The Peripheral

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!

I would say that this is Gibson back on form. The start of the book can be construed as bewildering, but in my view it's just Gibson making the reader work a little. There are things in the book that remain unexplained - like, where and what are the stub servers - vague references to Chinese tech, and the ending, whilst ‘happy', is a little too unresolved in my opinion.

Gibson says this is a standalone novel, but I think there are more than enough storylines and characters for at least another.

This aging techno geek enjoyed it.

Classic Gibson. Immersive, concept-driven science fiction that looks at today's technology and pushes it just a little bit into the future. Well, that plus time travel, but not the usual type of time travel. Add on top of that some great, interesting characters, and you're left with a great read. It starts fairly slow, but if you stick with it, you'll end up loving it.

More thoughts on this book at https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/the-peripheral-by-william-gibson/

A little disappointed. It took me a good quarter to a third of the book to really get into it, then about three quarters in I was back to slogging through it. Waiting for a plot, still. Some things happen, a lot of it seemingly improbable and off-stage. Until a climax that kind of jumps out from nowhere and leaves you wondering exactly what happened, what does it mean, and do I even care. Sadly, it's my least favorite Gibson book.

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 ReviewWilliam Gibson is one of those authors I keep meaning to read more of. I'm ashamed to say I've only read [b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg 909457], [b:Count Zero 22200 Count Zero (Sprawl, #2) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390358225s/22200.jpg 879764], and [b:Burning Chrome 22323 Burning Chrome William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349075772s/22323.jpg 2457086]. I've had [b:Mona Lisa Overdrive 154091 Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1374778887s/154091.jpg 1263322] 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 [a:Daniel Suarez 1956402 Daniel Suarez https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1265394868p2/1956402.jpg] 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.

While I'm a bit of a Gibson fan girl, this is one of my favorites since Pattern Recognition. Set partially in the near present and partially in a more distant future, Gibson has combined what was so mind-bending about his early Neuromancer stories with the rooted-in-modern-tech world of today-ish. Forward thinking in the best and worst ways. Gibson at his finest.

William Gibson's ability to throw curve-balls and create unique, interesting near future worlds that resemble our own just enough to be plausible is clearly displayed in this fantastic story. It'll be interesting to see how Amazon did in turning this into a streaming series, but even more I'm looking forward to reading Agency soon. I will say, The Peripheral might require a rapid-re-read to digest properly.

The Peripheral (Jackpot 1) by William Gibson

This book mixes the usual tropes of cyberpunk - out of control capitalism, virtual reality, class division, crime, etc. - and mixes in new ideas - time travel. The book flashes between an impoverished rural setting set perhaps a decade where people are surprisingly sophisticated in their technology, and a setting in England about eighty years in the future after a historical event called the “Jackpot” which has removed 90% of the world's population. The two time zones are connected by a mysterious Chinese server in the future that enables the future to contact the past via the internet. (When this happens, the past diverges from the future, thereby obviating any paradoxes.)

The book opens with a chapter that is pure cyber punk. It is very complicated with terminology and ideas that are not explained and are basically incomprehensible. The story then flips to the “present” where we are introduced to a bunch of Hillbillys with internet connections and mad military skills. The setting here is obviously rural and steeped in poverty, although the Hillbillies seem to have virtual reality equipment and other gewgaws lying around. The chief Hillbilly character is Flynn. She is talked into a job by her brother. The job involves operating a drone to keep paparazzi from photographing an event.What she doesn't know is that the event is in the future and that a future group of friends/investors has been opening businesses in their past/Flynn's present for what were to me very obscure reasons.

In any event, Flynn becomes a witness to a crime in the future. The future is therefore interested in having Flynn identify someone who might have been involved in the crime. Flynn is accommodated in the future by a “peripheral” - an android controlled remotely like a drone. From this vantage point, we get to see more of the future world, which is dangerous in its high tech way.

Flynn's world becomes embroiled in the politics of the future crime. There is another faction with the same technology connected to the same past. In the “present” chapters, there are serial attempts to kill Flynn, which are frustrated by her military friends.

I liked the story, but it had its flaws. It started out incomprehensible and kept a large fog factor throughout. In addition, the character list is far too numerous. I had problems keeping track of who was who and it seemed that Gibson kept adding new characters when there was a plot turn. On the other hand, Gibson does provide a view of a different future than we are used to. The incomprehensibility of the cyber future is a necessary feature of a future we haven't experienced. While the story does unravel many of the main plot points, there are many plot points that weren't resolved. For example, who the heck is the other faction that seems set on killing Flynn? Of course, this is just the first book of a trilogy, so we can expect that these questions will be answered in later books of the trilogy.

I read this book because Amazon is giving this book the mini-series treatment. It may work better as a tightly written television series with fewer characters than it does as a book. I am not saying that this book is not worth reading, but it could have used some editing in my opinion.

I can never explain why I love him. I'm not into tech, and I don't really get tech in real life. But I love William Gibson anyway. I find his tech fascinating, believable, and I usually get into his characters. I especially adored the characters in this book. This is a terrible review, but oh well. I'm full of post-Thanksgiving cheer and don't care.