Journal Review of The
Peripheral, by William Gibson
I am a big fan of William Gibson, always have been since I
read Neuromancer, that wonderful creative dystopian novel of future
technology growing amidst the ruins of the past. I followed his brilliant career
with pleasure through a half dozen novels.
Gibson’s characters are spare, cold, hard, intelligent people whose
souls burst through at times of crisis, his settings, glued atop the ruins of a
20th Century manufactured world.
His prose, terse, hip, and fluid, is always mesmerizing.
Neuromancer’s novum, cyberspace, anticipated much of
the technology of its time and influenced the technology being created then. Almost by himself, Gibson created the SF
subgenre of cyberpunk, which shattered the classic paradigm of the golden age SF
of Asimov and Heinlein. SF has further
changed since then, and cyberpunk has faded from relevance, but SF tropes are
not the same after Neuromancer.
In a quieter way, Gibson continues to innovate with his new
novel The Peripheral. Though
cyberpunk is gone, this book reminds of a time when technology and hipness and protagonists
mucking their way through forces beyond their ken were Gibson’s principle
themes. We have not seen this particular
William Gibson in a while, and though I love his recent novels for their SFnal subtlety,
I am enthusiastic about this latest novel, which harks back to Gibson’s cyberpunk’s
thematic structures while remaining true to what is happening today, measuring
trends and extrapolating memes and doing what SF does best: providing insight
into our present and our near future.
Some of the trends and memes the The Peripheral
focuses on: the garbage patch, post-humanism, quantum tunneling, designer
drugs, and especially the remote piloting of a variety of devices, the
peripherals. Gibson is at his best
tucking these ideas into a plot with mystery and danger and violence. The book takes place in two settings: a declining American hinterland of a small Southern
town with a vanished middle class, unemployed, disabled veterans, and a
post-apocalyptic London rebuilt by micro machines, assemblers who try to
reconstruct a vanished world destroyed in the Jackpot, a series of wars,
plagues, and environmental disasters that wipe out most of humanity in our near
future.
In this future, humans meddle with the past—or rather, a past, since the act of meddling
results in that past detaching from the future, going its own way in a quantum
multi-verse. In one such past, a
timeline called “the Stub,” Flynne, a young woman whose employment is to be linked
to a peripheral—a helicopter drone—witnesses a violent murder in the future in
London—and finds her life in jeopardy as forces from the future meddle in the
Stub to destroy her before she can act as a witness and identify the
perpetrator to future authorities. On
Flynne’s side are yet others from that future, represented by Netherton, whose
employment a publicist has involved him in the murder, and led by policewoman
Lowbeer, who tries to protect Flynne and use her testimony to bring the
murderers to justice.
There is a race in both the Stub and in the future London , a battle of
forces to bring and avoid justice that culminates in battles in both timelines
with the outcome is very much in doubt until the end. I highly recommend The Peripheral as
an entertaining and thoughtful read, one that raises a lot of themes and issues
that the future will have to resolve.
