The Peripheral

Summary

The novel focuses on Flynne and her brother, Burton. When Burton is hired for a security job which takes place in what he thinks is cyberspace and Flynne temporarily takes his place, she witnesses a possible murder.

According to GQ's Zach Baron:

The Peripheral is an emphatic return to the science fiction he [William Gibson] ceased to write after the turn of this century, set in not one but two futures. The first, not far off from our own present day, takes place in a Winter's Bone–ish world where the only industries still surviving are lightly evolved versions of Walmart and the meth trade. The second future is set further along in time, after a series of not-quite-cataclysmic events that have killed most of the world's population, leaving behind a monarchic class of gangsters, performance artists, and publicists in an otherwise deserted London.

Plot

The novel begins sometime in the near-future in a small town in rural America. Flynne Fisher works at a local 3D printing shop and lives with her mother and her brother Burton, who sustained brain trauma from cybernetic implants he received while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps' elite Haptic Recon unit. When Burton heads to another town to counter-protest the protests of a religious extremist group known as Luke 4:5, he asks her to take over his job working security in a video game/virtual world for a supposedly Colombian company called Milagros Coldiron. Flynne takes the job and notices the game world looks suspiciously like London, but far more empty and more futuristic. Piloting a security quadcopter, she fends off paparazzi drones from an unknown woman's high-rise apartment. On the second night of doing so she witnesses a man and a woman out on a balcony, where the woman is apparently killed and gruesomely devoured by a swarm of nanobots; Flynne is uncertain whether this is real or part of a virtual game.

The novel alternates between Flynne's experiences and those of Wilf Netherton, a publicist who lives in the early 22nd century, seventy years later than Flynne's time, and several decades after an apocalyptic period known as the Jackpot took place. As the book begins, Wilf is working with Daedra West, an American artist/celebrity/diplomat, on establishing relations with a group of deformed native humans known as "Patchers," on an enormous cultivated garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. However, Daedra's reckless behavior triggers her personal security system, killing all the Patchers and their boss, Hamed al-Habib. Wilf is fired (he assumes; he doesn't check his mail) and goes to his friend Lev Zubov's house. Lev, the son of a powerful and wealthy Russian family that moved to Britain several generations ago, is a "continua enthusiast." He has introduced Wilf to "stubs" which are alternate pasts whose futures begin to deviate from the ones that lead to his and Wilf's present at the moment contact is made from their present - a contact only possible in a data sense and only made possible by a mysterious quantum computer running in China. Milagros Coldiron is Zubov's front organization for accessing the stub in which Flynne and Burton live. Inhabitants of Flynne's time are able to access the early 22nd century of Zubov and Netherton via headsets built using a 3D printer and technological know-how passed back to them from the 22nd century. These headsets allow the wearer's consciousness to inhabit and control a 'peripheral' a.k.a. an artificial physical human body in the 22nd century. Using this technology, Wilf had hired Burton Fisher from his stub to act as drone security for Daedra's sister, Aelita, as a novelty gift to her.

Creation and publication

Gibson was working on the book as early as August 2012. The Peripheral was Gibson's 13th book. On April 19, 2013, Gibson appeared at the New York Public Library and read from the first chapter: "The Gone Haptics". The book was published in November 2014.

Gibson's book Agency is set in the same world as The Peripheral, also involving alternative but connected futures.

Critical reception

The Peripheral was positively received by The Guardian. According to GQ's Zach Baron, "Like many Gibson books, The Peripheral is basically a noirish murder mystery wearing a cyberpunk leather jacket and, after an uncharacteristically dense first one hundred pages, a super enjoyable read—though perhaps less so when you consider just how accurate Gibson can be when he's thinking about what might come next. Because according to The Peripheral, what is coming next is, to borrow Gibson's phrase again, well...fucked." The Sydney Morning Herald noted an "ultimate lack of narrative cohesion," but said that the book was still dense with "imaginative technological inventions and societal extrapolations, not least on capitalism, government surveillance and retro Third World colonialism."

The Irish Times wrote that it was "a formidable novel, and one that boasts just about the only plausible depiction of time travel in recent fiction. But it does suffer from slow pacing and a flat final-act climax." The Financial Times gave it a mixed review, calling the "twin narratives [...] complex and tangled," but overly drawn out over the book's nearly 500 pages. The Verge said the book was a "smart, nuanced twist on time travel" and praised how detail was integrated more into the characters' lives than his other recent series. NPR gave the book a positive review. The Toronto Star said it could be difficult to keep up with the book, but it was "fast-paced and chock full of fascinating speculations into not only what the future will look like, but how it will work."

Television adaptation

A streaming series adaptation was commissioned in 2018 by Amazon to be developed by Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. The series was put into development in April 2018 with a "script-to-series commitment", receiving a firm go-ahead in the middle of November 2019. Beyond Joy and Nolan, executive producers include Athena Wickham, Steven Hoban and Vincenzo Natali. It has one-hour episodes and was developed by Kilter Films for Amazon Studios. Warner Bros. Television was also involved as a producer, with Scott B. Smith as writer. Smith created the series and served as the showrunner as well as executive producer. Natali directed the show's pilot. In February 2023, Amazon Studios announced that the series had been renewed for a second season. In August 2023, Amazon Studies subsequently cancelled the series despite the prior renewal, due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.