first 100 pages of The Peripheral were unnecessarily dense. My response to that was: no, not really, unless you've forgotten how he *used* to write. Because this is not a new style for him -- it's more a return to form.
Second, she objected to the fact that under all the scifi trappings, it's "just a murder mystery." Well, you could say any of his previous novels had, "under the trappings," some fairly routine pulp-ish or noir-ish plots. Criminal pulled in/tempted by just "one last job." Corporate espionage and extraction of human workers who represent intellectual capital to these corporations. That kind of thing.
In my opinion, there are two mysteries in this novel: the murder mystery (which is the obvious mystery) and the underlying, shadow mystery, which is revealed in dribs and drabs until very near the end: the myster of The Jackpot -- what it is, how it happened, who it affected.
Ironically, the biggest mystery -- communication between people of one near future multiverse, and the people of a far future multiverse -- is simply set up as a given. (If anything in this novel is a deus ex machina, I suppose that is). So the mystery is never explained.
Third and last, she objected to what she felt was a Disney-ish happy ending. But, I argued, virtually all of Gibson's otherwise highly dystopian visions of the future end similarly: the bad guys don't entirely win, and the good guys don't entirely lose. Which is, I guess, just another way of saying the bad guys kind of lose, and the good guys kind of win. But one senses that the struggle and lives of the characters continue after you finish the book, and nothing feels too deus ex machina (except, in this novel, maybe some of the givens).
Let me put it this way: If you already know and pretty much love Gibson's previous stuff, I don't think this will disappoint.
If, however, Gibson's writing (especially the early stuff) put you off, then you'll probably hate this novel, too.
I loved it. Gibson has always been so expertly, specifically, and hauntingly able to describe the nostalgia of anachronistic characters and to chart the narratives of those people whose changing personal circumstances have left them with uncertain footing in either a not entirely friendly world, or an outright hostile one, as they try to secure some piece of stability and/or security for themselves amid an often constantly changing landscape. He's always written relatable and often quite compelling heroines, the vast majority of whom were not stereotypical scifi babes.
He has also always extrapolated from current and historical sociopolitical and economical trends -- especially with respect to technological innovation -- to provide a glimpse of the growing, ever-sharpening class divisions that our world has rapidly devolved into. Much of what he presented as mere backstory or incidental detail in his Sprawl trilogy novels (and even in later workrs) has come to pass. He obviously has class politics, and to me, Gibson seems to be one of those ex-working class intellectuals who never lost touch with the fact that -- had he never become successful as a writer -- he'd probably would have worked some kind of blue collar or civil servant/wage slave type job his whole life, because that's what he was headed for.
So he has remarkable sympathy for those square-peg-round-hole drones who get caught up in things larger than themselves, especially those who've had a taste of "the good life" and then otherwise blew it, lost it, or had it somehow snatched away. Yet he never comes across as overtly or explicity adhering to any 'ism;' he never comes across from that kind of tiresome first-raised pro-blue-collar/almost anti-intellectual pride, either. That's probably because, for many of his protagonists, it's their intellect, their brainy skills, that got them out of whatever backwater, wrong-side-of-town situation they were originally born into.
The way he writes his dystopian futures -- which are all merely extrapolations of things that are already true now -- "it is what it is." There's no agenda-pushing by Gibson, it's just a very dry recitation of the surrounding details that gradually weave into a whole where you see how the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, and you come to realize that is what we all would observe ourselves about our current world, if we were only paying attention.
So when one of his underdog protagonists finally achieves some level of security, you feel like it's been really earned... and much of the time, those underdogs are trying to pull another person or two or more up with them, or sometimes, enlighten an entire group even as they merely pursue their own trajectory.
It's that warmth and strange optimism amid all the doomy gloomy dystopia that has always kind of made Gibson's stuff moody, haunting, and ultimately very fulfilling reading for me.
These are some of the things I've always really admired about him.
Top reviews from other countries
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Dr. EduReviewed in Mexico on June 27, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Me gustó pero...
... pero no es lo que uno ve en la serie de TV, pese a la publicidad. La versión de TV es una variación muy corta de lo que tiene el libro, pero despeja varias dudas que la serie de TV deja. El estilo de escritura es particularmente... coloquial (lo compré en inglés, versión Kindle y llevada al Kobo... :-) ).
- Lintula HannuReviewed in Sweden on November 10, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars wellwritten scifi drama
Gibson does what he does best and that is high octane cyberadventure that makes the reader enjoy the whole adventure
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疾風Reviewed in Japan on January 30, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars 怖い・・・
バーチャルの行きつく先は、タイムトラベル?
誰が味方でだれが敵?
そもそも、バーチャルじゃないのは誰?
相変わらずぶっ飛んでる世界観がすごいです。
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Cliente AmazonReviewed in Spain on November 7, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Um excelente livro do mestre do cyberpunk em formato softcover
- Kindle CustomerReviewed in Singapore on April 17, 2024
2.0 out of 5 stars Quality of book. 👎
Haven't start reading. But I received the book with damaged edges and creased corner.
Seems like it was used or on display.
Kindle CustomerQuality of book. 👎
Reviewed in Singapore on April 17, 2024
Seems like it was used or on display.
Images in this review