An engaging page-turner, William Gibson’s “The Peripheral” offers a richly detailed sci-fi future populated with some tough characters looking to get theirs.
The novel flip-flops between two settings 70 years apart. The far-future setting takes place after the “Jackpot,” a slow-rolling catastrophe that wiped out much of humanity, leaving crime families and high-tech builder bots in its place. The past setting is a crummy Wal-Mart future filled with drones and drug manufacturers and veterans still glitching from the ghosts of their combat haptics.
The two settings meet through some cryptic server, one that allows for the flow of information, and thus money. People can even cross the barrier if they make use of neural cutouts to transfer their consciousnesses to genetically engineered bodies: the “peripherals” in the title. Still, the connection is mostly a novelty…until one of the visitors from the past witnesses a murder, sparking a cross-time arms race between those seeking to identify the killer and those seeking to hide him.
The tech and the characters are gritty and believable. Gibson always does a good creating settings that are down and out, with characters struggling to get by; he nails what it’s like to be broke. He also has a knack for reckless characters, impatient sorts with a bias toward big swings. “Rigorously selected by the military,” as one puts it, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”
The book starts slow, but once the conflict incites, the jockeying escalates exponentially. The future folks shake the past’s economy like a piggy bank, risking destroying the whole thing to get their side on top. Killers are dispatched, bombs deployed, “assemblers” directed to reduce human bodies to their atomic components. It’s exciting stuff.
As caveats go, I think the lead character, Flynne, is likeable but ends up feeling “down-home” in a forced kind of way, one exacerbated by a male author writing a female character. Similarly, while the plot builds some wonderful complications, the finale sees them resolved too easily. (Or maybe I was just too keyed-up for a Matrix style betrayal by a key character that never arrived.)
“The Peripheral” is intelligent, insightful and future-looking in the best tradition of Gibson’s work.