A few months ago, I wrote a post about M. R. Carey’s excellent sci-fi novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. I recounted how incredibly impressed I was by the way Carey took an exhausted genre—the zombie apocalypse story—and found a way to make it fresh and vital.
As luck would have it, the next novel I chose to read was William Gibson’s latest book, The Peripheral. I tore through it over the course of a weekend, and at some point, it occurred to me how similar the book is—in spirit, if not content—to Carey’s. Gibson, after all, faced a similar challenge to Carey in that his preferred genre, the cyberpunk novel, was also played out, in large part due to his (Gibson’s) own amazing success. His iconic works like Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome helped define the cyberpunk aesthetic, that weirdly prescient vision of a future divided between poor street people and the ultra-rich. It was Gibson who coined the term cyberspace, and, by the end of the 1990s, the cyberpunk vibe had permeated not only popular fiction but movies (Blade Runner, The Matrix) and anime (Akira).
Now, in 2019, reality itself seems to have caught up with Gibson’s work. We live in a world where the vast bulk of humanity is virtually impoverished and uneducated. These teeming masses distract themselves with 3D games and social media (literal cyberspace) while a few fantastically rich individuals build spaceships and private islands for themselves. We live in a world where teenaged soldiers kill people via satellite-controlled drones on the other side of the planet, and where rogue Chinese scientists make designer babies.
How’s a poor science fiction writer supposed to keep up?
For a while, I thought Gibson wouldn’t even try. In the early 2000s, he began writing “straight” literary fiction novels (albeit with a post-modern sensibility) like Pattern Recognition. I expected that he would never again return to the realm of speculative fiction that he so easily dominated for twenty years. Fortunately, I was wrong. In 2014, he wrote The Peripheral, a down-and-dirty, full-blown sci-fi book.
And, like Carey, he found a way to up the ante on his genre.
The first half of the novel is structured in a familiar way—chapters that alternate between two main characters. First is Flynne, a young remote tech worker in the rural south. Her brother, Burton, is an ex-marine suffering from PTSD, as are many of her friends, all survivors of an unnamed, high-tech war. As part of their military service, these vets have had computer components implanted through their bodies, turning them into killer cyborgs. The implants also make them especially good at working computers in (yeah, you guessed it) cyberspace. Flynne has no such implants, but she nevertheless fills in for Burton in some of his cyber-gigs, beta-testing virtual reality games and other hackerish occupations.
This leads her to cross paths (in a virtual sense) with Wilf Netherton, the focus of the other chapters. Netherton is a world-weary publicist in a future London, far removed that of Flynne not only in space but in time. Netherton’s future, we soon realize, is even future-er than Flynn’s by some seventy years, after the Earth’s population has been thinned by a mass extinction event vaguely referred to as “the jackpot.” Netherton’s world is a classic 1980s cyberpunk vision, overlayed with science-fiction’s latest tropes—bioengineering, nanotechnology, and an omnipresent social media.
Netherton’s age has become so advanced, in fact, that many people seldom leave their homes, interacting with the external world through remote-controlled, genetically altered bodies called peripherals. It’s kind of like Avatar-meets-The Matrix-meets-Frequency. Stranger still, bored oligarchs have found a way to communicate with the past through an unexplained time-portal, which allows for a two-way exchange of information (but not matter). As Netherton’s explains to his lover, an infinite number of these individual pasts—continua, as they’re called—can be contacted.
“And they’re dead?” she’d asked.
“Probably.”
“A long time ago?”
“Before the jackpot.”
“But alive, in the past?”
“Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”
It’s in this way that Netherton meets Burton and Flynne. He hires them to act as drone-pilots guarding his PR clients. (Such “stub” workers are paid with money generated through economic manipulations made by the AI algorithms of the future, for whom the 21st Century stock market, we presume, must seem unbearably crude).
But when Flynne inadvertently witnesses a brutal murder of a young woman, she is drawn into a mystery that ultimately leads to past and future worlds interpenetrating. Someone from the future wants Flynne dead, and Netherton’s London cop friend needs her help. Soon, the story leads her, Burton, and their friends to become peripherals in Netherton’s London—a world that is bizarre and overwhelming to them, but for which they find themselves oddly prepared by the hardships of their real lives.
The result of all this—two parallel narratives intertwining through multiple, ingenious plot developments and twists—is a tour de force of story-telling, a fitting installment to Gibson’s long career. As always, I was impressed by Gibson literary sensibilities, especially when inhabiting the point-of-view of his main characters. Take the moment when Flynne is almost killed and wakes up in a hospital: “Flynne sat up. A hospital bed made you feel like you needed someone’s permission to do that.”
Great stuff.
And while it’s almost a cliché that famous writers become bitter and pessimistic as they grow older, I was impressed by how weirdly upbeat and life affirming this book is—at least, as much as a post-apocalyptic novel can be. Gibson even manages to inject a bit of romance into the tale as Netherton finds himself infatuated with Flynne, a girl who lives (quite literally) in an alternate universe.
Check it out…
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 