When it came out, I started watching Amazon’s show based on this book, and I felt it was probably the best new Sci-Fi show to come out in many years. I didn’t have much hope it would end as good as it started, but I didn’t have the chance to be disappointed: Amazon show was cancelled after one season.
So I thought, well, I’m going to read the book. I’ve read a few books by William Gibson (namely, all the sprawl trilogy, some of the bridge trilogy, and some random stories), and I have a positive memory of that, although an hazy one.
So I proceeded to get the Audiobook version of The Peripheral, which in turn is the start of another trilogy§.
What the book is about
Spoilers ahead.
The Peripheral setting is a rural backwater in a future post-civil-war USA, which would be interesting by itself. But this is William Gibson, so there are layers and layers of interesting world building.
So the people in this world are contacted from an even further future where the human population has shrunk to minimal numbers due to some events referred to as “the jackpot“. Gibson hates being obvious so the jackpot is not a single event, (e.g. global warming, aliens) but an unspecified list of “many things went wrong and here we are“.
The post-jackpot world has developed two interesting technologies: one that allows people to operate a remote body (the peripheral of the title), and one which allows connecting to a point in the past. Of course, someone had the idea of combining the two, so they sent information in their past to build a controller that can operate a peripheral in their time.
Even this would be interesting on its own, but what makes it more interesting (Gibson!) is that every time a connection is made, time bifurcates, so the timeline in the past is not connected to the future timeline anymore.
So, what is the effect of someone with superior technology being able to act on a remote playground with no consequences? Well, a sort of colonialism, of course. Post-jackpot people even developed a vocabulary to detach them from this colonized pasts, so that they call each past a stub, not even granting it the dignity of considering a timeline.
In medio stat tedium
I have no complaint about the narration, but going through the book I remember why I have not read more of Gibson’s works. I don’t like them.
William Gibson is, in my humble opinion, a genius. A lot of what he writes is prescient, the themes are original, the world building is masterful. I want to know more about this world. I want to have more insightful thinking and exposition.
Gibson is also, for what I can judge, very good at writing characters. I can see the main character, Flynne Fisher, just ad I could see Molly Millions in Neuromancer.
But Gibson is, for my taste, terrible at writing plots. As I read to the end of the book, I tried to remember what happened in it, and I could not. As I remember, something happens that sets things in motion (future contact). something happens that closes the plot (bad people get what they deserve, good people are happy) but I have no idea about what happened in the middle. It’s just flyover country, boring stuff I need to get through to finish the book.
And I suddenly realized this is also what I remember of Neuromancer and Idoru. I do not know why. I have clear visions of specific scenes and paragraphs and characters, but I have no idea of what things actually happened.
BTW, I feel the Amazon show deviated from the book in good ways and was far more interesting, and it’s a pity it was cancelled. It had a heck of a good cast too!
So, if you already liked Gibson, go read this because you’ll love it. If you can get through a few hundred pages just for the sake of the world building, you’ll also like this. As for me, I won’t be reading the following books in the trilogy. Until In forget about this again, anyway.
Vote: 6.5/10, I wish this was a tv show.