The Peripheral
Ratings102
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings102
Average rating3.8
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Peripheral is what I've come to expect from a William Gibson novel. There are the haves and the have-nots who come together over some intriguing modes of technology and defeat some other more powerful entity or entities that are up to no good. There are mysterious and badass characters, celebrity culture, twists, and a little bit of romance.
As always, Gibson's prose has a hypnotic effect on me. He has a way of giving details to ground you in the story but with an economy of words. The tech described is unfamiliar to me but he has a way of making the strange familiar and sometimes the familiar strange, or at least interesting.
I'd be curious to see statistics from kindles and such for how many readers actually get to the end of any of Gibson's books. He always makes the first half so goddamn confusing. But if you stick with it, the rewards are plenty.
I don't know how Gibson does his research or synthesizes his ideas but I imagine that he takes one long look at the internet and then goes on to assemble a Keyser Soze future out of our current fears – environmental threats, collapsing economies, widening class divisions, loss of agency that affects everyone but the very rich.
My fellow Londoners will find that The Peripheral's future London ruled by a kleptocracy of Russian and Saudi oligarchs hits really close to home.
Also, The Peripheral feels destined to be adapted for the big screen by JJ Abrams — so many of his favourite tropes!
Confusing. Interesting, but confusing. His 80s/90s work was better.
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